As he lay dying, one of the last acts the Prophet Muhammad performed was to use a twig called a miswak to clean his teeth. According to oral tradition, the Prophet often advocated the use of a tooth stick, made from a twig of a tree (Salvadora persica) that is believed to strengthen the gums, prevent tooth decay, eliminate toothaches and bad breath, improve the sense of taste, and make the teeth shine. Is this merely folklore, or pious religious dogma? In fact, some 25 years ago the World Health Organization began recommending the use of the miswak. And a 2003 scientific study concluded that people who used the miswak had better results than those using a toothbrush."There are 2 kinds of knowledge," the Prophet said, "knowledge of
religion and knowledge of the body." The body? Many religions would seem to
prefer we didn't have one, but Muhammad often talked about food, spices, and
the ritual of eating, believing that God preferred people to eat in groups.
He also said, "Illness begins in the stomach, and diet is the main remedy." More
than a thousand years later, nutritionists like the legendary Robert Gray would
come to similar conclusions, and recommend radically altering our diet to
prevent colon and stomach cancer, among other ills.
My point is not that spiritual masters are visionaries. History is full of
visionaries who didn't teach spiritual wisdom. Instead, what I find remarkable
is how much of the wisdom of the great mystics is based on making life easier
for all of us on the most down-to-earth level. As Teresa of Avila said, "God is
in the pots and pans." This, from a woman who not only reformed her religious
order, but was also seen to levitate during prayer.
The 11th-century Sufi mystic al-Ghazzali wrote, "Illness is one of the forms of
experience by which humans arrive at a knowledge of God. As God says,
'Illnesses are my servants, which I attach to my chosen friends.'" Here we see
one great mystic, Muhammad, giving practical advice on how to avoid illness,
and another giving the further wisdom that if illness occurs despite our best
efforts to prevent it, we are to see it not as a punishment or failure, but as
a gift from which we learn compassion for others. Bill W., the co-founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous and another spiritual leader offering great practical
wisdom, once wrote, "I used to commiserate with all people who suffer. Now I
commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who don't understand the
purpose and ultimate utility of pain."
I should add that this same wisdom applies to certain New Age philosophies,
such as positive thinking and the law of attraction. These can be helpful
methodologies, but the presumption that they always work is misguided. When we
keep repeating positive affirmations or visualizing prosperity or wellness and
don't get results, we may become disillusioned and feel like failures--adding to
our burden. The wisdom of Al-Ghazzali and Bill W. teaches us instead to see
pain and illness as opportunities to feel more connected to others.
Much is made of the miraculous events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, yet most
of the miracles attributed to him were not of the supernatural or paranormal
variety. They arose organically, when someone sought him out to solve a
practical problem, like physical or mental illness. Consider the context in
which Jesus' healings took place. The Jews had been under Roman occupation for
a century, and the peasantry was dirt poor, with virtually no health care
facilities, hospitals, asylums, or doctors. Some scholars believe that the
numerous cases of demonic possession in ancient Israel may have reflected years
of colonial occupation, when many Jews felt that their land and lives were
possessed by the occupying armies. Jesus offered the afflicted a release from
their overwhelming sense of colonial oppression by showing them the existence
of a "kingdom of heaven within" themselves, more powerful than any external
force.
Further, healers were not uncommon in that time and place, and at least one,
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, a contemporary of Jesus from the Galilee, born ten miles
north of Nazareth, is said to have been a miracle worker (although his
followers did not come to believe he was an incarnation of God). Like all the
ancient Hasidim, Hanina prayed frequently, and his prayers brought results.
When the great Jewish political leader Gamaliel II sent his messengers to
implore Hanina to come to Jerusalem to heal his son,the Rabbi said he couldn't
make the long journey, instead asking God for mercy for the young man. At the
conclusion of his prayers, the Rabbi assured Gamaliel's messengers that the
patient's fever had already left him. This assurance elicited skepticism from
the messengers, who asked, "Are you a prophet?"
