Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks Interview

Summary

Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks describes how Jewish mysticism, meditation, and an early awakening shaped his understanding of spiritual practice. The discussion explores presence, the limits of intellectual seeking, and how awakening can be lived within ordinary life rather than pursued as a future achievement.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual awakening be integrated into ordinary daily life?
• How do I stop postponing freedom or enlightenment until the future?
• What is the relationship between meditation, Jewish mysticism, and awakening?
• How can I move from intellectual understanding to direct present-moment experience?

Key takeaways

• The crucial opportunity for awakening is always in the present moment.
• Meditation can support awakening, but it should not become an excuse to postpone transformation.
• Spiritual insight must be lived directly rather than merely explained intellectually.
• Awakening does not necessarily require renouncing ordinary life and responsibilities.
• Presence means meeting reality and other people with openness and full attention.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done about 385 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see them all organized in four or five different ways.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on the site and a donate page that explains all that in greater detail.

My guest today is Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks. He is a Jewish spiritual teacher, musician, and founder of Torah of Awakening. He has taught this Jewish path of presence to hundreds of students throughout the world through workshops, retreats, and his online program.

He also served as clergy and sacred music director at—and here we go, this is a hard-to-pronounce thing, and Brian and I were practicing it, so bear with me—he served as music director at… You say it, Brian. Come on.

Brian: Okay, Chochmat HaLev.

Rick: There you go. I never could have done it. Say it again.

Brian: Chochmat HaLev.

Rick: Okay, and that’s the name of a synagogue in Berkeley, California. He served as music director there from 2000 through 2016. He received s’micha—ordination. S’micha, sorry, I’m hopeless—ordination as minister of sacred music from Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in 2013; spiritual teacher from Rabbi Saralaya Schley and Shaykh Ibrahim Baba Farajajé in 2013; and Jewish meditation teacher from Dr. Avram Davis in 2004.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in music from the Eastman School of Music, 1991, and he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, Lisa, and their two children. So, thank you, Brian.

Brian: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s a real honor to be on this show. I’ve enjoyed it for many years, and it was such a delight to get the email inviting me to be on this show.

So, I just want to make a blessing for you and for your family and all those wonderful people I know who are working on this show: that it should continue in success and help a lot of seekers and practitioners gain more useful tools for their practice and their awakening.

Rick: Well, that’s our intention, and I hope we’re doing that. According to the feedback we get, we’re doing that to some extent. In a way, I’m a very unqualified person to interview you because I don’t really know much about Judaism. But maybe that makes me more qualified, because I’ll ask all kinds of questions that other people who don’t know much about it would ask, and that’ll be helpful for them.

Brian: I think so.

Rick: Yeah. I was thinking we might start… I’ve read the first few chapters of a book that you’re working on, and in the first chapter, I believe it was, you tell a very interesting story about the course of your own seeking. I think that might be an interesting way of starting because it would give people a sense of who you are and how you’ve arrived at where you’re at at this point. You want to do that?

Brian: Sure.

Rick: So, where would you like to start in that story?

Brian: Well, I could start in childhood, if that seems good to you.

Rick: Sure.

Brian: I’m open. You can cut me off anytime.

Rick: I will. I’ll probably ask questions as we go through it.

Brian: Okay. Well, for some reason that I can’t explain, spiritual stuff always really drew me. So, I was looking at all kinds of books. When I was old enough to go to the mall by myself—take the bus down to the mall and go to the bookstore there—I would go right to the esoteric section, always getting books on witchcraft, Western occultism, or Eastern stuff.

I didn’t have any formal religion in my house, really. We did Hanukkah, and that’s about it, but I had some cousins and an aunt and uncle that we would go to for Passover. When we would go there, I had such a visceral feeling that there was something there that was drawing me, some kind of… At the same time, it seemed like it was a mystery or a light that was hidden in some way.

Almost like I had a sense that probably most of the people at the table weren’t necessarily sensing the same thing I was. But my uncle—my uncle Howard, who now goes by Chaim—would really engage me and have conversations with me, sometimes for hours. He was one of the few adults that I can remember who would really talk to me about this kind of stuff. Since I was a little kid, that’s not a usual thing for adults to do.

So, it just drew me, and I developed this seeking, particularly with regard to the Jewish tradition. As I got older and learned about different ideas of spiritual awakening, I learned Transcendental Meditation when I was 12. My father, who’s a holistic doctor in New York, was interested in it mostly because of its health benefits. So, he paid for the whole family to learn Transcendental Meditation.

I started doing meditation regularly when I was 12 years old, and I was also looking at Aleister Crowley stuff and other Western occultist things, kind of doing rituals and meditations by myself, freaking my parents out. My parents were called into school a few times because of concerns that the teachers had about the strange magic books I was reading.

But at some point—it was actually a friend of mine whose parents invited me to go to Europe with him when I was in junior high school—I came across a lot of books that kept making reference to something called the Tree of Life and something called Kabbalah.

It was at that point that I realized that a lot of the non-Jewish Western spiritual materials that I was checking out were actually rooted in Judaism in a certain way. At least one stream of them was rooted in Judaism. That kind of took me back to wanting to really investigate this thing that had been exciting me since I was very young, but that I didn’t know very much about, which was the Passover Seders at my cousins’ house.

At the same time, my father had a partner. He passed away—he was killed in a plane crash in 1983—but before that, he was studying with a very famous rabbi and scholar of Kabbalah named Aryeh Kaplan. This was in Rockland County, New York, in Monsey.

My father’s partner, Dr. David Schenken, was learning with Aryeh Kaplan and then starting to teach his own courses on Kabbalah, which were being recorded. After he passed away, they needed to Xerox the transcripts of all of these Kabbalah lectures that he had given. I was working at my dad’s office, so I was given the job of Xeroxing all this stuff.

So, I’m supposed to be Xeroxing the manuscripts, and people would come in to check up on me and see how I was doing, and I’m just sitting there like… reading the stuff. So, that’s a little taste of it, and of course there’s a lot more. I don’t know if you want me to go further.

Rick: Well, I think it’s cool that you were so serious at such a young age. A lot of people I interview were, and I think that’s an interesting correlation. In my own case, I wasn’t. Aside from a few profound experiences looking at the stars when I was a kid or something, I was pretty frivolous and didn’t really wise up until I was about 18. So, I’m always a little bit envious of people like you who caught on to it at a younger age.

Brian: And I’m envious of people who were really motivated to practice music from a really young age. Music, of course, is something else that’s going on with me, but I’m really aware of how we develop whatever we’re passionate about based on how much time we put into it.

Someone gave me a book recently about that, which was really just talking about how…

Rick:Outliers?

Brian: I think that was it. Yeah, maybe that was it.

Rick: Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about how the Beatles, Bill Gates, and people like that put in at least 10,000 hours.

Brian: Yes. That’s the book that I’m talking about. So, it’s not intentional, but we tend to be drawn to things, and then the more hours we put into them, the more they start to bear fruit.

Rick: Yeah. On the other hand, we sort of do the best we can, you know?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. There are plenty of other things besides spirituality that I’m still doing the best I can at, and I’m never going to be an expert at them. Nevertheless, it’s good to continue to grow and not just be completely one-track, which is what my tendency is.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Diversified. So, there was a story in your book about a series of events leading up to a rather profound shift that you had, or you might call it an awakening. Let’s talk about that. Why don’t you recount that?

✨ An awakening at eighteen

Brian: Okay. I think that… I don’t remember when the idea of spiritual awakening became a concept in my mind, but I know throughout my teen years and before that, I had a sense that there was something like that. So, I knew about it, and it was part of what was motivating me with all the spiritual studies and also the meditation I was doing.

I think I had certain ideas in my head about what it meant, because when we read a description of something that we haven’t experienced, we tend to develop some idea of what that is, and it’s either attractive or not.

But at a certain point, when I was 18, I was just spending time with a friend of mine. It was kind of the… I think it was in August, the summer between high school and going away to college, and we were having a spiritual conversation. Later I learned that the technique of having a spiritual conversation, like what we’re doing right now, is actually affirmed in many different traditions. But we didn’t know that; we were just talking about it.

Our conversation kind of wandered into the biblical legends of Moses and the burning bush and freeing the Israelites from slavery, and it just started sparking things within us about how that story is actually talking about something real that’s directly relatable to how we approach this life that we’re living.

Something happened to us. The remarkable thing is, it wasn’t just me; it was both of us at the same time. I’ve never experienced anything like that ever again, but it was as if we both caught fire at the same time. We were both crying and hugging, which is totally bizarre for high school boys. Ten minutes later, we would have been making fun of ourselves. It was just ridiculous.

This is the time to make the right decision. The time is now.

Rick: Yeah, like that scene in Trains, Planes, and Automobiles with John Candy and… what’s his name? Anyway, I won’t go into the scene, but go on.

Brian: I know that I saw that movie, but I have to go back because I can’t remember now. But yeah, the way that we were saying it verbally to each other was, “This is it. You just have to live for God. That’s it.”

The concept of what the word “God” meant wasn’t getting in the way. We didn’t have any shared—we weren’t religious people; we didn’t have some shared dogma or ideology about what God is or anything like that. It was just more that the stories themselves awakened something in us through the conversation.

We tapped into what it meant to be just living from this place of pure openness and love. That’s one way to say it: kind of letting go of all the different ways that we get stuck. So, there was a real experience of freedom from all that personal mishigas that we all tend to experience.

It was something that lasted for a period of time, but it didn’t last forever. It was kind of like a bomb, you know, and then the sound sort of faded over the next few weeks. After some amount of time—I don’t know, a month or whatever—I was just left with a memory of it.

Rick: But it was obviously a genuine thing, not just an idea, because it wouldn’t have lasted a month. It would have lasted 10 minutes if it were just some philosophical insight or something. There’s some obvious experiential shift going on there.

Brian: Yeah, it changed the way I was interacting with everything. It changed the way I was living, but it also had a confusing effect because my memory of it is that I had this sense that if I wanted to really stay in it and continue it, I had to kind of just renounce everything—literally everything.

I had to just not go to college, but also not really do anything. I had to just walk out the door and start walking in trust, and that was it. I wasn’t going to do that.

Of course, later I realized that’s a way of life for many people in India. That’s an actual respected and known practice that many people engage with: They want to just free themselves from all of the entanglements of ordinary civilized life and culture and so on. They become wandering mendicants, or whatever we call them.

Rick: I interviewed a guy who did that. He had a successful printing company in Australia. He had this epiphany, and he literally took his shoes off and just started walking. He walked for years around Australia with the clothes on his back, basically.

Brian: And it was successful for him?

Rick: It worked out for him, yeah.

