Spiritual Innovators

by Rifkin, Ira; Coles, Robert; Skylight Paths Publishing

• ISBN13: 9781893361508
• ISBN10: 1893361500
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-05-01
• Publisher: Skylight Paths Pub

Summary

The result of a nationwide survey of religious and academic leaders of all faith traditions, this authoritative list of seventy-five includes mystics and martyrs, intellectuals and charismatics from East and West. Their lives and wisdom are now easily accessible in this inspiring volume.

A celebration of the human spirit, ideal for both seekers and believers, thinkers and doers, Spiritual Innovators is an authoritative guide to the most creative spiritual ideas and actions of the past century, a challenge for today.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Dr. Robert Coles
A Note from the Editors	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	xv
Ira Rifkin
They Shook Things Up
Chogyam Trungpa	6	(3)
Mary Daly	9	(3)
Mary Baker Eddy	12	(3)
Robert Funk	15	(3)
G. I. Gurdjieff	18	(3)
Aimee Semple McPherson	21	(3)
Elijah Muhammad	24	(3)
Bhaktivedanta Prabuphada	27	(3)
Bertrand Russell	30	(3)
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi	33	(3)
William J. Seymour	36	(2)
Shirdi Sai Baba	38	(3)
Starhawk	41	(3)
Desmond Tutu	44	(7)
They Bore Witness With Their Lives
`Abdu'l Bah'a	51	(2)
Daniel Berrigan	53	(3)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer	56	(3)
Mahatma Gandhi	59	(4)
Gustavo Gutierrez	63	(3)
Martin Luther King, Jr.	66	(3)
Oscar Romero	69	(3)
Malcolm X	72	(7)
Their Presence Changed the World
Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)	79	(3)
Billy Graham	82	(3)
Abraham Joshua Heschel	85	(3)
Pope John XXIII	88	(3)
Pope John Paul II	91	(3)
Ram Dass	94	(3)
Rabindranath Tagore	97	(3)
Vivekananda	100	(8)
They Made Intellect A Spiritual Force
Carl Gustav Jung	108	(3)
Hans Kung	111	(3)
Abraham Maslow	114	(3)
Reinhold Niebuhr	117	(3)
Alexander Schmemann	120	(2)
Joseph Soloveitchik	122	(3)
Paul Tillich	125	(3)
Evelyn Underhill	128	(3)
Ken Wilber	131	(9)
They Changed the World By Writing
Thomas Berry	140	(3)
Martin Buber	143	(3)
Joseph Campbell	146	(3)
Mircea Eliade	149	(2)
Abraham Isaac Kook	151	(3)
C. S. Lewis	154	(3)
Huston Smith	157	(3)
D. T. Suzuki	160	(3)
Simone Weil	163	(9)
They Showed Us Love in Action
Dorothy Day	172	(4)
Catherine de Hueck Doherty	176	(2)
Maha Ghosananda	178	(2)
Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas	180	(3)
Mother Teresa	183	(3)
Walter Rauschenbusch	186	(3)
Albert Schweitzer	189	(3)
Robert Holbrook Smith	192	(2)
Thich Nhat Hanh	194	(8)
They Brought The Traditions Together
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen	202	(3)
Black Elk	205	(3)
Deepak Chopra	208	(3)
Bede Griffiths	211	(3)
Hazrat Inayat Khan	214	(3)
J. Krishnamurti	217	(3)
Meher Baba	220	(3)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr	223	(3)
Paramahansa Yogananda	226	(3)
Andrew Weil	229	(7)
They Spoke From the Power of Silence
Ajahn Chah	236	(3)
Thomas Keating	239	(3)
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi	242	(3)
Thomas Merton	245	(4)
Pema Chodron	249	(3)
Ramana Maharshi	252	(3)
Seung Sahn	255	(2)
Shunryu Suzuki	257	(4)
About the Photographs	261	(2)
About the Contributors	263	(2)
Index	265	(5)
About SkyLight Paths	270

Excerpts

In his 1941 message to the United States Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke of four "essential" human freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom of worship. Taken together, they say much about the twentieth century.