To this he replied, "I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet; but
experience has taught me that whenever my prayer flows freely it is granted;
otherwise, it is rejected." The messengers noted the exact time when Hanina's
declaration was made; on reaching the patriarch's residence they found that his
son had been healed at that time, over a considerable distance. (Berakhot, v. 5
and Yerushalmi Berakhot, v. 9d).
"Whenever my prayer flows freely it is granted; otherwise, it is rejected."
This sounds a lot like the Taoist conception of Qi (chi, or vital force)
flowing unimpeded through a healthy body, which is the aim of the Chinese
exercise and healing regimen known as Qigong, and much of Chinese medicine.
Between the 2nd and 6th centuries, a Taoist movement arose that came to be
known as the Inner Deities Hygiene School, which saw the body as a microcosm of
the universe, with three energy centers called Fields of Cinnabar, or dan tien.
Anyone who has practiced Qigong knows that part of the exercise is to warm and
open up these interlocking energy fields, beginning with the lower dan
tien--three finger widths below the navel--which they believe to be the body's
center of gravity. When the chi flows freely, the body is healed.
We don't know exactly who discovered Qi or Qigong, or Yoga for that matter, but
we can presume that they were responding to the needs of the people. The
world's great spiritual masters responded to the crises of their times. Indeed,
that appears to be the reason for their arising. In the ancient Indian holy
book called the Bhagavad-Gita, the god-man Krishna--an avatar, or incarnation,
of the deity Vishnu--explains his reappearance in different times, different
forms, and different locations:
When goodness grows weak, when evil increases,
I make myself a body.
In every age I come back to deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner, to establish righteousness.
(4:7-8, Edwin Arnold trans.)
The Buddha arose in the 6th century BCE, at a time when the world had seen
centuries of bloody warfare. He was also considered a healer--developing ways to
relieve the mental stress that had wracked the region where he lived. He taught
people a simple practice of meditation that would help relieve the stress of
suffering, and contribute to a more peaceful world. According to the Tibetan
Tradition, Shakyamuni Buddha (the historical Buddha) introduced the Medicine
Buddha to his followers as an enlightened being who has unbiased compassion for
all living beings. He protects living beings from physical and mental sickness and other dangers and obstacles, and helps them to eradicate the three poisons that are the source of
all sickness, including war. Although warfare has continued to this day, it's
worth noting that Buddhism is among those few religions that rarely seek to
resolve conflict through violence against those who believe differently. That
may be because the Buddha taught that to believe that each of us is separate
from all others is illusion, and that this belief in the separative ego
contributes to the poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance, which lead to
violence. Today Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, says it this
way: "We are all related. We interare."
The great spiritual paths have been teaching us for centuries that all life is
connected like a web in such a way that what happens to other beings affects
each of us, whether or not we recognize it. In the words attributed to the
Native American Chief Seattle, "What we do to the web, we do to all of us." He
wasn't talking about the World Wide Web, but he might as well have been! His
words also recall Indra's net, an image developed by [9]Mahayana Buddhism in
the 3rd century to picture the [10]interconnectedness of the universe. The net
was said to hang over the palace of the Vedic god [11]Indra on [12]Mount Meru;
it has a multifaceted jewel at each intersection, and each jewel is reflected
in all of the other jewels.
That same connectedness is implicit in the age-old teachings espoused in nearly
identical language by Confucius, Jesus, and Rabbi Hillel: "Do to others as you
would have them do to you" (or its obverse, "What you do not want done to
yourself, do not do to others"). Before now, these were thought of as religious
or ethical ideals, but few people believed it to be literally true that we are
all connected.
Today we are seeing similar concepts expressed not only by spiritual leaders
but also by visionary leaders in the field of quantum physics, which to many of
us may seem as ineffable as the experience of religious mystics. Rupert
Sheldrake, the visionary British scientist, observes that for the last few
centuries, matter had been viewed as the fundamental reality. And yet, he
points out, now "fields" and "energy" are considered more fundamental than
matter. "The boundaries of scientific 'normality' are shifting again with a
dawning recognition of the reality of consciousness," he writes. "The powers of
the mind, hitherto ignored by physics, are the new scientific frontier."