Brian: That’s great. It’s funny because I later met somebody who said that he did that and it wasn’t successful. He said that because he wasn’t doing it as a result of an epiphany, he was doing it as a technique. He decided, “Okay, I’m going to try this and see what happens,” but it just kind of created its own entanglements.

Rick: Yeah, you read about somebody like Peace Pilgrim, if you’re familiar with her. She was able to do what she did by virtue of her enlightened consciousness. Don’t try this at home, basically.

Brian: Exactly, exactly. In some ways, I wonder, “What if I had really just done that at that point?” Things probably would have gone very differently. But instead, I just continued living regular life.

As it faded, I became interested in, “How can I—is it possible to bring that consciousness into an ordinary cultural, civilized life, as opposed to having to renounce everything?” Because if you have to renounce everything, then what good is it for most people? That was my thinking.

Rick: And you’d already been meditating for, what, eight years or something by that time? Or six years? So that obviously had had an effect, and it may have even been conducive to the shift or the epiphany you had.

Brian: Yeah. Actually, I want to say something about that, because I was doing lots of different types of meditation, but as I said, I learned TM, which I know is kind of native to your town.

Rick: Yeah, and I was a teacher of it for 25 years, so I know a bit about it.

Brian: Oh, wow, okay. So there you go. You’ll know what I’m talking about. I had a certain experience with that. I read the book by Maharishi. I don’t know how many there are, but there was one main book that was…

Rick:Science of Being and Art of Living, probably.

Brian: Yeah, maybe it was that one.

Rick: He also did a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, but go on.

Brian: That one I didn’t see, yeah. I saw Swami Satchidananda’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which I loved.

But anyway, one of the things that it said in there was that if you meditate, if you just do the practice, then very naturally the potential for enlightened consciousness will begin to make its way into your life. You don’t have to worry about it; you just have to do the practice, and it’ll happen over time. It’s just a gradual process. It talks about dipping into it and so on.

The effect that that had on me, just as a concept, is that it put the idea of enlightenment in my head as something that was going to happen after I practiced enough.

It’s very interesting, and it’s not that that’s not true, but one of the effects of that experience that I had when I was 18 was that I realized in that moment that it was a wrong concept because it was becoming an excuse. As I lived life, every time I was making a decision to grasp after something, or to be unkind to somebody, or whatever it was, or to just be caught in whatever was arising—whatever mishigas was arising—I didn’t perceive the choice in those moments.

Instead, I would say to myself, “After I’ve meditated longer, I’ll be more enlightened and this won’t bother me anymore, but right now this is where I’m at.”

That experience taught me that, actually, no, the crucial time is always in the present. That doesn’t mean that we can somehow instantly transform whatever level we’re at. Of course, we’re all at a certain level, but nevertheless, there is something that’s available in the moment which is very important to realize, engage with, and have inform everything you’re doing and choosing, as opposed to having this concept of, “I’ll be enlightened later, after I’ve practiced enough.”

Rick: It’s an interesting consideration, and I’m glad you’re approaching it in a subtle way because, on the one hand, some people say this thing of, “Oh, we’re all already enlightened. You’re already enlightened. Just realize that, just accept that, and you’re done,” that kind of thing, which is sort of absurd, really, in light of what we see as possible in the example of some very great, obviously genuinely enlightened people.

But on the other hand, there’s this dangling-carrot syndrome, which you mentioned. How do you shift from always chasing the carrot of future enlightenment to actually accepting it now?

I could give an answer to that, but let me have you respond to it.

Brian: Right. After I realized that, this was a new concept in my head. My new concept was: I can be—I don’t know if I necessarily used the word “enlightened.” I know that word is kind of problematic anyway—but whatever the word is, if you want to engage in reality as it’s arising in this moment with as much awareness as possible, don’t put it off into the future. Engage with it now.

This is the time to make the right decision. This is the time to accept things as they are, or to choose action that’s going to bring about blessing as opposed to more conflict, or whatever it is. The time is now.

That was an idea that was planted from that experience. However, after a few months, I didn’t know what that meant anymore. I didn’t know how to do it.

I was going around thinking, “Okay, so I know from that experience that I shouldn’t put it off, but I also don’t really know how to do it now.” That led to another many years of a much more intellectual kind of searching, taking the form of a lot of writing and reading lots of different books. College happened, then post-college, and I moved to the Bay Area. I was just kind of in my head a lot for many, many years.

Rick: Were you still doing some kind of meditative practices during those years?

Brian: Yes, absolutely.

Rick: And that was culturing some sort of experience?

Brian: Yeah. I was continuing to learn in the Jewish tradition, informed by the esoteric side of the Jewish tradition, and I was doing a lot of exercises which, later, as I’m now very much in the mainstream—maybe not mainstream, but I’m in the Jewish world of spiritual education—I see a lot of people doing.

I know a lot of people who are doing it. I see the curricula that people are coming up with and so on, and a lot of the exercises that people are putting out are things that I had kind of come up with—assignments I was giving myself in those years.

For example, going through the litany of traditional Jewish prayers and contemplating the little pieces of it, trying to get at what it really meant to me, what my intention was behind this, and rewriting them, then practicing them for many months before using the actual traditional words—that kind of thing. So I was doing that for a long time.

What were you going to say?

Rick: I was just going to tell you a little story. I was once standing on a stage with Maharishi, shooting my mouth off about something, and he kind of interrupted me and said, “Every day is life.”

He said, “Don’t pass over the present for some glorious future,” which is just to the point you were making. We always have some kind of discrimination, some kind of ability to be content, to be fulfilled, to have insight, to have wisdom, whatever, in the present.

I think if we appreciate that to the fullest extent we can, then it enables it to grow more than if we’re always discounting the present and looking to some future thing for our salvation or something. It’s just the point you were making.

Brian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s bookmark that for a minute because I have another story similar to that, but I’ll get to it in a little bit, maybe.

After many years of living—I guess it was during my 20s—I was in the Bay Area and in this internal search, not really connecting with communities or teachers or anything like that.

At a certain point, I felt like I reached the end of my rope. I think it was because I had written an essay to describe the experience that I had had and to explain it in an intellectual way, and I was happy with it. I had finished it and was like, “Ah, good, I finally explained what that was.”

Then, after I was done explaining it, I said, “Great, so I explained it. That doesn’t get me anywhere.”

Rick: Yeah, more intellectual stuff.

Brian: Right, I’ve explained it, so what? At that point I got very serious, or something. I got very intentional. I said, “Look, now that I feel satisfied with explaining this on an intellectual level and realizing that it isn’t really helping me, I have to go somewhere else besides the intellectual.”

I had had exposure to many different teachings, as I talked about, but there was a book by Steve Hagen. It was a book on Zen called Buddhism Plain and Simple. There was something about that book—I don’t know. I just picked it up, opened it, and started reading something, and something hit me. It just hit me all at once that my intellect was constantly, constantly moving me away from the present moment, away from my direct experience, always creating this spiritual goal as a concept that I held in my mind, as opposed to doing the only thing that’s really important, which is actually connecting deeply right now to this moment.

He had a certain way of explaining it that struck me in that moment. I’ve gone back and looked at the book, and I can’t completely—I’m not really sure what it was about the book. I think it’s a very good book, but for some reason there was something serendipitous about looking at it in that moment, which connected in a Jewish way, surprisingly, because it was not a Jewish book.

And yet it was something that, for example, Martin Buber constantly talked about. He always talked about the path of presence, and to him that was what Judaism was all about. But he didn’t talk about it in terms of the present moment; he talked about it in terms of your presence meeting this moment, mostly in terms of other beings that you’re relating to, like this conversation we’re having right now. It’s an “I-Thou” thing. How are you fully engaging with those in front of you? That’s how he talked about it.

Reb Zalman also talked about it. That’s a whole other stream; maybe we won’t get into it, but my connection with him was very profound throughout the years, and he always talked about a “Chassidism” of the here and now.

So whatever it was—Ram Dass, “Be here now,” whatever it was—I made a commitment in that moment. I said, “From this moment on, I’m just going to do my best to stop avoiding this moment. I’m going to see what my mind is doing. I’m going to see how my mind tends to take me away from actually connecting with this moment,” if that’s the way you want to describe it. “I’m just going to do my best to see that, let it go, and see what happens without any kind of expectation of it.”

Rick: And that didn’t mean that you had to stop reading and thinking and writing and intellectualizing, right?

Brian: No.

Rick: But you could do it with a different orientation.

Brian: Yes, yes. One of the things that it meant was that it changed the context of the spiritual practices I was doing, because the spiritual practices always fell, somehow, in my mind into the category of a thing where you stop life and do your spiritual practice, and then you go back to life. It was like these two separate things.

So this kind of crashed that down and made it universally applicable. The practice now, whether I’m doing my spiritual practice or whether I’m taking out the garbage, whatever it is, is that I’m simply going to be awake to whatever it is. I’m just going to keep doing that and see what happens.

Something started happening immediately, as soon as I made that decision, which I would describe as a sort of subtle brightness. It just started being this subtle brightness, which I could almost taste, and it tasted like that familiar taste from when I was 18, from that experience.

So immediately I thought, “Oh, okay, maybe this is the right direction. I’m onto something here.” I just kept doing that and kept doing that, and then some crazy stuff started happening. I started feeling like everything that I was doing, all the elements in my life, felt more papery. Everything seemed more—everything just took on a different texture.

Rick: Less solid, less thick, so to speak.

Brian: Yeah, less thick, less dense. Also, the feelings that I had for things, the feelings that would arise in the presence of the various stuff of life, didn’t feel as much a part of me. They were just part of the texture of what was happening.

As opposed to, “Me and my feelings, and this is a problem,” it was more like feelings would arise and then they would just dissipate. Very intense situations would arise that would actually be kind of like hell for a few minutes, and then they would dissipate.

There was one little thing that happened that I’ll mention. I was going to put it in the introduction of that book that I sent you, but I didn’t put it in there because I was just trying to condense it and make it shorter and shorter. To me, though, it was kind of a powerful thing.

I was driving, and someone cut me off. I got really, really angry and was about to lean on the horn and curse or something. Then something said inside me, “This is the moment. This is it. Are you ready to practice now?”

I said, “Okay.” I just said, “Okay, here’s the anger,” and I opened to it. It was incredibly painful. I felt this well of anger and negativity, almost like a scab had become dislodged from my heart and kind of left like smoke.

It all happened within a few seconds. It had rained recently, and there was a sheen of rain on the road. I just looked up out the windshield and out my window, and I could see the sun glistening on the road. A bird flew by.

This is the moment. Are you ready to practice now?

All of a sudden it was like the Garden of Eden, but it was just in traffic and dealing with normal stuff. What I felt like over that week—it took about a week—was that there were these scabs of me that were getting dislodged and thrown out during that time.