The last century of the second Christian millennium was a time of extraordinary upheaval. Empires came and went, traditional beliefs were reconsidered, cultural barriers broke down, and social and personal liberation took flight. Unprecedented material comfort was accompanied by the rapid spread of revolutionary ideas. And freedom, or at least its promise, was the prevailing zeitgeist. It was no less so for spiritual and religious innovators.

In the United States, William J. Seymour and Aimee Semple McPherson challenged the Protestant establishment and in doing so helped make Pentecostalism the world's fastest-growing Christian movement in the late twentieth century. Mary Baker Eddy, meanwhile, founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, commonly called Christian Science. Not only did this trio upset the applecart of accepted Christian "truths" but they also shattered race, gender, and social boundaries within the church world. Meanwhile, Bhaktivedanta Prabuphada forced the Western religious establishment to take notice of his Hare Krishna movement, a 1960s spiritual touchstone.

At different times during the century, three men may be said to have personified the period's emphasis on freedom of expression and worship. They are Shirdi Sai Baba, a legendary Indian fakir (wandering ascetic) with a penchant for shocking others; G. I. Gurdjieff, a rogue figure who charmed many of Europe's artistic and intellectual elite; and Chögyam Trungpa, a Tibetan lama who took delight in dashing monastic tradition. Each transcended conventional notions of how a spiritual teacher is expected to act. In doing so, all appealed to an unprecedented individualism adopted by many, and particularly in the West, as the twentieth century moved toward closure.

The iconoclasms of Bertrand Russell, Robert Funk, and Mary Daly also fall within the century's recurring intellectual theme. Russell, a Nobel Prize winner in literature, employed his prodigious talents on behalf of reasoned atheism and broad antimilitarism. He coauthored a famous call for a halt to nuclear weapons development-at the height of cold war fervor for just such weapons. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, employed twentieth-century marketing techniques to make academic reworking of Christianity's most basic beliefs a public and media sport-angering traditionalists to no end. A product of the feminist movement, Daly not only questioned the Roman Catholic Church's patriarchal hierarchy but also sought to rewrite its language-even if doing so meant creating idiosyncratic terminology of her own to make the point. Her radicalism forced sharp public conflict with the ecclesiastical establishment even as she inspired many another feminist theologian. Russell, Funk, and Daly-freethinkers all.

Freedom is also very much what Elijah Muhammad and Desmond Tutu are about. Both challenged the prevailing power structures of their homelands in efforts to lift their people out of degrading and debilitating economic, social, and political straits-although they certainly went about it in different ways. Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, adopted a controversial message of preferred religious and racial separateness, keeping his followers as societal outsiders while laying the groundwork for the large-scale African-American move toward Islam that marked the century's final decades. Tutu was a mirror opposite. An Anglican archbishop, he worked from within the South African establishment to dismantle the system of racial separation known as apartheid, becoming a global symbol of nonviolent struggle for freedom and reconciliation between former enemies, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Starhawk, meanwhile, represent another perspective on freedom, one uniquely late twentieth century. Schachter-Shalomi came from a highly traditional Hasidic Jewish background, yet ended up teaching at a Buddhist university after becoming the guiding light of the spiritually oriented Jewish Renewal movement. Starhawk, a feminist "ecospiritual" writer-activist, is a leading figure within the Goddess and Wicca movements. Hers is an anticapitalist, politically oriented, earth-based spirituality drawn from pre-Christian pagan paths-an in-your-face worldview that one might think unlikely to draw serious attention from more establishment religionists.

Yet it often does. And that says volumes about contemporary attitudes toward Roosevelt's four freedoms.

CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA

(1940-1987)

* * *

An important teacher of the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, known for their emphasis on meditation practice and learning, Chögyam Trungpa was one of the most influential forces in spreading Buddhism to the West. Particularly attracting young people, he had an unusual talent for communicating with Westerners in their own idiom, speaking in terms of their own culture rather than Tibetan tradition, and linking Buddhist concepts with those of modern psychology. His uncompromising, nontheistic message about the dangers of "spiritual materialism" sounded an alarm amid the chaotic spiritual supermarket of the 1970s.

Chögyam Trungpa founded a network of meditation centers around the world as well as the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. He also developed an original teaching called Shambhala Training, named after a legendary Himalayan kingdom said to represent the ideal enlightened society, as well as the inner state of enlightenment latent within everyone. This teaching is unique in its emphasis on a secular rather than a religious approach to spiritual practice. Other secular studies he fostered among his students include calligraphy, flower arranging, Japanese archery, tea ceremony, dance, theater, health care, psychotherapy, poetry, elocution, and translation.

He was born in eastern Tibet into the Mukpo clan, descended from King Gesar of Ling. Following his identification as the eleventh descendant in the line of Trungpa tülkus (incarnations of teachers), he was addressed by the title Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. (Chögyam is a contraction of Chökyi Gyatso, which was part of his novice monk name. Rinpoche means "teacher." Currently he is referred to as the Vidyadhara, "wisdom holder.") Having already been enthroned as the abbot of the Surmang monasteries, Chögyam Trungpa fled to India at the age of nineteen when the Chinese invaded his homeland in 1959. Subsequently he went to Great Britain, where he studied at Oxford University in the mid-1960s and founded Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist practice center in the West, in Scotland in 1967.

After a car accident that left him partially paralyzed on his left side, he broke with tradition by abandoning his monastic vows and marrying an Englishwoman in 1969. The following year they moved to the United States, where he established meditation and study centers in Vermont and Colorado. In 1986 the center of his activities was moved from Boulder to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he died the following year. Today Shambhala International, the umbrella organization connected with his work, is under the leadership of his eldest son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. Chögyam Trungpa is honored by several commemorative shrines (stupas) containing his physical remains; the principal one, known as the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, was consecrated at Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center in 2001.

His Words

The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full. You would like to spill your heart's blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you will hit him back. However, we are not talking about that street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others. - Shambhala , p. 46

Books by Chögyam Trungpa

Born in Tibet. 1966. 4th ed. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.

Crazy Wisdom. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991.

Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. 1973. Reprint, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987.

The Essential Chögyam Trungpa. Edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1999.

The Heart of the Buddha. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991.

Illusion's Game: The Life and Teaching of Naropa. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1994.

Meditation in Action. 1969. Reprint, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996.

The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. 1976. Reprint, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1988.

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. 1984. Reprint, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995.

Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving Kindness. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1993.

Organization

Shambhala International, 1084 Tower Rd., Halifax, NS B3H 2Y5, Canada; phone: [phone], ext. 10; e-mail: [e-mail]; web site: www.shambhala.org.

Other Resources

Audiotapes and videotapes: Kalapa Recordings, 1084 Tower Rd., Halifax, NS B3H 2Y5, Canada; phone: [phone], ext. 19; e-mail: [e-mail]; web site: www. shambhalashop.com/recordings/vctrbio.html. More than one hundred tapes are available.

School: Naropa University, 2130 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO 80302; phone: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail]; web site: www.naropa.edu.

Retreat centers: Karmê Chöling Buddhist Meditation Center, 369 Patneaude Ln., Barnet, VT 05821; phone: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail]; web site: www.kcl.shambhala.org. Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center, 4921 County Rd. 68C, Red Feather Lakes, CO 80545; phone: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail]; web site: www.rmsc.shambhala.org. Meditation retreats, educational programs, and contemplative conferences.

Excerpted from Spiritual INNOVATORS Copyright © 2002 by SkyLight Paths Publishing
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.