Mirabai Starr

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mirabi Star. She writes, speaks, and leads retreats on the

inner spiritual teachings of the mystics. Mirabi builds bridges not only between religious traditions, but also between contemplative life and compassionate service, between cultivating and inner relationship with the beloved, and expressing that intimacy and community between the transformational power of loss and longing for the sacred. Her new book is Caravan of No Despair, a Memoir of Loss and Transformation. And here's the interview with Mirabi Star. Hi, Mirabi, welcome

to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. Your latest book is called Caravan of No Despair, a Memoir of Loss and Transformation. And I have to say that the second half of the book for sure totally blew me away. Wow, that's quite a thing to say. It is really really good. It's a very emotional and touching story. And I'd like to go into that right after we do what we normally do when we start, which is the parable. So

there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh, it's so deeply relevant to the kind of work I do, because I work a lot with conscious grief or grieving as a spiritual path. I mean, not that we would take that on on purpose, but when life delivers these kinds of devastating losses that it that it can deliver. Um, how do we walk through

the landscape of loss in a conscious way? And so much of that has to do with not foisting our preconceptions onto the reality of what has happened to us, but instead just trying to be present for things as they are, even if as things are is unbearable, even if that means showing up for the unbearable nous of

our of our devastating losses. And when we do that, when we choose not to think positively about our losses, that's not at all what I'm talking about, but when we choose to really be present with what is and not get lost in victim mode, even though sometimes we do feel deeply sorry for ourselves, and well we should, but really just be with it. Then we're making a choice to feed that wolf, that is, the wolf of courage and love rather than the wolf of shutting life

out of our hearts. Yeah, and so you have a great deal of personal experience in this space. In your book, you talk about a couple of significant losses in your childhood. Um. What I'd like to focus on, though, is the is the part that I was talking about the second half of the book. Do you want to tell us what that loss was. I have had a number of losses in my life, many losses. Some of us just seem to have that path where we're just given loss after

loss in this life. And my life is one of those. Um. Some of you who are listening are identifying with that. I know. UM. But the one that was the most extreme, that really catapulted me into a different universe of grief and of spiritual growth, was the death of my fourteen year old daughter, Jenny, fourteen years ago in October, the end of October of two thousand one. Oh Well, Jenny died in a car accident. That's going to be the

easy way to explain it for now. If we go into the rest of the story later, you'll I'll say more, but it Jenny's death coincided to the day with the release of my very first book, and I've I've done a dozen books since then. But the first book was a translation of Dark Knight of the Soul by the sixteenth century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, who really

is writing about the transformational power of suffering. And these two events, um happened on the same day, in the sense that my version of that classic mystical teaching came out into the world, and my child left this world, and I was plunged into a dark Knight that I never could have anticipated. So it took me fourteen years, but I finally wrote that story. You did so very beautifully. Do you want to talk to us about the events that we're leading up to your daughter's death? Yeah? Okay,

So so I alluded to that a little bit. Um. So Jenny, who I adopted when she was very small. Um her birth mother was severely mentally ill, and Jenny was extraordinarily stable as a child, I mean she was. There was no hint that she herself would become mentally ill, and even up until the weeks before she died, she still was like a high achiever. She was a freshman in high school. She was already very much an activist.

She was an environmental activist and she um. This was right after nine eleven she became very much interested in human rights and in countering Islamophobia, and so she was a very conscious, high achieving hid But a few days before before she died, Jenny had a psychotic break, and it was completely unexpected on my part, and so much so that I didn't recognize right away what was going on, especially because most people UM have the onset of men

of mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia when they're late teens early twenties, not fourteen, So I didn't see it coming. But UM and Jenny's. Jenny's psychotic break manifested, as it does for for many spiritual geniuses, as a spiritual experience, and I recognized that was happening, but I didn't.

It took me a couple of days before I knew, with the help of some people who understood about these things, that also she was experiencing mental illness and that it was dangerous and so uh, my friends convinced me to get her to a hospital, and in attempting to do. So she kept jumping out of the car, and I got out of the car, and she got into the driver's seat and drove away into the mountains and crashed and died. And so yeah, so that's that's what happened.

