Rami Shapiro Quotes

Wonder enhances life; worry shortens it.

You get what you get, and then do your best with whatever it is.

spiritual practice is conspiratorial rather than inspirational; it conspires to strip away everything you use to maintain the illusion of certainty, security, and self-identity. Where spiritual writing seeks to bind you all the more tightly to the self you imagine yourself to be, writing as a spiritual practice intends to free you

we are powerless over our addiction. I am asking you to admit something further: that you are powerless over life.

The golden rule is not a rule of logic. It is not a form of logical reasoning, but rather it determines the logic of value selection, something that does not usually fall under the purview of traditional logic.

From all those I may have hurt, I ask forgiveness. Upon all who have hurt me, I bestow forgiveness.   As a wave returns to the ocean, so I return to the Source from which I came. Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. Hear, O Israel, that which we call God is Oneness itself. Blessed is the Way of God, the Way of Life and Death, of coming and going, of meeting and loving, now and forever. As I was blessed with the one, so now am I blessed with the other. Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. RABBI RAMI M. SHAPIRO13

A woman once approached the Buddha in tears. She presented him with her dead child and said, “Lord Buddha, I have heard that you can bring the dead back to life. This is my son who died only this morning. I beg you, Lord Buddha, restore him to me.” The Buddha agreed, provided that the woman bring him a single mustard seed from a home in the village that had not experienced death. The woman ran to the village and went door to door to find even one household that had not been touched by death. She failed. When she returned to the Buddha, her grief was no less but her attitude toward it had changed. She knew the inevitability of suffering and the futility of seeking to make things other than they are. She could now mourn her child and move on.

My God, the soul you place within me is pure. And because it is pure I am free to live today differently than yesterday. Because it is free, I am free to live today without the burden of past habits, past fears, past mistakes, and past failures. I am free to look at my past without repeating it; to examine it for lessons to be learned and amends to be made; and to draw from it what guidance I can to live today differently. My God, may I use today’s gift of freedom to further my capacity to serve You by serving Your creation with justice, compassion, and humility.

We want to believe in our beliefs, but this doesn’t make them true. What is really at the heart of belief is will: We choose to believe that something is true without requiring any objective evidence to substantiate our belief. We are back to the subtle play of ego in search of control.

Wickedness is devastated by the storm, but wisdom is the foundation of the world.14 10:26 Just as vinegar sets your teeth on edge and smoke stings your eyes, half-hearted effort is doomed to failure.

If the way offered you demands theft and you are forbidden to share what it is you are taught, you can be certain you have dined with Folly.

The disciplined live; the lazy are lost.

Twelve Step recovery asks us to do the impossible. We are asked to recognize that we are powerless and at the same time to find the power “to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.” We are asked to surrender to God and at the same time to recognize that this God is only the God of our understanding and hence a partial picture at best. We cannot escape the suspicion that we are fooling ourselves. This means that, even as we trust the program and work the steps, we can harbor doubt in the efficacy of both. This doubt is in fact a key to recovery. Knowing that we cannot know for certain who or what God is, whether or not Twelve Step will work for us, and just who the you is who is doing all of this, leads to an ever-deepening sense of humility, and it is this humility that is vital to our recovery.

Pride can mask a deep self-loathing, and it is this aspect of pride that is sometimes evident at Twelve Step meetings as people tell their stories. The idea is that if we cannot excel at excellence, we will excel at depravity. What the addict fears most is being ordinary.

Twelve Step recovery offers no image of God other than God as a force capable of helping you recover your sanity by freeing you from the insanity of your addiction and the delusional thinking that feeds it.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein: We cannot solve problems with the same mind that created them.

whatever addiction brought you to rock bottom has opened the door to spiritual awakening.

Twelve Step recovery is about freeing yourself from playing God,

The real disease from which almost all of us suffer is the disease of playing God, of thinking we are or should be in control of what happens to us in life.

Quit playing God, and abandon the delusion of life’s controllability, or find some way to escape reality and maintain the illusion that you are in control.

our quest for control always ends in exhaustion and failure.

because the root cause of your action is your thinking, the deep cure must focus not only on the body and its behavior, but also on the mind and its thoughts.

the mind that seeks to fill the hole is the same delusional mind that is digging it.

spiritual growth is this: an ever-deepening capacity to embrace life with justice, compassion, curiosity, awe, wonder, serenity, and humility.

God is the Source and Substance of All Reality: God is what is and what was and what is not yet.

The more mature our spirituality is, that is, the more we embrace life with justice, compassion, curiosity, awe, wonder, serenity, and humility, the more we become aware of God in, with, and as all things.