Rick: It kind of reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s story of looking at the ducks. You’ve probably read that, where he’s sitting watching ducks, and the ducks get into this little fight with each other over something. A few seconds later, they just sort of shake off their feathers and start swimming around again as if nothing happened.

Imagine if all of humanity could function that way. What a different world it would be.

Brian: Yes, yes, exactly.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that’s pretty neat. So were there any other significant watershed moments, or is it just life rolling on now and living in a greater state of presence and nonattachment?

Brian: Well, yeah, no, there were a lot of moments. I feel like the true way that it has unfolded for me until now is very complex and has had lots to it. But I think the main theme is that after that week, some kind of transformative process happened that was different from the first one, when I was 18.

The first one was more heart-centered, and it was not intentional at all. It happened spontaneously, and I didn’t know how to get back to it. After the second one, I felt that I had been given a key. There was a door that I could now open, and I knew how to open it.

And yet, at the same time, it wasn’t like me with my key, knowing how to open it. It was like, “This is a gift. I don’t have control over it.” But as far as things go now, I have access to this eternal dimension, and now I have to work with it, right?

I would say that there are certain ideas in the rhetoric of spiritual awakening—and this is in Judaism as well. There are concepts of different stages of development and beings who are more enlightened, and then they don’t have an ego anymore. They don’t have a yetzer hara, which means the inner force to do evil.

For me, I would just say that it didn’t really change anything except that it gave me access to this eternal dimension. From then on, it was and is my choice to engage with that dimension more deeply and more skillfully as various challenges of life come up.

Another little piece is that when it first happened, I let go of all the formal spiritual practices because I thought, “Well, this is it. This is all you really need.”

But what I experienced was that regular life was actually very difficult for me. It was probably difficult anyway, but it felt more abrasive because, after having all these layers of me stripped away, everything felt very abrasive.

I would walk into a restaurant to get a cup of coffee or a pastry or something, and I would hear the people working there have a little argument. It would just send me into tears. I would be weeping for 20 minutes or something because of the negativity that I saw there. Everything became very difficult to function in.

Rick: You were very sensitive.

Brian: Very sensitive.

Rick: Vulnerable.

Brian: Vulnerable, yeah, exactly. Naked, or like a scab that was ripped off—something like that.

After some time, I started thinking, “Well, maybe this is part of why there are formal spiritual practices and why there are certain lifestyle suggestions or commandments, as you might call them, in Judaism—mitzvot, or commandments.”

What is the purpose of these structural things that we have to learn mentally, then practice and do? It started to occur to me that maybe if I did some of that stuff, it would be helpful. It would help me to live partially in this eternal realm and partially in this crazy life realm that we’re living in.

What I found is that that’s true. Of course, not 100 percent—there’s a certain skillfulness with which you have to take on these practices. If you do too much at once, then it becomes disruptive in relationships and interferes with other things.

But if it’s done skillfully, the whole purpose, as I see it now, of these formal practices is not just to reach the eternal, not just to plug into that realm, but actually to help integrate that realm with all of the ordinariness of life.

I think that’s where Judaism excels. I don’t have a lot of personal experience with other traditions from the inside, so I can’t compare them or say anything definitively like that. But I can say from my own experience, and from others I know and talk to, that one of the high points of the Jewish tradition is that it’s very helpful in helping you connect what we might call the higher and the lower worlds—the eternal space within which everything is arising—with all the stuff that’s arising.

✨ Kabbalah, Judaism, and awakening

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s a very important point, and I think it’s something that people in the spiritual community in general deal with constantly. There’s been more and more talk of it in recent years, with words like embodiment and integration being thrown around a lot.

I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine earlier this week, or maybe it was last weekend, who was talking about how he felt so sensitive because of whatever spiritual development he had been undergoing. He found himself crying a lot and stuff, just like you said. And I said, “That’s great, but you need to kind of counterbalance it with an equivalent amount of strength.”

I joked with him about how the ladies like the strong, sensitive types, so go for both. And I think one can be, just speaking simplistically perhaps, very strong but not sensitive—the macho stereotype. One can be very, very sensitive but not strong, and that can make you very vulnerable.

But I think it’s possible and valuable to develop both qualities commensurately. If you do, you can be super-duper sensitive and, at the same time, not be so vulnerable. That’s not to say that you’re not going to experience everything acutely, deeply, and fully, but it won’t be overwhelming, overshadowing, or wounding, and so on. You’ll have the capacity to be so sensitive and function normally in the normal world.

Brian: Yeah, and what you’re talking about is a major theme in Kabbalah. So, there are a lot of images and teachings that are aimed at explaining exactly what you were just talking about.

Rick: Great. Well, let’s talk a bit about Kabbalah and Judaism. A friend of mine named David prepared some questions for this interview because he’s really into Judaism and sort of a Jewish scholar. His brother is actually a rabbi or something.

Brian: Yeah, his brother is Danny Matt.

Rick: Oh, you know Danny?

Brian: Yeah, I know him, and he and I have actually done some work together—some musical services in Berkeley that I’ve led. He’s done some teaching in those, and he’s involved in a very major translation of the Zohar, which is one of the most basic texts of Kabbalah from medieval Spain.

Rick: Great. Well, it’s a small world. His brother David lives in my town here and is an old friend of mine. He wrote a nice little thing about you here. He said, “Brian’s main interest is awakening, and he is very well versed in the Jewish tradition. His specialty is that he has reinterpreted all of the important themes in Judaism in terms of awakening. Throughout Jewish history, it has been very much encouraged to come up with new interpretations of the sacred texts. Brian’s work is a perfect example of that.”

So let’s talk about some of these themes and your interpretations and so on, just as we can spend at least an hour on this. Perhaps if you want to dip back into your personal experience from time to time, if things come to mind and you want to illustrate points, we can do that.

But assume someone like me, who knows very little about Judaism and wants to learn more. This is a perfect opportunity for you to explain it. So David wrote out a lot of questions and a bunch of themes and all, and you probably have that document in front of you as well. Where would you like to start in explaining all this to us?

Brian: Well, maybe I’ll just start by first letting everybody know that today is the new moon. So, in Judaism, the new moon is a Jewish holiday. It’s called Rosh Chodesh, which means “the head of the month.”

The particular month that’s beginning now is called Adar. That’s the name of it, the month of Adar. And there’s a saying in the Talmud that says, “Mishenichnas Adar Marbim B’simcha,” which means, “When Adar enters, joy increases.”

The understanding is that there’s this holiday in Adar called Purim. And Purim, if you’re familiar with the Bible, is connected with a book called the Book of Esther, or the Scroll of Esther. It’s actually a very engaging kind of narrative about the Jewish people during the first exile, after the First Temple was destroyed.

It’s a whole bunch of stuff that happens that I won’t go into, but one of the interesting things about that book is that it’s one of the few places where God’s name is not mentioned at all in the entire book, and yet it’s considered a sacred text.

So the esoteric tradition understands that the special thing about this text, and also the special thing about this time period that we’re in, is that divinity is hidden but is underlying everything. The rest of the biblical texts tend to objectify divinity, talk about God as a character who says and does things, and have people interact with God.

But, of course, for most of us, the experience of what we call divinity, being, existence, or sacredness is something that is underlying everything. So the question is: Can we tap into that, and can we approach life and also sacred texts with sensitivity to that?

When you talk about these different Jewish concepts, Judaism is a very, very intellectual kind of tradition. The intellectual stream is very strong. Likewise, even in the esoteric realm, I know many Jewish people with whom I’ve interacted who say, “Oh, they love the Torah of Awakening stuff because they feel like it’s not just intellectualizing that esoteric realm.”

You can study Kabbalah—Jewish mysticism—for years and years and years, and all you’re doing is thinking about stuff. You’re not actually going into it. So my approach, when I look at all the different elements of Judaism—which is really a vast ocean that you could never cover in a lifetime, because there’s so much there—is simply to look at it from the point of view of what’s available in this moment.

In other words, what is the text, the practice, or the idea trying to tell me about what I can tap into in this moment? And when I do that, things tend to open up and reveal themselves in a certain way. So that’s how I’m approaching those things.

Rick: In his notes here, David wrote, “God is the basic name for God. It’s made up of the four Hebrew letters that correspond to the English letters YHVH. It means being, so God is being.” Would you agree with that? God is essentially—how would you define God? Let’s spend a minute. Everybody knows the word, and people have different concepts of it. How would you most deeply, most profoundly define what God is?

Brian: Well, when we say the word God, God is a concept, right?

Rick: Well, any word is a concept representing something. Apple is a concept, but you can bite into one also, you know?

Brian: Exactly, exactly. So, taking that analogy of an apple, apple is a word, it’s a concept, but then you can actually take the physical apple and bite into it.

So my question, then, is: With the word God, and with any religious or spiritual words, does the word help you to bite into the apple, or is the word leading you somewhere else, down some other road? And my sense is that when we get into theology, when we get into talking about what is God and what’s the nature of God and this kind of stuff, then we’re kind of moving away from the apple.

Rick: We may be, but as long as we can really understand—I mean, if we want to communicate, we have to use words. And if we really understand what our—there are words like God and enlightenment and so on that people don’t like to use because they have so much baggage.

Maybe we can make up new words, but maybe if we define our words and we don’t think of God as the old guy in the sky with the beard, or enlightenment as being able to walk through the clouds or whatever, then we can actually still use those good old words.

Brian: Yes, absolutely. So, if we say that God is being or existence, which the most sacred name in Judaism actually indicates because the name itself is a permutation of the letters of the verb “to be”—which is, for those who know Hebrew, the letters heh, yod, heh—then that’s the verb “to be.”

You put them in a certain order, and you add a letter, vav, which has to do with a very seldom-used present tense of the verb “to be.” Then you have this name, this divine name, which gets translated and transliterated into English in various ways.

But if you look at the Bible, most English translations, I think, just say “the Lord.” You get it—it says “the Lord.” But actually, it’s pointing to this unpronounceable Hebrew name that means being or existence.

So then the question is, well, if it’s being or existence, then why use the word God? Why not just use the words being or existence? I think Eckhart Tolle talks about that too: God is a closed concept, so why do we use the word God?

And my answer to that—the apple I want to point to and to which you take a bite—is the avenue of the heart. In other words, there’s a relational experience with being, existence, or reality. Reality is also a good word, because maybe the word reality is a little more all-inclusive.

The point is that reality is right here, right? This is reality. It’s very rich. It includes everything that’s happening in our experience right now. It’s our physical sensations, our sensory input, all of our memories and concepts, whatever feelings are arising within us. It’s the fullness of it. It’s all of reality.

And the tendency that we have as human beings, which makes spirituality something that we’re interested in—why does spirituality exist at all? Why do we need spirituality?—is because we have this tendency to feel ourselves to be separate from the fullness of reality.