Journalist Lynne McTaggart has interviewed many of the leading minds in this
new field, reporting on their work in great detail in her books. Of one of the
key discoveries of researchers in this arena, she has written, "They had
demonstrated that big things like atoms were nonlocally connected, even in
matter so large that you could hold it in your hand." As the titles of her
books The Field and The Bond suggest, a vast web of connectedness links not
only human beings but all matter. McTaggart and others have been seeking to
render obsolete the Newtonian idea that we are separate individuals, connected
only marginally by familial, national, religious, and ethnic links. Instead,
McTaggert writes, "at our essence we exist as a unity, a relationship--utterly
interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment." In other words,
we interare.
Now let's bring this idea of interconnectedness up to the present moment. I've
had the privilege of working on the books of two visionaries who are changing
the current paradigms of separateness among people and nations. In Manifesting
Michelangelo, Joseph Pierce Farrell tells how helpless he felt when his father, a New York City firefighter, suffered a calamitous fall and was hospitalized for many months. That traumatic event planted in the four-year-old boy a powerful desire to ease the sufferings of
others. Nearly 40 years later, he discovered, almost by accident, the ability
to act as a vessel to transmit intelligent healing power from a Divine Source
to the injured bodies and misshapen faces of suffering children and adults.
Farrell derived from this discovery a five-step path that any of us can use to
manifest change in the world, whether social, economic, political, or
spiritual. Yet the goal of Farrell's work remains supremely practical--to teach
us that each inividual holds within the ability to heal others and to relieve
their own pain and the suffering of others.
Over the past century, Eastern traditions and practices, such as Buddhism,
Qigong, and Yoga have transformed the spiritual landscape of the West. One of
the unintended side effects of exposure to these high-grade mystical traditions
has been to leave many people with the mistaken impression that seeking
enlightenment is the sine qua non of spiritual practice. Yet one teacher who
spent 30 years traveling the Far East and studying with the greatest yoga
masters of India sees things differently. In his forthcoming book, The Promise
of Love Sex and Intimacy, New Zealand-born Mark Whitwell argues that what we need is not enlightenment but intimacy-- first of all with ourselves, and then with other people as well as with our most intimate partner. Whitwell's teachers, T. Krishnamacharaya and U.G. Krishnamurti, taught ways to increase the flow of love and intimacy between individuals and
groups--simply by learning to breathe properly, and so to unite the polarities
of male and female that exist within each of us. Seeking enlightenment, they
said, implies that you are lacking something, whereas we are already completely
supported by Nurturing Source. This is what the Yoga of the ancients aimed to
do. Theirs was a supremely practical application of the deepest yogic wisdom -- not to achieve isolated states of bliss, or merely to lose weight and look good in designer yoga pants.
Whitwell believes that the spiritual essence of Yoga has been lost in the rush
to commercialize and brand it for Western consumption. He teaches a simple,
seven-minute practice of breath and movement that he calls The Promise, and
that anyone can do, young or old, fit or out of shape, even someone confined to
a wheelchair. Through his nonprofit Peace Project, this same simple practice is
being taught to Muslim and Jewish women in the Mideast so that they can come
together in peace. One Muslim woman who teaches Koranic studies in East
Jerusalem has been learning Mark's Promise practice along with a mixed group of
Jewish and Muslim women.
"Over the last few years, I have been attending breath and movement classes with
both Jewish and Muslim women in our neighborhood. In our class we end every
lesson in a heart circle where we all hold hands and connect hearts, connect to
the love and then send it out to where it is needed, to the suffering and
trauma in East and West Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine. These classes have
helped me feel more connected to an infinite source of love, even though we are
surrounded by pain. I pray deeper. I love deeper, and I want to teach the women
in my class how to adapt these principles to their daily prayers, so they can
connect to God directly from their hearts. I know it will keep us strong and
together. This practice, combined with our five-times-daily prayer cycle, has
helped me personally feel the depth of our faith of love. It has become my joy
to pray, rather than just a social duty."
