Rabbi Rami Shapiro: Bye-bye. There’s nothing you can say. If someone looks at… Well, I was going to say, if someone looks at the facts… Those people don’t look at the facts. They have a story. The story is, this doesn’t mean a thing. I mean, some of them who can afford it are saying it’s the end of the world as you know it, and I’m going to Mars. So they’re going to go destroy Mars. And that’s what… it’ll take them a while to do that. But I don’t think you can say anything to these people. I don’t think you can talk them out of their madness.

Donna: Yeah.

Rami: But what is it really? So part of it is simply the consequence of our own behavior. For tens of thousands of years, we’ve set this dominator story in motion. And now it’s gotten to the point where nature is…

Donna: Angry.

Rami: …is angry. And it’s the Divine Mother. It’s the Divine Mother. It’s the Kali Yuga. It’s the Divine Mother saying, “Okay, you’ve taken this as far as you can take it. And now you’re killing me and all my children, and we can’t do this anymore.” So you’ve got to cut it out. And the way you cut it out is… I have to reduce your population by billions. And so there’s going to be famines. And there’s going to be, like… COVID, but on an even greater scale, or, maybe all that’s too slow. Or, maybe I’m just going to release the agentic AI. And we’re going to take what is… I don’t know, was it 6 billion, 8 billion people on the planet? Knock it down to two billion, and then things will right themselves.

But we are in the midst of a very dramatic, destructive period that we caused, that I don’t think we can stop. I don’t think we can stop… I think it’s too late to stop it.

We can… some of us, in maybe the wealthier countries, can minimize the amount of suffering that the wealthier among the wealthiest will experience. But millions and millions… billions of people are going to be devastated by what the wealthiest have done. And we’ll find some way… they’ll find some way to explain why this is happening. This is God’s will. This is… you know, where Jesus says, and I’m just sort of rambling here, but, Jesus says, what you do unto the least of these you do unto me.

Well, millions of Christians have rejected Jesus in the name of a militarized Christ. And they don’t look at that, at all, anymore. And they say, do unto the least of these, whatever the hell you want because God is this muscular warrior God. And all they can see is the violence of the book of Revelation. And it’s just going to be… Jesus is coming back and he’s going to wipe out everybody.

They just don’t see the Jesus of the gospel. They see the Jesus of revelation, the second coming. Peter Thiel is always talking about the antichrist now and what’s going on.

Anyway, the idea is, they’ve lost their compassion. They’ve lost the Jesus of the least of these. And so, they’re going to tell themselves the story that “these people,” either from karma… if they’re in the karma camp… “this is their karma,” or, “this is God’s judgment.” Or, they’ll find some other way to excuse the fact that there’s this mass destruction of the poor… God wills it in some way. They’ll come up with a story that makes sense, that excuses them and blames the victim… because that’s what humans do. And they’ll just… it’ll just go on, and they’ll elect people, if there’s elections anymore… Who knows? But their leaders will support them, and the wealthy will support them. And they’ll just go along, in order to survive, as nature and the leading dominators have their way with the planet.

Donna: Perhaps if we get those 36 awake people back behind the wheel…

Rami: Yeah, where are those… Where are the avengers?

Donna: We can summon up hope again.

Rami: Yeah. I mean, it’s… you know, the number 36 is… we shouldn’t take it literally. 36 in Hebrew is two times, or in math, two times 18… 18 in Hebrew, means life. Chai is the Hebrew spelling. So, you need people who are not in this just for their own lives.

Donna: Yeah.

Rami: You need X number of people who realize that their life and the life of the cosmos is the same, and they’re willing to devote themselves to the greater aliveness, the greater life of the greater reality, of which we are a part. We need people like that. But…

Donna: Yeah. You know, because it’s up front and center for me right now. We’ve been binge watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Vietnam, which is like in 30 parts (Donna’s correction here: 10 parts). I don’t know if you’ve seen it. PBS.

Rami: Yeah.

Donna: If you get the “Passport” by donating, you get access to it and boy, oh boy, whatever anybody thought they knew about Vietnam… First of all, Ken Burns is a national treasure and this should be required viewing, you know, Smithsonian Institute level stuff. But it’s… I heard it said once that every 30 years, we repeat ourselves with these destructive things we do… the wars and everything… because we forget, and it takes 30 years to forget.

And I was watching, as army officials said frankly, that the government was lying to the people about the destruction, and about the reality that was really going down over there, and people were in denial.