We’re not separate from reality. There’s not us in reality, right? There’s just reality. But why do we have this feeling of, “I’m separate from reality”? We may not say that intellectually to ourselves, but there’s a feeling that there’s a problem here, that something’s not right.

It manifests in different ways for different people. Maybe it’s a feeling of alienation, or a feeling that I’m not good enough, or that things aren’t happening in the way they’re supposed to. Just these different senses are created by the way our minds work, giving us a sense of separation from reality.

So, if we use the word God in a way that’s useful, then I would say, “What is God? What is that? What’s the connotation of God?” It’s a connotation of reverence, a connotation of surrender, a connotation of trust. Like, we’re not just out here as fragments wandering aimlessly around, but there’s actually some sort of greater coherence to things. There’s a greater power, a greater reality, and all these things help to loosen up that constriction of the heart that puts us in hell.

Rick: Yeah.

Brian: So the concept of God is good and useful if you’re using it prayerfully, if it’s inspiring your heart to open. And for those qualities, what we call middot—middot means “measures,” but in Judaism middot means spiritual qualities that flow from the heart.

For example, gratitude is a middah, reverence is a middah, trust is a middah, loving-kindness is a middah. All these middot flow naturally when we take a prayerful attitude toward reality, and that’s helped by calling reality God. That’s my sense of it.

Rick: One reason I like using a word like that, related to what you’re saying, actually, is that if you just say “being,” it doesn’t necessarily connote all the qualities that I would ascribe to God. For instance, in a single grain of salt there are a billion billion atoms, which is an incomprehensible number, and each one of those little atoms is a marvel in terms of what it actually is and how it functions and so on.

To me, that indicates a vast, unfathomable intelligence orchestrating and permeating every bit of creation, with no break anywhere. It’s just omnipresent everywhere. Intelligence is a quality like that. Physicists tell us that in a cubic centimeter of empty space, at the level of the vacuum state, there is more energy than there is in millions of atomic bombs—huge, vast energy latent within every iota of creation.

So that implies the quality of energy—intelligence, energy. We could enumerate other qualities. If we ponder what is actually going on, what we’re actually perceiving and engaging in this universe, it’s this amazing thing, which is not just random billiard balls dumbly banging into each other, but is obviously something of amazing complexity and brilliance in its design and orchestration. So that’s the reason I like to use the word “God”: it just implies all that to me.

Brian: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s just another example of exactly what I’m talking about: there are certain qualities that we have. What you were just saying brings to mind a term that was used by Abraham Joshua Heschel, olav hashalem.

Rick: Hmm, I love it.

Brian: Radical amazement is something that’s not just there all the time, in the way that awareness is there all the time. It’s something that—it’s a fire that flares up when you contemplate in a certain way. So that contemplation that you just led us on, of the million, million atoms in the grain of salt and the incomprehensible amount of energy, just as I was hearing you say it, there’s a sense of awe that comes from becoming aware of that. To me, that’s what prayer is about, as opposed to meditation.

Rick: I think you can end up living in that state of awe more and more all the time, just the way we were talking earlier about living in a state of sensitivity and strength all the time. Awe becomes part and parcel of your ordinary experience, you know?

Brian: Right.

Rick: Cool. So feel free to always pipe up if I’m not asking a question and something comes to mind. Just jump in.

One thing about God is that God is often entreated with prayer. Often, when that happens, people have this sort of concept of, “God is off someplace and I’m sending him this message, and I hope he hears it and gets back to me.” There’s a duality implicit in that. So what would you say about that supposed duality and God’s ability to respond to prayers?

Brian: As long as there’s a sense of duality in life—which, it seems to me, is always the case as long as we’re functioning in ordinary life—there are moments when that sense of duality drops away altogether. But in order for me to have figured out how to put these headphones in the right hole and to connect this stuff that was all new to me, that was duality, right? I mean, I didn’t know, and then Jerry helped me, right?

We’re dealing with life in time, and so as long as that is present, then there’s going to be a tendency for there to be a sense of me and the rest of it. That’s the basic duality. There’s me, and then there’s everything else that’s going on, and there’s going to be concern that arises whenever we do anything.

We do things in order to bring about a certain result, and so there’s always the concern, like, “I’m not in control; therefore, I hope that this works,” right? That situation that we all find ourselves in is potentially constricting. In other words, it’s constricting to those middot we were talking about before—the middot of gratitude, of trust, of just open-heartedness, of connectedness.

All those things tend to get constricted the more the mind is concerned about how things are going to work out. When you pray, you say, “God,” or “Hashem.” Hashem is one of the Hebrew terms that we use as a very casual way of talking about God. It literally means “the name,” referring to that name that we were talking about—the name that means existence or reality.

It’s kind of funny, because if you said, “Hey, reality,” it would sound strange.

Rick: Too impersonal.

Brian: Yeah, it sounds very impersonal, but you say, “Hey, Hashem,” and it sounds very personal. Yet the word Hashem means the name that means reality that we can’t pronounce. But we say Hashem, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof: “Please, help me out. Help this thing that I’m trying to do work out. Help this person to not be judgmental of me.” Whatever it is, whatever is heavy on your heart that you put out in a prayer helps you to really internalize the fact that you’re not in control and that you’re surrendering control to that which is beyond you.

Now, of course, that only works if your prayer is really prayerful, because prayer can also be graspy, like, “Oh God, please, blah, blah, blah,” right? Then that’s not actually a real prayer; it’s just a…

Rick: It’s more like a demand, almost, or a desperation.

Brian: Yeah, an expression of desperation. The tendency we have to grab after things, to insist on things, to want to control things—those are basic ego qualities. It’s part of the spiritual work to relax those qualities.

Prayer very much helps you do that, in my experience, if you’re able to do it. Of course, some people can’t handle the word “God,” and they don’t want to deal with that at all. But Judaism—yeah, Judaism is a theocentric path. It uses that concept of God, it’s filled with prayers, it’s very dualistic in that sense, and yet there’s also the awareness that as I pray for what I need, it’s actually not even me praying. It’s like God doing its own process, because really there’s only God, so God is praying to itself in this form.

Rick: So Judaism actually recognizes that there’s only God, and that although we may think that we’re separate from God, we’re only God playing hide-and-seek with himself? I mean, Judaism recognizes that kind of notion?

Brian: Yes, absolutely. I would qualify that by saying there are different streams, of course, of Judaism, different streams of Jewish thought. Like any tradition, it’s very complicated. There’s no just Judaism or Buddhism or whatever.

The stream that I’m talking about is the stream that comes from Kabbalah, which itself has different streams. Nevertheless, there is a basic theme in Kabbalah of this nonduality notion, what’s called in Hebrew, sometimes referred to as “achtut,” which means “oneness.” It’s referring to the basic oneness of all reality.

That comes through different Hasidic teachings, of which there are many lineages. The particular stream that I’ve studied more than others is the lineage that comes from Chabad, and the basic text of Chabad, which is called the Tanya.

In my book, which you read some of, I make some reference to the Tanya, which is available in many translations, and people can check that out. It’s very clear in the stream of Hasidic teaching that we’re not talking about God creating the universe and then these being two different things. Rather, we’re talking about this one reality, which then appears through a…

There are lots of very fancy, very intellectual explanations for how it can appear to be not all one. But that’s the basic premise: there’s a purpose for feeling like we’re not all one.

It’s not like duality is the enemy, and I guess that’s one of the hallmarks of Jewish spirituality that is different from some forms of Eastern spirituality that emphasize transcendence, with the idea that the goal of this human life is to transcend it and then kind of disentangle yourself from it.

A major theme in Judaism is that, yes, you should transcend it and disentangle yourself from it, but not for the purpose simply of realizing it. It’s for the purpose of then bringing that transcendence into ordinary, mundane, gritty existence.

Rick: Yeah. Like you say, there are different streams, and some streams of Eastern thinking say just that as well. Even in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, “Transcend,” and then three verses later he says, “Establish in being, go and fight this battle. Perform action.”

Brian: Exactly.

Rick: Related to all this, I think there’s a fellow named Mark from Santa Clara who asks—you talked earlier about how you had this shift where you finally were residing in presence and functioning from there more or less spontaneously, although I imagine you would agree that even doing that, there are times when you get gripped or drawn out.

So Mark asks, “What triggers or reminders do you use to routinely fall consciously back into presence? Can you suggest any particular practice to make the noticing increasingly habitual?”

Brian: There was a temporary glitch there.

Rick: Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll read it again. Basically, he just asked, “What triggers or reminders make this noticing more habitual?” I’d also add: perhaps more stable, so you don’t get drawn out of it as easily.

Brian: To me, that’s a super-important question. I think that maybe there are two questions that are the most basic and important questions. The first one is, “How do you get to experience it in the first place?” The second one is, “How do you deepen with it and maintain it more and more, and not be in this yo-yo kind of, or seesaw sort of thing?”

First of all, Judaism is chock-full of practices to help you do that. For example, as anybody who has any Jewish background who’s watching knows, there are certain blessings you say before doing different things. Before eating, there’s a special blessing you say; there’s a special blessing you say when you wake up in the morning; there are times during the day when you stop to do certain prayers.

So your day, if you’re doing traditional practices, is filled with these opportunities to come back to presence. However, I’ll qualify that with the big obstacle in it, which is that when you teach this stuff in a religious culture, you’re telling people to do it before they necessarily have the hunger for it.

I have this exact challenge right now with my own children: How do you teach these practices and actually have them be real, as opposed to, “Okay, I’m going to rush through this blessing so I can take my bite of food”?

Rick: Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, go God.

Brian: Exactly. It becomes a thing where you feel like, “Oh, I have to…” Maybe you feel bad if you don’t say the blessing because you think you’re supposed to, but you’re not really taking it as an opportunity to do that.

That’s something that exists in Jewish culture. There’s that obstacle, and it probably exists, I would think, in any religious culture. You have the same thing. That is also the function of spiritual teachers—or really anyone who doesn’t have to be formally a teacher, but anyone who’s plugged in, who’s in your tradition and you’re in their presence.

Why is it good to be in their presence? Part of what’s so good is that when you go to do the things you’re doing anyway—like, “I’m going to say this blessing”—you suddenly bring a lot of presence to it when you’re in the presence of someone who has a lot of presence, right?

Rick: Yeah, kind of like a dog chasing its tail or pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps or something. There’s that saying some Christians use, “Well, what would Jesus do?” Well, you kind of have to be Jesus to really know that, because then you’re functioning from His level of consciousness and you’ll spontaneously act in that way. But can you really mimic His behavior and have the same effect?

Brian: Yeah, well, I think that to a certain degree you can, in the sense that if you’re behaving out of certain unconscious impulses and then the thought arises in your mind, “What does the Baal Shem Tov do?” Whatever it is, whatever spiritual master you’re going to envision, then that can help you access some more presence, and from that presence can flow greater creativity and wisdom about how to deal with whatever situation you’re in.