My own heartfelt hope is that by understanding the interconnectedness of the
world's spiritual traditions, and the essential equality of the visionary
leaders from which they have sprung, our social duty of religious tolerance
will also become a profound and lasting joy.
(This blog post is taken from A Talk before the Health, Transformation & Spirituality Working Group of the Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns of the U.N., New York City, by Peter Occhiogrosso, given Oct. 28. 2011.)
than a thousand years later, nutritionists like the legendary Robert Gray would
come to similar conclusions, and recommend radically altering our diet to
prevent colon and stomach cancer, among other ills.
My point is not that spiritual masters are visionaries. History is full of
visionaries who didn't teach spiritual wisdom. Instead, what I find remarkable
is how much of the wisdom of the great mystics is based on making life easier
for all of us on the most down-to-earth level. As Teresa of Avila said, "God is
in the pots and pans." This, from a woman who not only reformed her religious
order, but was also seen to levitate during prayer.
The 11th-century Sufi mystic al-Ghazzali wrote, "Illness is one of the forms of
experience by which humans arrive at a knowledge of God. As God says,
'Illnesses are my servants, which I attach to my chosen friends.'" Here we see
one great mystic, Muhammad, giving practical advice on how to avoid illness,
and another giving the further wisdom that if illness occurs despite our best
efforts to prevent it, we are to see it not as a punishment or failure, but as
a gift from which we learn compassion for others. Bill W., the co-founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous and another spiritual leader offering great practical
wisdom, once wrote, "I used to commiserate with all people who suffer. Now I
commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who don't understand the
purpose and ultimate utility of pain."
I should add that this same wisdom applies to certain New Age philosophies,
such as positive thinking and the law of attraction. These can be helpful
methodologies, but the presumption that they always work is misguided. When we
keep repeating positive affirmations or visualizing prosperity or wellness and
don't get results, we may become disillusioned and feel like failures--adding to
our burden. The wisdom of Al-Ghazzali and Bill W. teaches us instead to see
pain and illness as opportunities to feel more connected to others.
Much is made of the miraculous events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, yet most
of the miracles attributed to him were not of the supernatural or paranormal
variety. They arose organically, when someone sought him out to solve a
practical problem, like physical or mental illness. Consider the context in
which Jesus' healings took place. The Jews had been under Roman occupation for
a century, and the peasantry was dirt poor, with virtually no health care
facilities, hospitals, asylums, or doctors. Some scholars believe that the
numerous cases of demonic possession in ancient Israel may have reflected years
of colonial occupation, when many Jews felt that their land and lives were
possessed by the occupying armies. Jesus offered the afflicted a release from
their overwhelming sense of colonial oppression by showing them the existence
of a "kingdom of heaven within" themselves, more powerful than any external
force.
Further, healers were not uncommon in that time and place, and at least one,
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, a contemporary of Jesus from the Galilee, born ten miles
north of Nazareth, is said to have been a miracle worker (although his
followers did not come to believe he was an incarnation of God). Like all the
ancient Hasidim, Hanina prayed frequently, and his prayers brought results.
When the great Jewish political leader Gamaliel II sent his messengers to
implore Hanina to come to Jerusalem to heal his son,the Rabbi said he couldn't
make the long journey, instead asking God for mercy for the young man. At the
conclusion of his prayers, the Rabbi assured Gamaliel's messengers that the
patient's fever had already left him. This assurance elicited skepticism from
the messengers, who asked, "Are you a prophet?"
To this he replied, "I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet; but
experience has taught me that whenever my prayer flows freely it is granted;
otherwise, it is rejected." The messengers noted the exact time when Hanina's
declaration was made; on reaching the patriarch's residence they found that his
son had been healed at that time, over a considerable distance. (Berakhot, v. 5
and Yerushalmi Berakhot, v. 9d).
"Whenever my prayer flows freely it is granted; otherwise, it is rejected."
This sounds a lot like the Taoist conception of Qi (chi, or vital force)
flowing unimpeded through a healthy body, which is the aim of the Chinese
exercise and healing regimen known as Qigong, and much of Chinese medicine.
