Rabbi Rami: Yes, that’s true, but the Kali Yuga is the darkness before the great awakening.

Donna: The light.

Rami: Right, yes. Yes, it’s a tough thing, but it’s part of the process of purification. So, it’s a necessary darkness. I don’t want to see it as all bad. I was initiated into the Ramakrishna mission, and the Hindu name I have is Kalidasa, servant of Kali.

Donna: I love that.

Rami: I didn’t know this, but it turns out Kalidasa is a famous Hindu poet. So, I like the name. But because of my experiences with the Divine Mother in various traditions, I was given the name Kalidasa.

Donna: I love it. And I’d like to talk more about the Divine Mother. I also have a spiritual name, which comes from the Sikh tradition… Dhanpal. It’s one who shares her wisdom. We have a translation… you mentioned some of Jesus’s teachings and how they’ve been “twisted.” Was that the word we agreed on?

Rami: Yes.

Donna: We have a translation of the Lord’s Prayer as it may be seen in the original language of Jesus, which was Aramaic, and I think that our mutual friend Kay may have sent it to you. I would like to look at a few lines with you because it is so enriching, especially the first line, or the first few lines, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Just stopping there, you mentioned the divine feminine, and here we have the most well-known prayer, focusing on our Father, who art in heaven. This prayer was originally translated into Greek, and then it went into Latin, and then eventually it became the New Testament, et cetera. But in Jesus’ original Aramaic, it translates into something like, “Oh, breathing life of all existence, you who dwell in the dimension of light and vibration from which all things emerge.”

It doesn’t focus on the Father. It doesn’t focus on the masculine. It focuses on light and vibration; or in Aramaic, Shemaya, light and vibration. I wanted to get your take on this, and we can go to the next couple of lines as well because this is just so fulfilling to me. And we’ll put a link to this translation under the interview.

But… “The sacred vibration,” instead of the “Father”… it’s so delightful to me.

Rami: It’s important to get away from the masculine-centric language. There’s no question about that. The translation is interpretive. Do I really think… Because it has a very new age sound to it. Now, did Jesus really intend that? Did his followers follow that? Who knows? I studied Aramaic. It’s part of your rabbinic training. Did we learn it, did we learn Aramaic in those ways? No. But the interpretation is still very powerful.

When you talk about Our Father that’s part of the Jewish tradition. Avinu Malkeinu, our Father, our King. People did speak that way, and they did mean the masculine, and it was part of Jesus’ milieu… And, hopefully, along with Jesus, along with other mystics—because I think he was a God-realized, Jewish mystic—could not have abided by that. Any mystic worth his salt or her salt would not limit their understanding of God to the masculine. That’d be ridiculous! So, the notion of… say it again, the beginning. Read the beginning again, where Father is translated…

Donna: “Oh, breathing life of all existence, you who dwell in the dimension of light and vibration from which all things emerge.”

Rami: Just take, “breathing life of all existence,” right? How does creation happen, in the Bible that Jesus was brought up on? It says, “In the beginning, God spoke,” and the vibration… the word they use is “The spirit of God, the breath of God, hovers over the deep.” So, the word “hovers” can be translated, and I don’t know if I’m saying it right, ululate? You know how ba-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, that kind of sound that certain cultures have, where the women make that…

Donna: Oh, the zaghrouta, they call it in Egypt. I don’t want to do it in the microphone, but yes!

Rami: Yes, but it’s that…

Donna: The sound of excitement and celebration…

Rami: Exactly. That’s what the word can be understood as. So, you have this divine breath making this joyous exaltation sound, and that’s where creation comes from. It’s this exaltation of LIFE just happening from the divine source coming out, as the world that you and I know. Everything is sound. Everything is vibration. So, the idea that…

Donna: Yes. The WORD… In the beginning was the Word.

Rami: The Word, right.

Donna: Yes.

Rami: But not a specific word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, because God is sound. God isvibration. So, vibration is sound, vibration is light. Everything is vibration. Consciousness is vibration. So, the reading of the Aramaic is giving us the inner dimension of what Jesus and every other mystic is trying to reveal to us in texts that are limited by language, right? So, you get the text that’s this thick, but the meanings are this thick, right?

Donna: Yes.

Rami: So, they’re trying to blow the text open. It’s very beautiful. And then, you get the heavens, so Shamayim, which they translate as, “Our Father who art in heaven.” What does it say?

Donna: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Rami: That’s the standard translation.

