WHY IT NEVER RAINS ON THE ENLIGHTENED

ROSHI STEVE HAGEN, a Zen priest and author of The Grand Delusion, sat down with RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO to wrestle with some big stuff—including the ghost of “It!”

- Roshi Steve Hagen, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Scott Edelstein

What should be the purpose of any religious tradition?

RABBI RAMI: Ideally, to free people from their sense of separateness and superiority; to provide them with the tools for awakening to the nondual reality of which all life is a part; and, as it says in Genesis 12:3, the skill for living as a blessing to all the families of the earth, human, and otherwise.

STEVE HAGEN: Religion is uniquely situated to help us wake up, to see reality directly, to realize it. And nothing more than that. And this is why belief is so injurious to religion. It keeps religion from fulfilling its ability to help us realize Reality.

One of my favorite verses from the Bible, Psalm 46:10, says, “Be still and know.” This is when we can truly know— when we’re still. Still within our minds, within our hearts, and open to what is taking place, no matter what it might be.

Religion can teach us to just sit down and shut up and pay attention. Then we can discover that we already know; we’re already enlightened; we already realize Truth.

RR: I agree, and to do this, religions need to listen more to their mystics than their clerics. Mystics teach us to use tradition to move beyond tradition, whereas clerics make a fetish of tradition and teach us to die for tradition—and, worse, to kill for it. Mystics know that beyond tradition there is what Rumi calls the field…

SH: Beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field; I will meet you there. We have that poem over our front door at Dharma Field, the Zen center where I teach and practice.

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