So I just wanted to give that as a suggestion to … Who is the fellow who asked?

Rick: Oh, it was Mark in Santa Clara.

Brian: Okay, so Mark. There’s this whole richness in our tradition of all these different practices that you can do, but there’s also a wisdom in how you take them on. If you’re not already doing them, then you don’t just take them all on at once. You try one, and it’ll probably have a very profound effect if you do it with that type of intention. But soon there’ll be a tendency for it to become rote.

So then you have to overcome that and realize, “Oh, this is my mind just becoming accustomed to it. It’s becoming rote.” Perhaps then it’s time to take on another practice to help you have a fresher reminder. That’s how you work with it. It’s a process of working with these traditional practices.

But I’ll also say that there’s a certain practice that I developed, which you can check out. So if you go to TorahOfAwakening.com, what you’ll find there is that you can download a guided meditation practice that I call Integral Jewish Meditation. The reason I call it Integral is because, over the years, as I noticed the beneficial elements of many different Jewish practices, I realized that for a lot of people who want to just do something, you don’t necessarily have ten years to learn all these Jewish practices. Maybe you want to try something that’s from the Jewish tradition but is also very accessible.

So what I did—I don’t want to say I did it, but it kind of developed over time through working with people—was to take the positive elements of these different practices and create something that’s very doable, even in a few seconds.

Rick: Yeah, I read those instructions, and it actually seems a little bit TM-like in terms of its effortlessness and simplicity. It’s something you could do for twenty minutes twice a day, or ten minutes twice a day, or whatever works for you. That kind of thing has a cumulative effect.

Brian: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it’s very, very powerful. One of the things that is somewhat unique—not completely unique, but I know that you don’t find it in some other practices—is that it integrates a kind of somatic element. There are body motions, vocalizations, chanting, thought streams that you contemplate, and so on. That is the opening to then sitting in silent presence for the open meditation.

You can also do that opening, which is really the part that’s unique about IJM, or Integral Jewish Meditation, throughout the day many times, just for a few seconds, in addition to doing a ten-minute or twenty-minute practice. Even in transition moments—before you get out of bed, before you get into your car, before you enter a building—you can do this practice of Integral Jewish Meditation, which helps you plug into all these different elements of presence that we’ve been talking about.

Rick: Okay, good. And we can talk about that more if you want to refer back to it toward the end.

Brian: I’ll remind people toward the end of the interview.

The Baal Shem Tov and Jewish saints

Rick: You mentioned the Baal Shem Tov a minute ago, and back in the seventies, I think it was, I read a book about him and was very impressed. He seemed like a remarkable saint, really. He even had some amazing siddhis, apparently, like being able to teleport from one place to another and things like that. What is your take on him? Are there people like that, similar to him, in Judaism? Is there a history of remarkable saints or siddhas, to use the Eastern term?

Brian: Yes, yes, there’s a big history of it. It’s not at all unique. He, of course, holds a very special place in the history of Jewish spirituality because he’s seen as really the grandfather of the entire Hasidic movement.

For those who don’t know what that is, Hasidism—today you may live in a place where you see men in black coats and black hats—

Rick: With the long braids on the side.

Brian: Exactly, right. You don’t know what’s up with those guys. Like any real-life religious culture, it has its problems and its history and so on, but the forces that gave birth to the Hasidic movement, as I understand it, arose from the need for genuine esoteric Jewish spirituality to become available to everyone.

That was the impulse that created Hasidism, because prior to that, the whole esoteric aspect of Judaism was considered very nistar, which means hidden. It was studied by elite groups of people who were already at a very high level of learning, and all of that Jewish learning, which is really very much on an intellectual level, was considered the prerequisite.

So the Baal Shem Tov comes along and says—or apparently perceives—that this depth has to be made available to the peasant, the guy with his milk cow. It has to be available because otherwise we’re going to be destroyed; we’re not going to survive. Judaism was becoming so … There was this separation between the elite scholarly people and all the peasants who were becoming assimilated, disappearing, and so on.

So there was this flaring up. It was like a fire, a bonfire that flared up Jewish spirituality, starting with the Baal Shem Tov, followed by many, many very inspired, very plugged-in rebbes in his lineage.

But even way before him, in the Talmud, for example, there’s a lot of this. Ever since then, there have been many stories of miracle workers. There’s a wonderful story in the Talmud that talks about … It’s off the top of my head, so I don’t remember the details, but I think it’s Rabbi Akiva. For those Jewish scholars out there, you might correct me.

I think it’s Rabbi Akiva who goes around and heals people. He enters their homes, and they’re in bed, ready to die, deathly ill. He takes their hand, and they stand up and they’re fine. Then one time he’s very sick, and another rabbi, whose name I’m not remembering at the moment, comes in and says, “Are these afflictions dear to you?”

He says, “Neither these afflictions nor the reward,” meaning that when you suffer, there’s spiritual reward that comes from it. He says, “No, I don’t want these afflictions, and I don’t want the reward.” So the other rabbi takes his hand, picks him up, and heals him.

Then the Talmud asks, “Why couldn’t he heal himself if he’s such a great healer?” The answer is that a prisoner can’t release himself from prison.

So there’s a concept that there’s a certain communal element in how this stuff flows, which I think is hinting at the importance of connecting with others—not necessarily in physical healing, but in the process of spiritual development and spiritual awakening. We help each other.

Rick: Yeah, like you and your friend when you were eighteen. There was a sort of chemistry that made that happen.

Brian: Exactly, yeah.

Rick: Regarding the Baal Shem Tov and the re-ignition of some kind of spiritual thing going on, it reminds me of that story where God and the devil are walking down the road. God sees something and picks it up, and the devil says, “What’s that?” God says, “It’s the truth,” and the devil says, “Oh, here, let me organize it for you.”

It seems like these bursts of light that come along from time to time always end up getting dimmer as they crumble on the hard rocks of administrative ignorance and whatnot. Then it’s time for a fresh one to come along.

Brian: Don’t we know it? Yeah, and in that vein, the Baal Shem Tov didn’t write anything himself.

Rick: It was all oral.

Brian: Yeah, and then the different disciples wrote things about him and quoted him and so on. But it’s interesting that he never wrote books.

Reincarnation and sacred sound

Rick: Yeah, a couple of questions have come in that will cause us to jump around a little bit, but it’ll be fun to ask them. David from Israel asks, “In the Vedic tradition, the world is created from sound. In the Hebrew tradition, the world is created from the Hebrew letters. My sense is that there is a deep truth here and that these are not just concepts. What are your thoughts?”

Brian: Yeah, I agree. I would also say that if we’re taking the Biblical creation narrative, the Torah creation narrative, at face value, the universe is created with sound in that story as well. It doesn’t say it’s created from Hebrew letters, but in Kabbalah, later on, as the tradition develops, it talks about how the Hebrew letters are the DNA of the universe. So that’s, I think, where that idea is coming from.

Rick: And Sanskrit says that too. Sanskrit says that its letters and sounds are the DNA of the universe, basically. Speaking of apples, for instance, it says that the vibratory quality of the Sanskrit word for apple, whatever that word might be, has the same vibratory quality as an apple itself. It’s just that the apple is more manifest.

Brian: Yeah, and it says that in Kabbalah too, exactly. The idea is that the Hebrew words for things are not merely representations, but somehow they are the spiritual DNA for those things.

Rick: Like it’s the language of nature in a way.

Brian: Yes, exactly. As far as I know, I haven’t heard of anything except Judaism and Hinduism where that concept exists. I don’t know if there are other cultures that also say that about their language.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know.

Brian: Yeah, anyway.

Rick: Well, actually, in a way, physics says things about how certain frequencies end up getting more and more concretized as the process of manifestation occurs. I’m sure physicists could explain that more clearly, but there’s a parallel there.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting idea in terms of how that idea is helpful. My experience is that the chanting of Hebrew sacred texts, both the prayers and the scriptures, which is a regular part of Jewish practice, is tremendously presence-inducing.

It’s a powerful, powerful spiritual practice, and of course that exists in the Vedic traditions. TM is also based on this, with the mantras that are given. But it’s tremendous, tremendous power.

So I would just encourage people to … We have this gift; we’re given these gifts of these practices. We can look at them and say, “Wow, that’s an amazing idea,” or we can do them regularly and see what effect they have on our nervous system, how they affect our consciousness, and what potential they bring forth.

I’d say, do the experiment. In my experience, the experiment is very fruitful. So, the concept that the universe is created out of the DNA of Hebrew letters—is that literally true? I have no idea. But I can say that it’s very, very powerful.

Rick: I wonder if, you know, if you could really go back far enough and understand what was going on well enough, I wonder if you would find some sort of merging or original source of both the Hebrew and the Vedic traditions—if they just sort of dovetailed and branched off an original trunk in some way. Just speculating.

Brian: Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard some scholars say that that is the case. I think there’s a mainstream—and this is not my area of expertise at all, but from the little bit that I know—understanding that the Hebrew lineage of language and the Sanskrit lineage of language are different, that they’re actually two different streams. But I’ve heard other scholars point to these very hard-to-ignore, almost identical words in the two different traditions.

So it seems as if the alphabet itself is really different, but that the sounds are probably the same. The Hebrew alphabet is really from the same lineage as the English alphabet. Just like we have ABC, there’s Aleph, Beth, Gimel. I mean, the connection is very obvious. But as far as I understand it, the whole Sanskrit symbology is a completely different system. It’s not about ABC.

Rick: Yeah, well, as I understand it—we’re getting a little esoteric here—the Devanagari alphabet of Sanskrit wasn’t originally used. I mean, it was sort of a relative innovation. But anyway, let’s go on to another point, because we’re getting a little geeky here.

Dan from London asks, “How is reincarnation viewed or understood in Judaism?” Is it?

Brian: Well, reincarnation is a traditional Jewish concept.

Rick: Is it?

Brian: Yeah, but it’s not emphasized or talked about anywhere near as much as it is, as I understand it, in traditions that come from India.

Rick: Are most Jews aware of that fact?

Brian: Probably not, but I would say more today than ever, because Kabbalah and books on the whole esoteric tradition of Judaism have become so much more popular. Well, they started being written in the early ’70s, and they’ve continued until today. There’s tons of people talking about it, so I would say that people are more aware of it today.

There’s a word for it in Hebrew. It’s called gilgul, which means cycles or circles: the soul gets incarnated, it leaves, and then it gets incarnated again. There’s actually an interesting concept in Kabbalah that not only is there reincarnation, but our spiritual DNA is actually not just one thing. There are various levels to our soul, and they get disassembled and may reassemble in different forms for the next incarnation.