That's the simple version of the story. The book, of course goes into it and in much more detail, with much more nuance, because it is a more nuanced story than than I just was able to convey in a couple of minutes. Um. But that's yeah, that's basically what happened, and so my life, really, I was set on a course that I was unprepared for in many ways and in other ways a little bit prepared for by virtue of having been immersed in teachings about radical unknowingnus, because

that's what a loss like this plunges us into. There's just no way to have it all figured out and sorted out and explained by any spirit virtual teaching or any psychological explanation or anything else. There's only the mystery. And that's where I was. Yeah, I've heard you refer to, you know, the idea of people explaining it via the various spiritual teachings as sort of somebody wanted to put a band aid on your gunshot wound, right, I did say that in the book. Very good. Yeah, So one

of the things I'd like to do. Your writing is very lovely, and i'd like to read a section out of the book, if that's okay with you, that happens um shortly after your daughter's death, and you're describing how, you know, immediately after you are surrounded by people you know, and they're they're very much around you and propping you up. But at one point you decide you want to be alone, and uh, you know, you you feel like it's time to kind of go into the grief. And so that's

kind of where we'll pick this up. Thank you. Even as I rocked on my knees howling, I detected soft breathing behind the roaring. I leaned in, listened. It was the murmur ring of ten million mothers backwards and forwards in time and right now, who had also lost children. They were lifting me, holding me. They had woven a net of their broken hearts, and they were keeping me safe. There. I realized that one day I would take my rightful place as a link in this web, and I would

hold my sister mothers when their children died. For now, my only task was to grieve and be cradled in their love. It's very powerful to hear that read to me, Well, it's very powerful to read I can assure you of that, and it's a beautiful sentiment of you know, for me, it's said a couple of different things. One was that there's nothing to do except grieve what you're going through there um And I think also at the same time, it's pointing to you were able to recognize that you

weren't totally in this alone. You know, this wasn't something that happened only to you. And despite how awful different things are that happened to us, I think there's always some comfort in realizing it's not us. It's not a personal thing in the sense of something happening to us because of you know, who were what we are, But that's a human thing. And I just found that really touching.

Thank you, Eric. There it's very tempting to go into that solitary place where you feel like this rarefied creature that is enduring something that nobody else could possibly relate to. And and so on the other hand, though, when we're experiencing the fire of grief. Fire melts things, and it can melt the boundaries that separate us from from other other beings and from the human condition. UM. And and

that's in fact what happened. It was like the grief was was powerful enough that it knocked down the walls between myself and my fellow creatures. And I took my rightful place in the in that interconnected web of being for the first time in my life. So far from making me feel special, my daughter's death delivered me into the arms of humanity. And and I really got in a visceral way that I was part of a web of being that included many other grieving people, especially mothers.

And so as you moved into this grieving process and went through it, it was interesting in the book you talk about Elizabeth Coogler Rosses has got that the the idea of the certain stages of grieving. UM. Can you share your experience of how what happened to you if

it lined up with that or did not. I love Elizabeth Coogler Ross's um framework for the kind of universal features of the grief landscape because it helps us not feel so alone and so crazy when we when we're going through it, we recognize that that it's it's the human condition, and many people before us and many people to come walk through very similar kinds of emotional and

spiritual states. Fortunately, Kogler Russ explained to us at least later that it's not like this is some kind of neat timeline and you you check off the five phases of uh, what are they? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It's not linear, and it's not like at the end of this checklist you're going to be all better, you know. The understanding is that when you've had a great loss that's connected to a great love that will continue to

inform the rest of your life. But we begin to integrate what happened UM into the bigger, vast picture of who we are and and it takes its its place in the fullness of our being. It may take a huge place, like Jenny, stuff will always occupy and you're part of of my narrative to myself and also who I am. But it's it's kind of like um learning to live with an amputation and finding a new center of gravity in your life. It's not like the limb magically grows back, but but you're able to enter life

again with fullness and even joy. I never could have guessed that I would ever feel joy again, and yet now every day of my life is brimming. I also feel the big black hole where Jenny isn't physically here, So it's kind of all true at the same time. But Coogler ross is stages of grief have unfortunate names like denial, anger, bargaining, even acceptance, certainly depression, because there they are not pathologies, those stages, they're not pathological states.

They're they're really spiritual initiations in some way, like each one is a portal. And even though we revisit each one over and over again, and it's more of a spiral staircase, sometimes we dip into different ones almost minute by minute. In the especially in the early stages of loss, there is this experience that I've had with each of

those five stations. I'd rather call them that I feel like spiritual initiations, and they and they grow me and they bring me to a deeper and more integrated place, and so I bless those initiations. And here's the rest of the interview with Mirabi Star. You say that tragedy and trauma are not guarantees for a transformational spiritual experience.