Spirituality refers to behaviors designed to free you from the delusion that your life can be controlled and the illusion that you are controlling it.

Hitting rock bottom is the term recovering addicts use to identify those moments when reality demolishes the illusion that you are in control of your life.

Humans experience themselves, their thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of love and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.3 Our

William Blake puts it, “A fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.

The addict who succumbs to addiction and hits rock bottom becomes or at least has the opportunity to become wise.

The real gift of Twelve Step recovery is not simply the cessation of our harmful behavior, but the ending of our harmful thinking. For it is ending harmful thinking that is at the heart of spiritual growth, awakening, and recovery.

addiction as a state of mind committed to maintaining the illusion of control.

spirituality as the practice of spiritual maturation, designed to continually cut through the illusion of control and return you over and over again to reality and your powerlessness over it.

Living without even the possibility of control is so frightening to most of us that we would rather live in an addiction-induced fantasy than face the tough truth of reality.

Recovery is a process we work every day, not a destination at which we arrive. Because recovery in this sense is a verb, rather than a noun, you will want to work the Twelve Steps over and over again.

If people are dissatisfied with you, no matter what you do differently they may never change their minds about you.

Never underestimate the human capacity for rationalization and denial.

as you think you are in control of life, forget it.

We cannot control what happens to us. All we can do is work with what happens moment to moment.

Judaism without tribalism expands our capacity to live meaningfully without control.

Just as a wave is the ocean extended in time and space, so each of us is God extended in time and space.

is wrong to claim that all Gods are the same or that all Gods are variations of the One God. They aren’t. Each God arises in its time and place and reflects the values of that time and place, or at least the values of its priests, prophets, sages, and gurus.

the world cannot be other than it is, because there is nothing other for it to be.

Identifying it, I call it Tao36 Forced to describe it, I call it great Great means passing Passing means receding Receding means returning Therefore the Tao is great

Knowing yourself as a wave is knowing the relative world, the world of seemingly separate beings. Knowing yourself as the sea is knowing the absolute world, the world of the One who is all these seemingly separate waves.

Most of the hurts we experience are not meant for us. They are by-products of the suffering others are feeling. The truth is that most of the pain and suffering we feel isn’t directed at us at all.

Bismillah as proof:

PREFACE This is a book about writing as a spiritual practice. This is not a book about spiritual writing. Spiritual writing—inspirational writing—has to conform to what the reader finds inspirational. Spiritual writing has to make the reader feel safe, certain, and self-satisfied; it has to leave the reader believing that what she already knows is all that she needs to know. Writing as a spiritual practice is something else entirely. Writing as a spiritual practice has nothing to do with readers per se. You

three rules for writing as a spiritual practice: (1) Don’t write what you know; (2) Don’t write what you don’t know; and (3) Just write. Don’t write what

Writing creates something new: an “art emotion,” i.e., an image of emotion, an illusion of emotion, which exists only in the context of the written work. This is quite different from Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” It suggests that, whatever the process of

Named addictions are few—alcohol, drugs, food, sex, gambling, and shopping, for example—but they are merely symptoms of a general unnamed addiction from which we all suffer.

WELCOMING ANGELS In the arduous simplicity of this moment I open my heart, mind, and soul to stillness. In the deeper quiet I sense the greater Life that is my life. I do not live only; I am lived. I do not breathe only; I am breathed. I am not only the one I appear to be but also the One who appears as me. —rabbi rami m. shapiro

The Sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams flow to the sea, and the sea is not full … All words are wearisome, more than one can express; the eye is never satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:5–9

It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge. At base, in the foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure, the religions are distinct.... But beyond these differences, the same goal beckons.

Desire takes the place of grain, and you are no smarter than the bird. The trap looks so innocent, yet its endless yearning exhausts both body and soul.

Free-falling into God is the discovery that you are part of the Divine and filled with a creativity that allows you to live free of the addiction that defined the preshattered ego.

Or take the case of Ron Paul during the 2012 presidential primary. During a debate on American foreign policy, Congressman Paul said, “If another country does to us what we do to others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a ‘Golden Rule’ in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nations what we don’t want to have them do to us.” The crowd booed.

When we want to love our neighbor, we cite the Golden Rule in support of doing so. When we want to bomb our neighbor, we ignore or even boo the Golden Rule and find some other divine command to justify our bombing.

RENEWAL Imagine not that life is all doing. Stillness, too, is life; and in that stillness the mind cluttered with busyness quiets, the heart reaching to win rests, and we hear the whispered truths of God. —rabbi rami m. shapiro