Donna: Right. And then, in this new translation that we have featured… it’s been up for quite a while, “O breathing life of all existence, you who dwell in the dimension of light and vibration from which all things emerge, may the sacred vibration…”

Rami: Yes, that’s what we’re talking about. Whether it’s the Hebrew or the Aramaic, that is the inner meaning of what is meant in those terms. So, one of the problems with “who art in heaven,” which this version renders “dimension of light and vibration”… this version solves the problem. Where’s heaven? Back in Jesus’s time, they thought of multiple heavens, right? Paul talks of multiple heavens. The rabbis had multiple heavens. They talked about up and down. Their worldview was… Earth is here, there’s layers of reality below Earth, and there’s layers of reality above Earth. There’s up and down, and Earth is in the middle. Today, that’s ridiculous.

There’s no up and down. We’ve been up. If there’s no up, there’s just space, and it goes in all directions. There’s in and out. There’s in, toward a body of gravity, and there’s an out, away from a body of gravity. So, you want to get away from the whole hierarchy of up and down that Shamayim, or Shamaya, who art in heaven. You want to get away from that whole concept, which this rendering in English frees us from. Dwells in the dimension of light and vibration from which all things emerge. A light and vibration goes out in all directions, so it isn’t a hierarchy anymore. It’s a whole-archy. It’s everywhere.

Donna: Yes.

Rami: So, it’s very liberating.

Donna: Yes, liberating indeed.

Rami: Yes, it’s very liberating. And that’s what you want to do with all of our sacred texts. The same thing… I don’t think I have it here, but… no, okay. It’s in another room–but in the Hindu tradition, there’s something called the Mahavakyas, the great sayings. And there’s different numbers, but there’s four classic Mahavakyas, and they come from the Upanishads, which is a commentary on the Vedas, the most ancient Hindu texts. Anyway, they’re just one-liners. They’re like mantra.

I have a little book from the Ramakrishna Society, where… it’s commentaries on each of the four great sayings. And they go into the Sanskrit and they say, “Okay, it says X, but there’s so much more to the words, and it means more than just what it obviously says.” What they even knew to say thousands of years ago when they wrote, Tat tvam asi, “thou art that.” What’s that? That is Brahman. But what’s Brahman?

And so the author, who’s modern, says, “think of consciousness and all we know about consciousness in neurological studies and all of it…”

So, the more we know, the deeper our understanding of these words get… way beyond what their original authors could know. Now, I’m totally making this up, but… I would argue that the great mystics, Jesus, the authors of these Upanishads… Did the great mystics have an inkling–even if they didn’t have the language… Did they have an inkling of the greater reality that was beyond any words their civilizations had yet produced? So, they used the words they had.

So, they had Abwoon, what we say “Father,” but he had his Aramaic, and then… it took 2,000 years for someone to go, “Hey, that doesn’t mean “father.” “That means…” And then, you get this whole beautiful understanding of what Abwoon…

Donna: Something like, this creation… Something like, the light that is within all of us… Something like, the vibration that pervades all.

Rami: Yes. That was the word that Jesus had to work with, but what was in his mind? I would say… what you just read. Not just that word. Does that make sense?

Donna: It does. He wasn’t focused on just this male man, the limited mortal person.

Rami: Right. He saw beyond it, but his linguistic palate was limited to the civilization he lived in. In John 1:1, where… I mentioned a minute ago, “In the beginning was the Word.” So, I have a Chinese translation of the Book of John, and in the Chinese translation of the Book of John, it says, “In the beginning was Tao.”

Donna: The way.

Rami: Yes.

Donna: Amazing.

Rami: Now, in the Greek… of John, the original… It says, “In the beginning was Logos.” And then, whoever translated it into English said, “The Word,” and then the Chinese translator said, “No, it’s Tao.” And so, I’m not going to say which one is right. They’re all right, in a way. They’re all hearing something different. And I think… John, because John is a tremendously mystical gospel, the author of the Gospel of John probably saw this bigger thing, and the word that he had was “Logos,” but it was probably “Tao,” also. You know what I mean?

Donna: Yes, I do.

Rami: He had this huge insight, and his language was that (Rami makes small gesture with hand).

Donna: Exactly.

Rami: And so, he gave us what he had. In 2,000 years, or whenever they wrote the translation into Chinese, and then later, we got “Tao” out of it. That’s why these books are living, and that’s why you have to read them in as many different versions as possible, and then they’ll trigger your own insight.

Donna: And just to round it out, because this is so beautiful, “Thy kingdom come” does, according to this translation, include that divine feminine creative principle, which we might call “Tao.” May the sacred queendom, or the divine feminine creative principle, fully express itself in earthly reality as it does in the dimension of light.

Read and Watch Part 4 next Saturday

Read and Watch part 1 Here: Awaken Interviews Rabbi Rami Shapiro Part 1 – 36 People Awake to the Divine Feminine

Read and Watch part 2 Here: Awaken Interviews Rabbi Rami Shapiro Part 2 – What You Do Unto the Least of These You Do Unto Me

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