I'd be curious if you could describe not like how do you grieve, but what principles or what characteristics do you think help make the losses in our lives that we glean what we can positively from them? What are what are the states of mind that bring that about? Do you think, yeah, well, one of them is dropping down into hopelessness. And I hope that doesn't sound as dark as as it could. Um. What I mean by that is kind of what Pema Children means the great

American Tibetan Buddhist teacher when she speaks about groundlessness. It's like when things happen in our lives that are beyond our control and that are as far away from our preference as they could possibly be, how do instead of pushing them away or turning away from them, or trying to check out of the experience through all the various means that are at a disposal, various substances and addictions and other kinds of behaviors that take us away from

our experience, how do we rest in our groundlessness? Like the ground has been totally taken out from under our feet. In my case, that was that certainly happened when Jenny died. She was the cent you know. It was in the middle of full unmothering a teenager and she was gone. No ground left, everything burned to the ground, and it

was like a free fall. So what Pama children and other great wisdom teachers St. John of the Cross, who's whose masterpiece Dark Knight of the Soul I had just finished translating, invite us to actually rest in not knowing, abide in the mystery, and in fact even turned towards our overwhelming feelings with a gentleness and a tenderness toward ourselves, and and cultivate a kind of curiosity about the experience that we're having, even if the experience seems beyond bearing.

And when we soften and yield and turned toward the tidal wave as it comes crashing over us, something almost magical happens, or can happen, where we are swept up in that wave, and then we are returned to the

shore unharmed because we softened, because we yielded. When we allow ourselves to know absolutely nothing, when we don't try to fill in the emptiness, the yawning chasm with spiritual explanations or theology or dogma, doctrines or even spiritual practices even are reliable favorite familiar spiritual practices, like for those of us who have been on a spiritual path and may have certain things that we do everyday, prayer, meditation, yoga,

reading scriptures and so on. If they don't work in the depths of our anguish, and they're likely not to, then the invitation is to let them go and to just be with what it is. And so that's what John of the Cross says. You know, when you have a dark knight of the soul experience, no amount of effort on your part is going to mend what you

mistakenly perceive as your brokenness. The only thing that you're called to do is to soften and just be and into that shattered space, the light begins to seep and we because we're present and we're quiet, and we're still against all our intuition to do otherwise, we begin to notice that luminosity that soaks up into the shattered container of our souls and fills us with light or doesn't I mean it's it's grace. According to the mystics anyway,

this is a process of grace. But if we're available, then it's much more likely that we will have a transformational experience. So it's not like everybody who has a terrible loss, tragedy of trauma is going to have an

enlightenment experience. I'm not suggesting that, but for those of us to whom traumatic things happen, tragic things happen, if we're able to be present in our groundlessness, we have a much more of an opportunity for that broken, open heart to be filled with love, and that is what that's what transforms us as love. You know that that rings true to me. I don't have grief of the level that you you know of that is an experience, but my experiences with real grief in my life were

were similar. It was the process of UM really going into it, being willing to feel it, um not trying to talk my way out of it or escape it. It was when I stopped that makes me feel like on the other side of it that I gained something. Obviously lost something, but that there was something gained also.

And I've got experiences in my life where I've done that, and plenty of times where I didn't do that, and it's interesting how I relate and react to the situations in my life in which I was open to those things. I think that though it's you know, when we say this, it sounds sort of lovely, right, but what you're describing is not lovely at all, And in the midst of those periods is all kinds of pain and confusion and like you said earlier, wrestling and bargaining and denial, and

that's all happening. Also, this isn't a you know, you're not describing somebody who's this perfect spiritual person who sits in the middle of it. It's it's just an intention to do the best we can with that, right. Yes, Eric, thank you so much for clarifying, and also, by the way, for attesting to having practiced this yourself in your in your times of great loss, where you were where you really had that intuition to just stay with it and

it's harrowing. I mean, I'm not pretending otherwise. Anyone who reads my book Caravan of No Despair, we'll see that

there's nothing pretentious about my process. I am completely naked in how incredibly difficult and and painful and beyond belief some of what I had to endure was and and how sometimes I just had a kind of almost a wrise sense of humor in the midst of my unbearable anguish, where I just like shook my head and just went, wow, I can't believe that I could possibly withstand this level

of pain. In fact, I remember just the other day that I recalled a memory that I had early on which is shocking to me now, but um where I said, I'm so glad that Jenny died and not me, because I would never want her to have to experience the pain that I'm experiencing. Thank god it was this way and not the other way, because I couldn't stand. I literally couldn't stand the thought that she would have to endure a fraction of the pain that I was feeling. And so yes, I am not trying to paint a

pretty rosy picture here. And it's also not like a one time bolt of light that that enters into our shattered hearts and fixes us. There's no fixing because there's nothing really broken. This is the human condition, and it is terrible and it is beautiful, and we're vast enough beings that we can hold that whole spectrum from the most messed up. I can't stand this. I hate this. It sucks too glimpsing this kind of perfection in the

whole thing that would never want to admit. But there are moments when we see this vast beauty and the gifts. But when someone's freshly grieving, that is the last thing I would ever suggest to them. Right, So, don't walk around with this book and hand it to people who are freshly grieving and say this will this will fix you. Well, actually, you know, some freshly grieving people are reading it and it's really helping them because it doesn't pretend to fix anything.