Some aspect of me, for example, that didn’t finish some work in some area may hitchhike on someone else’s incarnation and not even be very active, but just be going through the experience. There are ideas like that in Judaism. But the concept that I’ve heard about in Indian-based religions—where there are an uncountable number of incarnations and the sheer magnitude of it is emphasized—I haven’t seen that in Judaism.

It’s more like they’ll point out specific things, such as, “Oh, this teacher is the reincarnation of that sage from then.” Certain people will point that out, but they won’t talk about it a lot as an important part of the teaching, in my experience.

Rick: Yeah, I remember hearing that the Buddha said that if you took all the bones that you’ve had and all the bodies that you’ve occupied and piled them up, they would be bigger than all the Himalayas or something—just a huge number of lifetimes.

But anyway, in Judaism, the idea is that you pick up where you left off? There’s a sort of progressive sequence, hopefully. If you do well in one lifetime, you’re able to pick up from there and continue to progress?

Brian: Yeah, there’s a sense that there’s a purpose to the incarnations. There’s certain work that has to be done on oneself, and there’s certain work that you have to perform. So it’s kind of both. There’s the personal evolution of it, but then there’s also some kind of role that you were incarnated for that you might not fulfill in your lifetime, or in any particular lifetime.

Then there’s a series of lifetimes that would have to happen in order to fulfill whatever particular function your soul root came into being for.

Rick: So next time for you, rock star, right?

Brian: I hope so. My son was just asking me, “Abba, why didn’t you ever become a big rock star?” I was lazy, I don’t know.

✨ The Shema and awareness

Rick: So my friend David, as I mentioned, wrote down a bunch of points, and he mentions a certain prayer called Shema Yisrael, which I know nothing about. But you indicated to me before we resumed the recording that it was an important thing, so let’s talk about that a little bit.

Brian: I’m sure Jewish folks who are out there watching, who had any little tiny bit of connection with Judaism—and I’m sure there are many who have none, but still, if you had a little bit, you probably know this prayer. It’s not really a prayer, but it’s a verse from the Torah that is chanted in traditional prayer services.

When a boy or a girl becomes Bar or Bat Mitzvah and gets up there to lead the prayers, of course they’re going to do this one at the very least. It’s also the prayer that a traditionally religious person will do their best to say if they know they’re about to die. They’ll say it out loud.

Once I was driving one of my teachers back from a retreat that he was leading. I was driving him back to the Bay Area from Santa Cruz, and I was getting too close to a car in front of me. He said, “Shema Yisrael!”

Rick: Kind of a spontaneous reaction, huh?

Brian: So I love that, because I had never experienced someone saying it when they were really afraid they were about to die. That was an amazing, amazing reaction.

Rick: Yeah, most people would use some kind of four-letter word.

Brian: Exactly. It reminds me of some of the—I think it was Satchidananda’s commentary in the Bhagavad Gita—where he was talking about the importance of keeping God consciousness, or maybe he called it Krishna consciousness, right before death. Every moment is important because you never know when you’re going to die.

So we have the same kind of concept, and Shema Yisrael is the way of embodying that. The words—

Rick: I just wanted to, before I lose that thought about what you just said, mention that the Vedic tradition says that the last thought at the time of death determines the nature of your next life, and that your last thought is usually a distillation of the whole quality of the life you’ve lived.

But there are stories of people getting distracted by some goofy thing at the moment of death and going off in that direction in their next lifetime instead.

Brian: That reminds me of another legendary piece. There was—I can’t remember which rabbi—one of the rabbis of the Talmud who never dies, because in order for the angel of death to grab you, there has to be a space in your consciousness to allow that to happen.

His mind was so engrossed in, and immersed in, the words of Scripture—his mind was constantly immersed in these sacred words—that the angel of death had to create a distraction to surprise him, or something, so he would stop thinking holy thoughts for a moment. Then he could take his soul and kill his body.

Rick: Wow, interesting. So anyway, I interrupted you. You were going to say more about Shema Yisrael.

Brian: Yeah. So the words—there are six words—are Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. The straightforward English translation that you’ll see in many siddurim, or prayer books, says, “Hear”—meaning this kind of hear—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” And that’s it, right?

So it’s been taken in mainstream Jewish culture—you’ll hear this talked about as a creed. It’s basically a creed of belief. We believe, you know, “Listen up, we’re telling you something important. This God, the one God of the Bible and so on, is our God. We’re a tribe of people who are related to this God, and there’s only one of them. There’s not a whole bunch of them.”

So that’s on the exoteric level. That seems to be what it’s saying.

Rick: What about that stuff in the Old Testament where God is referred to as jealous and seems that way, based on the stories of his behavior? It seems like a very petty, localized sort of consciousness.

Brian: That’s right. Well, that’s a different—should we get on to that?

Rick: Well, no, finish your thought. I’m taking you off track.

Brian: Okay, that’s a good line of conversation. Anyway, if we look at these six words, it’s actually giving a deep instruction in the practice of presence and in the realization of the oneness of reality.

The beginning of it says shema. Shema means “listen” or “hear.” So right away, it’s telling you the basic practice. If we’re thinking of listening not in the limited sense, but as a metaphor for being aware, it’s saying to be attentive, be present, be conscious.

Then it says Yisrael. Now, the word Yisrael is Israel, referring to the Jewish people. But the word itself seems to be composed of Yishar El. Yishar means “straight,” but also has the connotation of not distorting things with ulterior motives—like a person who’s straight, who’s honest.

Rick: Straight shooter.

Brian: Yeah, a straightforward person doesn’t have other things hidden that are going on. They’re there with you. And then “El” is the generic word for God. So, for example, in Hebrew, if you’re referring to other gods of other traditions, you’d still use the word “El.” It’s a generic word for deity.

So “Yisrael” could be understood to mean “straight to God,” meaning that if you’re being very simple, if you’re being attentive to what the reality of this moment is, then you’re going to be making a basic connection with that which is—we call it divine—the divine aspect of experience or of reality.

And then it says, “Adonai Eloheinu.” On the surface, it sounds maybe very ethnocentric, like, “This God is our God,” right? “Eloheinu”—that “einu” ending means “ours.” It’s a suffix that means “ours.” So “El” is God; “Eloheinu” is our God.

The word “Adonai” is a word that is often used in formal prayer. When you see that name we were talking about before, which has four letters and is not pronounced because it’s considered so sacred that you don’t try to pronounce that word, instead you say the word “Adonai,” which has a more relational, devotional connotation because it’s similar to the word “Adoni,” which means “my lord.”

So you’re calling this name of God, which means being or existence, “my Lord” when you say “Adonai.” We talked before about how the personalization kind of brings forth this relationship of surrender and reverence for all of it, for the majesty of being.

Now, “Eloheinu” means “our God,” but a way to understand that is not that our God is some separate God that is ours, that we possess, but rather our own inner divinity. So what is our own inner divinity? It’s the miracle of our sentience; it’s the miracle of our consciousness.

So when you say “Adonai Eloheinu,” the hidden message there is that existence, being, and reality are not something separate from our own consciousness. This is something that’s actually very straightforward and obvious, but it’s not something most people consider, which is that inner awareness is showing up as all these things that we consider external to ourselves.

I’m talking to you on this screen. The screen seems external to me, and you’re somewhere totally different. We’re different people, and we’ve never met before this day, except a little bit through email. It seems like we’re separate, right?

And yet, at the same time, how can I possibly interact with you if it weren’t for the fact that you are living right now in my awareness, and I’m living in your awareness? So there’s actually no separation between that which we perceive as separate and the awareness within which it’s arising. It’s actually one single thing.

Now, psychologically, because we think of it as separate, we tend to hold emotionally in our body this feeling of separateness. But if we bring to mind the fact that actually everything that exists is arising as one reality, and it’s arising in this one consciousness, then there can be this relaxing, this softening of that solid sense of me. With that, the anxiety, stress, fears, and all those different things that are characteristic of what we might call ego can kind of melt away.

Simply with these two words, “Adonai Eloheinu”: all of existence, all of being, is not separate from this divinity which I am. It’s my own inner divinity—not even inner. It seems inner, but it’s really not even inner because it’s inclusive of everything that’s perceived, right?

Then it says, finally, “Adonai Echad.” Again, existence, being, reality—”Echad” is one. So it’s not telling me about some separate God that there’s only one of; it’s reminding me that there’s one reality right here, and the access point to that one reality is not somewhere else. It’s exactly this.

There’s one reality right here, and the access point to that one reality is not somewhere else. It’s exactly this.

So when we see it, when we understand the Shema that way, then just by dropping in and saying those six words can be tremendous. It’s like a key, a key to unlock the door of presence and to open up that eternal dimension of reality that’s always here, but that we tend to block.

Rick: Nice. I wonder if your friend went through all that when you were about to hit that car coming back from Santa Cruz.

Brian: Probably not.

Rick: Here’s a question from Brian in Fairfield, Iowa—my hometown. I know several Brians here; I don’t know which one this is. He says, and this relates to what you were just saying, which is why I’m asking it now: Could you talk about awareness aware of itself?

Brian: Yeah. Well, as we know, we can’t have any experience without awareness. The word “awareness” simply refers to the most basic fact of our experience. Our thoughts are coming and going, our thoughts are changing, our feelings are changing, our outer setting and our feeling of our body are changing, life keeps rolling on, and yet we only know that because, on the most basic level, there is awareness that’s there.

And so when we say awareness is aware of itself, or awareness being aware of itself, as soon as we say that, there’s an invitation to become aware that you’re aware. If it remains merely intellectual—like just calling the thought into being, “Oh, I’m aware. Okay, I’m aware now that I’m aware”—that’s not necessarily so transformative.

But if we bring it back to the thing—actually, the Shema that we were just talking about—and remind ourselves that not only am I aware, it’s not that me, my sense of me, has this thing called awareness that it possesses, right? Rather, the entirety of experience as it’s happening in this moment is all happening within awareness.

That means my feeling of me is happening within the field of awareness, and everything that’s external to me—right? You look out the window: the trees, the clouds, and the sun—as far as we can perceive, all of that is happening within this awareness.

Then you can maybe go further. You can ask, “Well, am I not that awareness? Is that awareness something other than me?” I mean, that’s maybe not how we tend to frame ourselves, right? We tend to frame ourselves as this body, these thoughts, this history, and so on. But if the awareness is actually the entire field of experience, and everything in that field of experience is not separate from this awareness, then that’s a very radical invitation. That shifts things, right?

Rick: And that relates to the—oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Brian: Oh, I was just going to say that that invitation is present in the saying of the Shema, as well as in many other Jewish prayers, by the way.