Between the 2nd and 6th centuries, a Taoist movement arose that came to be
known as the Inner Deities Hygiene School, which saw the body as a microcosm of
the universe, with three energy centers called Fields of Cinnabar, or dan tien.
Anyone who has practiced Qigong knows that part of the exercise is to warm and
open up these interlocking energy fields, beginning with the lower dan
tien--three finger widths below the navel--which they believe to be the body's
center of gravity. When the chi flows freely, the body is healed.
We don't know exactly who discovered Qi or Qigong, or Yoga for that matter, but
we can presume that they were responding to the needs of the people. The
world's great spiritual masters responded to the crises of their times. Indeed,
that appears to be the reason for their arising. In the ancient Indian holy
book called the Bhagavad-Gita, the god-man Krishna--an avatar, or incarnation,
of the deity Vishnu--explains his reappearance in different times, different
forms, and different locations:
When goodness grows weak, when evil increases,
I make myself a body.
In every age I come back to deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner, to establish righteousness.
(4:7-8, Edwin Arnold trans.)
The Buddha arose in the 6th century BCE, at a time when the world had seen
centuries of bloody warfare. He was also considered a healer--developing ways to
relieve the mental stress that had wracked the region where he lived. He taught
people a simple practice of meditation that would help relieve the stress of
suffering, and contribute to a more peaceful world. According to the Tibetan
Tradition, Shakyamuni Buddha (the historical Buddha) introduced the Medicine
Buddha to his followers as an enlightened being who has unbiased compassion for
all living beings. He protects living beings from physical and mental sickness and other dangers and obstacles, and helps them to eradicate the three poisons that are the source of
all sickness, including war. Although warfare has continued to this day, it's
worth noting that Buddhism is among those few religions that rarely seek to
resolve conflict through violence against those who believe differently. That
may be because the Buddha taught that to believe that each of us is separate
from all others is illusion, and that this belief in the separative ego
contributes to the poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance, which lead to
violence. Today Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, says it this
way: "We are all related. We interare."
The great spiritual paths have been teaching us for centuries that all life is
connected like a web in such a way that what happens to other beings affects
each of us, whether or not we recognize it. In the words attributed to the
Native American Chief Seattle, "What we do to the web, we do to all of us." He
wasn't talking about the World Wide Web, but he might as well have been! His
words also recall Indra's net, an image developed by [9]Mahayana Buddhism in
the 3rd century to picture the [10]interconnectedness of the universe. The net
was said to hang over the palace of the Vedic god [11]Indra on [12]Mount Meru;
it has a multifaceted jewel at each intersection, and each jewel is reflected
in all of the other jewels.
That same connectedness is implicit in the age-old teachings espoused in nearly
identical language by Confucius, Jesus, and Rabbi Hillel: "Do to others as you
would have them do to you" (or its obverse, "What you do not want done to
yourself, do not do to others"). Before now, these were thought of as religious
or ethical ideals, but few people believed it to be literally true that we are
all connected.
Today we are seeing similar concepts expressed not only by spiritual leaders
but also by visionary leaders in the field of quantum physics, which to many of
us may seem as ineffable as the experience of religious mystics. Rupert
Sheldrake, the visionary British scientist, observes that for the last few
centuries, matter had been viewed as the fundamental reality. And yet, he
points out, now "fields" and "energy" are considered more fundamental than
matter. "The boundaries of scientific 'normality' are shifting again with a
dawning recognition of the reality of consciousness," he writes. "The powers of
the mind, hitherto ignored by physics, are the new scientific frontier."
Journalist Lynne McTaggart has interviewed many of the leading minds in this
new field, reporting on their work in great detail in her books. Of one of the
key discoveries of researchers in this arena, she has written, "They had
demonstrated that big things like atoms were nonlocally connected, even in
matter so large that you could hold it in your hand." As the titles of her
books The Field and The Bond suggest, a vast web of connectedness links not
only human beings but all matter. McTaggart and others have been seeking to
render obsolete the Newtonian idea that we are separate individuals, connected
only marginally by familial, national, religious, and ethnic links. Instead,
McTaggert writes, "at our essence we exist as a unity, a relationship--utterly
interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment." In other words,
we interare.