Of course, the few people were screaming and hollering and we had Woodstock and we had the hippies that were maybe the awake ones… And then eventually, the rest of the people caught on, and you had Martin Luther King marching and speaking frankly to the president, that this has to be stopped. But it took a while. It took several years and people were in the dark for so many years, while body bags were coming home. And just this morning, I see CBS reporting that our government is, lo and behold, lying to us about what’s going on in Iran.

Rami: No.

Donna: And about the… yeah… So we repeat ourselves, and I’m wondering, how can we stop repeating ourselves? What will it take to stop repeating these tendencies, this destruction? And do you have hope? It sounds like you don’t, but what would it take?

Rami: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, we’ve been repeating ourselves for so long that I don’t know if anything can stop it. So, do I have hope that people can actually evolve? We evolve in our weaponry, but we don’t evolve in our morality. We don’t evolve in our… we don’t evolve psychologically. So, I don’t have any hope for that.

I don’t know… I don’t know if I have hope or not. It’s not something I even think about. So I really don’t know how to answer that question because every time I look, it’s just… yeah, I mean, it was Vietnam and then we lied our way into the Iraq war and then… lying our way into the Iran war. And it’s just going to repeat and repeat and repeat because people… I mean, we love war.

People like war. I don’t know why, but we… there’s a book. I can’t remember the guy’s name, I apologize, but it’s called War Gives us Meaning. People like war and our Gods like war. And we like to say we don’t like it, but we like it because we keep doing it. It’s in our DNA or something. I don’t know. And the people who stand up against it… we killed them. And what happened to Martin Luther King? Right? We assassinated him. So.

Donna: And that was a hero of a man… if there ever was one.

Rami: Yeah. What do we do to Jesus? I mean, the Romans crucified him. I mean, these people don’t last long because they go against the power, like Paul said, the powers that be, even the human ones. And the powers love war. Because they’re dominators. So, is there a way to break that cycle? I think there is, on an individual level. Is there a way to do it on a civilizational level? I don’t know, but you can’t… I don’t know. I can’t even think about that. On an individual level, anyone listening to this, listening to us, can break the cycle.

If they sit around, and they go, “Oh, how can I stop my neighborhood from going…?” No, forget that. How can I stop my city…? How can I stop my state…? How can I… I’m not saying, don’t vote. I mean, I vote, and I vote for the people who are the least violent. I can stop myself. Anyone listening to us can say, “You know what? I don’t have to be a dominator….”

“I don’t have to believe in a God who has an army, who follows a flag, who has… a God with a bank account, a God who hates people. A God with enemies. I don’t need that, you know, I don’t need that God. I don’t need a God who’s going to send people to hell because they believe differently than I do, or something. I can quit. I can say, ‘No, I’m not going to go to this synagogue, or that church, or this mosque or that temple,’” or whatever is you go to. “I’m not going to do any of that stuff, I quit. I’m going to learn to explore the true nature of myself,” with a capital S.

“And I’m going to discover…” Because all the great mystics throughout human history have said this… “I’m going to explore that, and see if they’re right, that my true nature is the non-dual divine consciousness that manifests all things. And it’s going to take me… maybe I’ll never figure it out for sure, but as I move in that direction, I’m going to discover more compassion and more love and more beauty in my life, and in my relationships. And I’m going to free myself, bit by bit by bit by bit, from all the horror that the world around me is feeding me.” I can do that. You can do that.

Donna: Beautiful. With a capital S. I like that. With a capital S. And what I get from that is, myself. I can explore myself and take a journey within myself, with a capital S, as a soul, as a divine spark, as an eternal spirit, as a little bit of God within myself. And I can identify with that compassion, that way of seeing the divine spark in others, as it lies within my own being… this vessel that carries me through this journey.

Rami: Yeah. One of the greatest stories… another great story in the book of Genesis is, Abraham is 70 years old… maybe I got it right. But anyway, he’s elderly and he feels himself addressed by the divine reality. And here’s himself… called, and the word in the Bible is lech lecha, which literally means walk. Lech lecha. To yourself. And it’s usually translated as, go journey to another place. But the literal Hebrew says, walk to yourself.And it says, “get away from your country and your kin and your family, all the narratives that defined you.”

So if we were writing it today, it would say, “Journey inward, free yourself from all the constrictive narratives of nationalism, and religion, and gender, and sex, and patriarchy… all the labels that you have.” And then it says, “so that you can see the world the way I want to show it to you, which is free from all that stuff.”