I am that I am”

Rick: And that actually kind of leads us right into another question that just came in. This one also seems to be Brian Day. This is Brian from Norway. He’s asking, “How do you see the relation between the expression ‘I am that’—aham brahmāsmi in Sanskrit; Nisargadatta’s book has that title—and the name God revealed to Moses, ‘I am that I am’?” And there’s a Hebrew thing here: “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” or something. You can pronounce that.

Brian: Yeah.

Rick: So, again, just to repeat the question because I fuddled it up: the relation between “I am that” in the Eastern tradition and “I am that I am,” which God revealed to Moses.

Brian: So, the name that he’s talking about in the Torah is “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” and that word “Ehyeh” is another form of those same letters that we were talking about before. The most sacred name, which is four letters, is a different permutation of that same verb root, which means “being.” The straightforward translation of that name is “I will be what I will be,” right? So it could also be—

Rick: That has a future tense to it, obviously.

Brian: Exactly, yeah. And the tenses are a little ambiguous in Hebrew, so it’s not—you could also say, “I am that I will be,” or “I am that I am,” or “I will be what I am.” All those things are possible translations of it. But, straightforwardly, it’s a future tense.

Rick: Well, the whole point of it in the Vedic tradition, though, is to realize that one’s essential identity is the totality, is the all-encompassing reality. So is that what this conveys in the Torah?

Brian: I think so, yeah, and through a different angle, because in the Vedic thing—and I’m not sure if I’m understanding actually the Vedic—I mean, you just explained it, so I don’t—

Rick: Well, the idea is that reality is one contiguous, indivisible whole, and we kind of misperceive it as fragmented. But the fact of the matter is there’s only that: “That alone is,” and “Thou art that.”

Brian: Okay, okay, good. So what comes to mind when I hear that phrase is that it’s very interesting to me that, and I don’t know if this is the way it is in the original, but in English anyway, when you say the word “that,” you’re implying a duality in that very word because “that” is pointing away from yourself.

So, for example, one of the things that came to me at certain points in my process is, “I am this.” That came to me, and then I heard later about “I am that,” and I went, “Wait a minute, am I that or am I this?”

Rick: Then they actually say, “All this is that.” There is that phrase, too.

Brian: Yeah, right. So the word “this,” to me anyway, implies the fullness of this experience, whereas “that” implies, “I’m over here and that’s over there.”

But that’s great, too, because then what that seems to be pointing out is, “That thing that seems separate from me is actually a perception that lives in my awareness right now, and therefore it is 100% me.” There’s nothing in the experience that’s not part of me because everything in the experience is happening in awareness, which means it’s made completely out of awareness. And what am I except for awareness? So “I am that” is completely true in that sense.

Whereas in the Torah, the context of that narrative is that Moses is saying to Hashem, “I’m going to go to Pharaoh and I’m going to try to free the slaves. How am I going to do that? That doesn’t make any sense.” And, at the very least, when I come to Pharaoh and say that this God has sent me to free the slaves, he’s going to say, “What God? What God are you talking about? So what’s your name?” And God says, “I will be what I will be.” And then he says, “Tell Pharaoh, ‘I Will Be’ is my name.”

Rick: That’ll convince him. Now, if you’re not convinced that there’s this non-duality, esoteric dimension to the Torah, that line right there should convince you. There’s something going on here. I mean, this is a very cryptic little passage in the Torah that he’s picked out to ask about.

So we can go in a lot of ways. The wonderful thing about Judaism and the Jewish scriptures is that there’s no, like, “Oh, this is the answer to that.” These are things to contemplate and to work with and to allow them to unfold.

So I would just say, what’s coming to me in this moment about that particular name, which is different from other moments, is that the mind tends to always make this duality between what I consider to be spiritual, what I consider to be godly, divine, and so on, and other stuff. That’s one of the basic tricks of the mind, the basic dualities that the mind creates, which then prevents us from actually opening fully to this moment and to that eternal dimension.

So when God comes along and says, “Look, I will be what I will be,” it’s saying, “Look, there’s nothing that can arise that’s not already always me. You don’t need to know that I will be this way or that I will appear this way.” Yes, we have these ideas: the graceful one, the merciful one, the compassionate one, the healer, the creator, and all these things. But all that puts concepts in our head. We want to peg God into certain categories and say, “Well, then this is not God.”

And so then that puts us back into this dualistic framework, and God is reminding us, “You know what? The basis of this whole teaching is, I will be whatever I will be. You don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to preconceive it, because everything that is, is my name, because Is is my name. My name is Is-ness.” That’s how I understand that.

🕊️ Jewish spirituality today

Rick: Okay, good. I have the sense—and see if you agree—that there is some sort of global spiritual awakening taking place. One way that that’s manifesting is that people are not satisfied with just being told what the truth is by some intermediary. They’re not so satisfied with dogmas or empty rituals or doctrines and so on. They’re questioning a lot of those things, and they’re also getting more and more interested in every tradition in the more mystical, esoteric, experiential aspects of their tradition.

So do you see that happening, and do you see that happening in Judaism? Is there an upwelling of—I know Madonna was interested in the Kabbalah and all that stuff—is there sort of an upwelling of serious interest in the deeper aspects of it? And by serious, I mean people actually want to experience it. They don’t want to just believe it or intellectualize about it.

Brian: Yes, absolutely. As I was mentioning before, when we were talking about the beginning of the Hasidic movement, which was happening in the beginning of the 1700s, that’s exactly the same thing that was happening then, of course, under very different cultural circumstances.

But maybe the root of it is the same, meaning that in order for the tradition to survive, it can only get so far on telling people what they’re supposed to believe and what they’re supposed to do. Now, that does work if you have the means, if you have the luxury for a lot of religious cultural stuff to happen. If you have the money, you’re being supported, and you live in an environment where you’re studying the scriptures all day, then maybe that’s very stimulating. That can make you feel like you’re a great scholar and you’re doing something worthwhile, you’re communing with these ancient teachers, and that’s wonderful.

Maybe you don’t actually need deep spiritual experience to sustain that. That’s not to say that they don’t have deep spiritual experience, just to say that the culture of that doesn’t need that experiential element to exist, because there’s enough normative experience to make you feel like you’re a person, that you’re doing something worthwhile.

But when you’re back in those days a peasant who doesn’t have the means to do all that learning and to become a respected scholar, but you’re struggling all day just to survive, and yet you’re being told you have to do this stuff and believe this stuff, it’s not enough. You need some real juice. You need something that’s going to really nourish you.

I would say today we have a similar situation, but it’s completely different in the sense that people simply have the freedom. They don’t need to listen to what religion is telling them. Then you add on top of it the incredible dysfunction through which Judaism has been transmitted in this country.

Again, this is not true for everyone. Some people have had wonderful experiences with their Jewish upbringing, going to Hebrew school and so on. But many, many, many people simply leave because their experience growing up seemed punitive. I know Catholics feel this way; they went to a Jewish school or a Catholic school and just felt like they were being yelled at and told what to do. It doesn’t make any sense to them, and there was nothing nourishing about it, so they just leave it completely.

Then, sooner or later, for whatever reason, a spiritual longing is awakened. In our recent history, I would say the late ’60s and early ’70s is really when that renaissance started happening. American Jewry was stimulated in large part by all of the Eastern teachers who were coming to the United States and teaching yoga, Zen, Kundalini yoga, and all the different things that were coming to this country.

Those Indian teachers really knew how to get those hippies, right? The hippies were already taking LSD and doing different things. They were already transcending, to a certain degree, the constrictions of the normative culture, and they were open to other things.

Then these teachers were saying, “Hey, you can do this in a way that our traditions are helping you do that. It’s not just about taking drugs and listening to rock and roll. There’s a whole path, and you can really reap the benefits of this path if you’re passionate about it and you have commitment.” So people started doing that.

A lot of those people happened to be Jewish. There are many Jewish people who tell the story—people who are like the generation ahead of me, people in their seventies or older, or a little younger, who were around during that time—and there are many books about it now.

They’ll say, “Hey, we started chanting Hare Krishna, or we started doing various Sanskrit chants and so on, or Japanese—the Heart Sutra, whatever. And all of a sudden, those prayers from Hebrew school started coming back into my mind, and I started thinking, ‘Wait a minute. If I’m going to sit around chanting in some other language, why am I chanting in Sanskrit? I have the language to chant.’”

So they started getting curious. There were a few very powerful Jewish teachers back then, most notably Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, with whom I had a deep connection, and Reb Shlomo Carlebach, whom I didn’t know but with whom I also have a connection because of all the music that he created.

Those guys, and many others who were connected with them, kind of created a renaissance of American Jewish spirituality, and a lot of what’s going on today is the result of that. A lot of the surge of interest in Kabbalah and esoteric Judaism comes from what happened back in those days.

Rick: Do you have a sort of an esoteric understanding that makes sense to you of why the Jews have always had such a hard time of it? I mean, there’s the whole thing with Egypt way back then, being slaves and all, and then obviously there’s the Holocaust. These days, there’s a rash of synagogue threats and bombings and whatnot.

Is there some kind of—I mean, what’s going on? Do you have any sort of sense of why it’s always been that way, seemingly?

Brian: Well, I have to preface saying anything about that by saying that when you start talking about that, you potentially start setting off these triggers in Jewish psyches. By the way, I don’t have those triggers so much, for some reason. I don’t know.

Rick: I’m not implying at all that they deserve it. It just seems like—

Brian: No, no, no, I know. I didn’t think you were. I’m just saying that as soon as you start giving a reason for it, then people start saying, “Wait a minute, are you saying that—”

Rick: Oh, yeah. Like if you start talking about karma, or taking on or burning off karma or anything like that, yeah.

Brian: Right, right. I just want to first of all acknowledge that that’s true, that that exists, that that’s a hallmark of our history, and there are lots of different ways that you can go with it. I hesitate to—I do have ideas about it, but I hesitate to actually get into that.

But I do want to maybe just say something from a slightly different angle about it, which is that there’s something universal about it. There’s a deep wound in the collective Jewish psyche that’s there about being oppressed, about being victimized. Of course, that’s not unique. Many peoples, maybe all peoples at some point or another, have experienced those kinds of things.

Because of that, there’s a certain flavor to Jewish spirituality that reflects that. It’s a kind of longing, a heart longing for redemption, for an end to human suffering, that I think fuels—for example, fuels—the tremendous concern with social justice that seems to exist in a disproportionate amount in Jewish culture.

Perhaps Jewish people, as part of their spiritual work—I guess what I want to say is that Jewish people, but really all people, should open themselves to feel the pain that arises from that collective wounding, because ultimately that brokenness is a—as a famous song said—“That brokenness is where the light comes through.”

Rick: Leonard Cohen.

Brian: Leonard Cohen, yes. Rabbi Leonard Cohen. So when we have these wounds, and maybe you’ve experienced this with other people, I’ve experienced this so much in the Jewish world, there can be a tendency to contract and to become too much focused on what we call the—what you were talking about before, actually—not just being vulnerable but being strong.