Now let's bring this idea of interconnectedness up to the present moment. I've
had the privilege of working on the books of two visionaries who are changing
the current paradigms of separateness among people and nations. In Manifesting
Michelangelo, Joseph Pierce Farrell tells how helpless he felt when his father, a New York City firefighter, suffered a calamitous fall and was hospitalized for many months. That traumatic event planted in the four-year-old boy a powerful desire to ease the sufferings of
others. Nearly 40 years later, he discovered, almost by accident, the ability
to act as a vessel to transmit intelligent healing power from a Divine Source
to the injured bodies and misshapen faces of suffering children and adults.
Farrell derived from this discovery a five-step path that any of us can use to
manifest change in the world, whether social, economic, political, or
spiritual. Yet the goal of Farrell's work remains supremely practical--to teach
us that each inividual holds within the ability to heal others and to relieve
their own pain and the suffering of others.
Over the past century, Eastern traditions and practices, such as Buddhism,
Qigong, and Yoga have transformed the spiritual landscape of the West. One of
the unintended side effects of exposure to these high-grade mystical traditions
has been to leave many people with the mistaken impression that seeking
enlightenment is the sine qua non of spiritual practice. Yet one teacher who
spent 30 years traveling the Far East and studying with the greatest yoga
masters of India sees things differently. In his forthcoming book, The Promise
of Love Sex and Intimacy, New Zealand-born Mark Whitwell argues that what we need is not enlightenment but intimacy-- first of all with ourselves, and then with other people as well as with our most intimate partner. Whitwell's teachers, T. Krishnamacharaya and U.G. Krishnamurti, taught ways to increase the flow of love and intimacy between individuals and
groups--simply by learning to breathe properly, and so to unite the polarities
of male and female that exist within each of us. Seeking enlightenment, they
said, implies that you are lacking something, whereas we are already completely
supported by Nurturing Source. This is what the Yoga of the ancients aimed to
do. Theirs was a supremely practical application of the deepest yogic wisdom -- not to achieve isolated states of bliss, or merely to lose weight and look good in designer yoga pants.
Whitwell believes that the spiritual essence of Yoga has been lost in the rush
to commercialize and brand it for Western consumption. He teaches a simple,
seven-minute practice of breath and movement that he calls The Promise, and
that anyone can do, young or old, fit or out of shape, even someone confined to
a wheelchair. Through his nonprofit Peace Project, this same simple practice is
being taught to Muslim and Jewish women in the Mideast so that they can come
together in peace. One Muslim woman who teaches Koranic studies in East
Jerusalem has been learning Mark's Promise practice along with a mixed group of
Jewish and Muslim women.
"Over the last few years, I have been attending breath and movement classes with
both Jewish and Muslim women in our neighborhood. In our class we end every
lesson in a heart circle where we all hold hands and connect hearts, connect to
the love and then send it out to where it is needed, to the suffering and
trauma in East and West Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine. These classes have
helped me feel more connected to an infinite source of love, even though we are
surrounded by pain. I pray deeper. I love deeper, and I want to teach the women
in my class how to adapt these principles to their daily prayers, so they can
connect to God directly from their hearts. I know it will keep us strong and
together. This practice, combined with our five-times-daily prayer cycle, has
helped me personally feel the depth of our faith of love. It has become my joy
to pray, rather than just a social duty."
My own heartfelt hope is that by understanding the interconnectedness of the
world's spiritual traditions, and the essential equality of the visionary
leaders from which they have sprung, our social duty of religious tolerance
will also become a profound and lasting joy.
(This blog post is taken from A Talk before the Health, Transformation & Spirituality Working Group of the Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns of the U.N., New York City, by Peter Occhiogrosso, given Oct. 28. 2011.)
Thanks for your insights. I agree that the body is part of our spiritual path. We're in the body for a reason.
Excellent and very inspiring. I love your writing!!