Rodger Kamenetz is a prolific author of nonfiction and poetry, whose bestseller The Jew in the Lotus recounted Jewish spiritual leaders’ meeting with the Dalai Lama in 1990. His new book, Seeing into the Life of Things: Imagination and the Sacred Encounter (Monkfish, out now), seeks to answer a question posed by the Dalai Lama at that meeting: “How does your spiritual practice purify afflictive emotions?”
PW spoke to the author about imagination, poetry, dreamwork, and reactive states of mind.
Your work has spanned different literary and spiritual traditions. How did you initially come to the practice of dreamwork?
In 1990, when I was exposed simultaneously to both really serious Jewish rabbi scholars and the environment of Tibetan Buddhism in exile, I was really struck by the powerful images that you saw all over the place: prayer wheels and painted silk thangkas with images. And there were strange, buffalo-headed deities who were somehow the manifestation of the wisdom of Buddha. They were overwhelming to me. I started asking, what is there in Judaism that's like this? I had this idea that Judaism doesn't do images, which I try to show in this book is not true. That's how I got into the dream world. I found a teacher in Jerusalem who once said that images are sovereign in the mind. We can see things in dreams we can't even name. We know they're real to us in that moment, but we can't put words to them. The words come afterwards.
You write that dreams “speak primarily in images that teach the basic distinction between feeling and reaction.” Is there a fundamental way you’d describe this distinction?
Reaction is approximately what I think His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] meant by afflicting emotions. A feeling could be difficult or uncomfortable, but still a feeling. Most of our feelings are difficult. Pain is difficult. Fear or terror is difficult. Joy and love, sometimes they're difficult too, in a different way. There's always a story that gets inserted with a difficult feeling. Reactions are often how we tell a story. Our ego makes up a story to encompass or envelop a difficult feeling and turn it into a larger story. In many cases, people confuse the difficulty of feeling with what reactions do for us. Reactions take us away from feeling altogether, because we have feelings we don't want to feel.
You’re a prolific poet as well as a nonfiction writer. You write that “poetry has a close connection to prayer, for prayer is also a verbal rite.” How does poetry influence your nonfiction work?
Poetry is at the heart, for me. It was the first experience of writing where I felt that there were words coming through me, or to me—words that were, as poet Robert Duncan says, mine and not mine. They had that dual quality. My philosophical curiosity about that has engendered a lot of my nonfiction. There are the primordial experiences of this sense of receiving, of something uncanny, or something that seems to be a voice within. There's a tension there, for me, between the prose that maybe is responding to having this experience, but somehow wants to. I'm drawn to prose and then I'm thrown back into poetry.
Is there a particular audience that you hope this book will reach, whether dreamworkers, meditators, or readers who are completely new to these practices?
I'd love it if it reached people completely new. I feel that, especially now, this question that's at the core of the book, [about] reactive states of mind, is so up for us. In the first place, in our politics, we're constantly being provoked into reactivity. It's taking us over and people are reacting all day long. They have reactive anger. They have deep anxiety. All these afflictive states of mind are constantly being engendered. And then second, social media, same thing: we have a computer working against us. You'll make some comment on somebody's post that is angry or reactive, and what does the algorithm do? It gives you more such posts to react to. It's obviously a destructive thing. My view is, if we're going to get through this—and I believe we will—we really need to cultivate inner resilience, cultivate the wholesome state of mind, to give us strength. Not to be passive or retreat from the world, but to engage the world with feeling so that when we do have to face these provocations, we can do so knowing the difference between a feeling and a reaction.