There can be a sense of kind of over-strengthening yourself, becoming insular, or maybe just neurotic.

Rick: Woody Allen.

Brian: Yeah, exactly. It’s a stereotype, right? It’s a stereotype that comes from a real—it comes from a historical reality. Then there’s also a way in which you can consciously open to all that pain, let that pain become your prayer, and let that pain become your empathy.

Rick: There’s another thing which is disproportionately characteristic of the Jewish population, I would say, and that is brilliance. I mean, if you look at the percentage of Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners and great musicians and stuff like that, it just seems like, “Whoa, you guys have good genes,” or something. What’s going on?

Brian: I would just add to that, as a kind of humorous thing in spiritual circles that also happen to be Jewish circles, the disproportionate number of Jewish spiritual teachers in non-Jewish traditions in America.

Rick: Very true. I mean, in the TM movement, the number of TM teachers was very disproportionate.

Brian: Right, right. So I have no idea.

Rick: It just seems like there’s a propensity toward excellence.

Brian: Yeah, well, the most obvious answer for that is that traditional culture, traditional Jewish culture, emphasizes the development of the mind. It has always, at least going back about 2,000 years—probably before that too; it has its roots before that—but when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, there was a question whether the Jewish people would continue to exist.

There were different answers to the question at that time: “How shall we continue to exist now that the central institution of Jewish spirituality, which was the Temple in Jerusalem, has been completely destroyed and Jews are sent into exile, east and west and north and south? What do we do now?” Different solutions were proposed, but the solution that has survived—if we talk about Darwinian survival of the fittest—the Judaism that has survived is the Judaism of the mind.

The early rabbis who existed both in the few hundred years leading up to the destruction of the Temple and the several hundred years after the destruction of the Temple did this monumental thing. I still want to know from people who really understand the history—I’m baffled by how they did it. How were they even able to do this? They created the Mishnah and the Talmud, which are the root works of rabbinic Judaism.

If you study them, you’re learning how to argue; you’re learning how to have multiperspectival thinking. Judaism is not a religion of dogma, even though, of course, there are traditional dogmas. It’s really a tradition of arguing and conversation. There’s a famous phrase that says, “These and these are the words of the living God,” meaning that when this rabbi says this thing and that rabbi says something completely opposite, and these two schools of thought are really at war with each other intellectually, there’s an understanding that this argument, this debate, is for the sake of heaven—meaning it’s for the sake of the revelation of divine reality on this plane.

When you go to yeshiva, a traditional place of Jewish learning, you’re not just learning what to believe and what the books say; you’re learning how to think as they think. A big part of that is law, so it’s no surprise that Jews would excel in professions.

Rick: Like what? That’s really cool. Nisargadatta said that the appreciation of paradox and ambiguity are hallmarks of spiritual maturity. He didn’t use those exact words. He said those qualities—of being able to not be polarized in your understanding of things, but to be able to accept paradoxically apparent things in one mind, in one awareness, and appreciate that things don’t have to be nailed down, and that reality itself is rather ambiguous, as quantum mechanics tells us—are indicative of a certain level of spiritual development.

Brian: Right, it’s like in Fiddler on the Roof, with Tevye.

Rick: Right.

Brian: He’s right, he’s right.

Rick: On the other hand, he gets… and finally his daughter wants to go off to Siberia, and he says, “There is no other hand!”

Brian: Right. At some point you have to stop and make a decision.

Rick: One thing we haven’t talked about much—maybe we could spend our final few minutes talking about this—is music. You’re a musician, and music is really big in your life. What would you like to say about it?

Brian: Well, I consider it to have been a gift that was given to me to even be able to connect the two things of spirituality and music, because it didn’t really begin that way. Not that music wasn’t always a spiritual thing—of course music is inherently spiritual, in a sense—but when I was growing up and I went to college, learning and meditating and all these different things, I didn’t really think of my work with music in that way.

I went to college for musical composition, and I was on a track of composing classical-type music and also working with avant-garde rock bands and so on. That was one thing, and then all this spirituality stuff was something different.

Back in 1999, I met someone named Dr. Avram Davis, who had founded this place in Berkeley called Chochmat HaLev. His vision for that was to be a Jewish meditation center. It’s a synagogue now, but at the time it was started as a Jewish meditation center, and I don’t believe that there were any that existed at that time. Now there are several throughout the country.

He didn’t want it to be a place where you were going to do Vipassana or Zen or something like that with a Jewish twist. He wanted to really teach people the techniques of Jewish meditation that exist in our tradition and have that be a place where people could come and learn.

He had started that a few years earlier, and I met him. We had many conversations, and he said, “I want you to come and start playing music for our Friday night Shabbat service.” And I said, “No, no, you should have me come teach meditation. That’s what I want to do.” And he said, “Okay, maybe, but first come and let’s get a band together.”

So I did it very reluctantly because I wasn’t interested in that. But amazingly, it was one of these serendipitous things where they bought a building right around the time when the band came together and was ready to do something.

In February of 2000, the new building opened, and we had our band there playing music for this service. Several hundred people showed up and packed the place. It was instantly like, “Oh my God, I guess this is what I’m doing now.” I didn’t have any preconception about it, and it took me several years of doing it to realize that this was actually its own art in its own right.

It’s really something very different from musical performance in general, where you can use the music, speaking, traditional prayers, and these different things that make up a sacred gathering to induce people into a deep state of presence and prayerfulness.

Even though I didn’t have the idea at all that this was something I was going to do, I felt like it was something that started developing on its own. Then I realized, “Oh yes, I want to do this. This is really powerful stuff. This is what I do now.”

There’s nothing more fulfilling than playing music with other musicians who are coming from this intention, and then looking and seeing the community there. People are just opening up. People are crying, people are joyful, people are letting go of stuff, and they’re dancing. It’s just such a wonderful thing.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s certainly a universal phenomenon: kirtans and bhajans and Native American chants. Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead wrote a book called Drumming at the Edge of Madness, which is about rhythms in all the different cultures as a spiritual technique.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. And actually, one of our singers, Jeanette Ferber, sings regularly with—is it Phil Lesh? I think it’s Phil Lesh.

Rick: Yeah, he was with the Grateful Dead.

Brian: Yeah, yeah. So she does work with those guys.

Rick: That’s neat.

Brian: Yeah.

✨ Torah of Awakening

Rick: All righty, well, this has been a great conversation. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I hope that listeners and viewers feel the same. I’ll of course be creating a page for you on BatGap with your bio and a link to your website and all, but do you want to just say verbally what your website is again?

Brian: Okay, so the website is TorahOfAwakening.com. Torah is T-O-R-A-H, of Awakening. Some resources that you can get there: I teach a practice called Integral Jewish Meditation, and when you go to TorahOfAwakening.com, there’ll be a button right there that says something like, “Get the free guided meditations.”

It will teach you a special practice that is rooted in traditional Jewish practices but is also very accessible for anybody to learn in 25 minutes. You can use it both to meditate every day, however it works for you, but you can also use it briefly at different times throughout the day in order to cultivate greater presence and connect with those inner resources of peace, creativity, open-heartedness, and all those positive qualities.

Rick: And obviously you don’t care if people are Jewish or not; they can learn that, right?

Brian: Absolutely. This is an open gift to anybody who wants to partake.

Rick: Yeah, and you have some other ongoing things, don’t you? Some kind of regular membership thing where you provide satsangs or something online?

Brian: Yeah. So, for those who want to go deeper—if you’ve tried the Integral Jewish Meditation and it’s working for you and you want more—what I do is put out a new teaching every week, both in video form and in written form.

It contains a new chant that takes a piece of Jewish sacred text from the traditional prayers, just a little piece that anyone can learn, and teaches it in a melody, and then does a new guided meditation. So you get this practice weekly, usually on Mondays, that’s about 20 to 30 minutes long.

For a monthly contribution that you can sign up to make, you can become a member of Torah of Awakening and receive these instructions every week. As part of that, you can also do some one-on-one guidance with me. Members can just click on something and schedule 20-minute calls with me, which are free. If you want to do longer, it’s on a donation basis for members.

When you download the free guided meditations, you’ll also then be on my list, and I’ll send you a brief teaching weekly as well. You’ll just be receiving that for free anyway, but if you want to go deeper, you can sign up and support this work monetarily.

Rick: Do you have a job outside of being a spiritual teacher?

Brian: Well, when I was in college, I was complaining to my mother on the phone that I didn’t have enough money, and she started singing, “Get a job!”

For many years I taught piano privately; that was my main income. I started doing the musical Jewish stuff that I was telling you about in 2000, and that eventually grew into a job as well.

Before—we recently moved to Tucson last July—my main livelihood was a combination of the work I did in the synagogue and private music. I’ve been transitioning to this online teaching so that I could connect with more people, and that’s been slowly growing. It’s been sort of a phasing of these different things that I’m doing.

I do some workshops and retreats and different things like that that people ask me to do, which are kind of like little gigs. I do a little bit of private music teaching, and I still actually work at that synagogue in Berkeley, but just on a much smaller basis. I return there once a month.

We also have some other Torah of Awakening things that are developing there in the Bay Area and here in Tucson as well.

Rick: Great. Well, hopefully this interview will give you a bit of the BatGap bump.

Brian: Yes, b’ezrat Hashem, and I thank you for that very much. I also just want to encourage all the watchers that if you’ve enjoyed this and enjoy all the different things available on BatGap, go ahead and make a contribution and support BatGap.

This is a good week to do that because every week there’s a certain piece of Torah that’s read traditionally, and this week is called Parashat Terumah, which means “portion” or “contribution.” It says, “Tikhu li terumah mei’eit kol ish asher yidvenu libo,” that every person whose heart is motivated to give—meaning, if they’re liking it, if they’re enjoying it—they should give a little contribution, and you should really get an influx of energy as well from that.

Rick: Well, thanks, and little ones add up, you know. It doesn’t have to be…

Brian: That’s right, that’s for sure, for sure. I say the same for me, too. Energetically, if you like it and you support it, even if it’s very little, that’s very helpful.

Rick: Yeah, great. All right, thanks. So, let me just make a couple of general concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks, and this is part of an ongoing series of interviews. We’ll hopefully be doing them for many years to come.

If you find this interesting and would like to get more involved, go to www.batgap.com, where you can check out the previous ones and sign up to be notified of future ones. There’s a menu called “At a Glimpse” or something like that—”At a Glance”—where all the various features of the website are summarized, so you can check that out. It’s a good jumping-off place.

So, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks, Brian.

Brian: Yeah, thank you.

Rick: Yeah, a lot of fun.

Brian: Definitely, a lot of fun.

Rick: Yeah.