I mean, you just read an Eric, you know it's it's very honest and raw, and so people who are in that fire are really relating to it and are exactly grateful for someone telling the truth about how how hard it sucks at the same time that there is light.

You mentioned the coinciding of your book about a Dark Night of the Soul being published and you entering into your own and you have a line where you say you're talking about the effect that grief has on you, and you say, what I had been trying to accomplish through years of rigorous discipline had happened overnight, a state of no self. I was ready for the holy encounter

at last, but I wasn't in the mood. I wanted to want God, but I wanted Jenny Moore, Eric, will you just read to me all day from my book? I've got a lot of it highlighted here. I probably could thank you. That's a perfect thing to have read just now, because it fits in exactly with what we're saying it. Grief does break us open, and that broken open state is a wholly holy place to dwell. And so what you know, we'd much rather not have to

be going through what we're going through wed. If we lost UM, a loved one, we'd rather have them back. If the relationship is over that we're not ready to be over. We wanted to be Um still happening. And so they're all kinds of preferences involved that don't magically go away just because we've been lit on fire, right, And I think a lot of this idea of transformation and the benefits that can come from these awful situations

is really a retrospective thing to a large degree. It's when we've gone through that grief and allowed it to do what it will do. That we can then be to some degree on the other side, not saying that stuff ever goes away, but out of that sort of acute period that we can look back and see some of these things that happened. But in the it'll of it, it's very, very difficult, and and as your book makes out, even if we can see it, let's do the trade.

You know, I'll give you, give you back whatever I'm getting here for what I had. Right. And yet there are moments even early on, when we do get glimpses of the gifts, like, for instance, what koobl Ros talks about with denial um is is obviously a biochemical phenomenon that happens when we undergo trauma, that where our brains are washed with with chemicals that help us to insulate from the experience so that we don't implode and and go crazy, you know, go insane with the with the

power of the pain. Right, But that also can manifest as a kind of grace space where we feel connected to our loved ones who have died, if that's what we're experiencing u the death of a loved one, where we fal where we're open to kind of magical, synchronous things happening, you know, a butterfly landing on our hand and and it feels like a blessing from from the

other side. I mean, we're open. We become open to this, this these kind of sacred and magical moments in ways where we're that we're not when we're back in our complacent,

regular state of mind and we're more cut off. Um, so we're insulated on the one hand, but we're also opened on the other And a lot of people report those incredibly beautiful moments of connectedness and and just glimpsing the beauty of this world in ways that we couldn't see when we were just rushing about thinking that we were in charge of our movie and and the other thing that had That is a grace or a blessing that we can often notice early on in this time

of loss and grief is the love of family and community. Those of us who have people who care about us, and which most of us think God do and I am so sorry if you don't. But but for most of us there are people who we didn't even think knew that we existed. Maybe who come who come rushing into the broken open space of our life through grief and loss and tend to us like our communities gather, our families gather, and we're held by love by people

wanting to comfort us and wanting to help us. And that's one of the things I hear again and again as a grief counselor that is most moving to people is the love of their families and communities that comes rushing in to hold them at times of great loss. You really do a great job of talking through that. And it's interesting because you also there's just so much

honesty in the book. You you know, you're talking at points about the support you did receive and then some of the feelings you had about like well, why were other people who aspected would support me? Maybe worn't is supportive, And it's just it's interesting to see you walk your way through all of that. In some ways, there's no

pleasing aggrieving person either. People are like they make you feel claustrophobic there, you know, what is that called I'm smothering their efforts to help, or you know, they're not saying the right thing, or they're not saying anything, or they're they're going down the different aisle in the grocery store to avoid you and you know it, and yeah,

there's just we're just inconsolable. Nothing works. So I'd like to change direction if we could, and talk about some of your other work and what a large part of your career has been focused on. You are known for translating great works of Christian mysticism, and mysticism is a word showing up a lot more in places that people like us might hang out. And um, I was wondering if you could explain from your perspective, what what is mysticism?

What does that mean? What makes someone a mystic? The technical meaning of the term is that a mystic is somebody who has a direct encounter with the divine. That is a kind of experience of connection to the sacred that has nothing to do with uh with some spiritual practice or some ordained representative, a clergy person, or having

gone through the right ritual. It's an experience of connectedness to God or often in the language of the mystics, to the beloved, to God as the beloved, and the soul experiences itself as the lover in union with the beloved, and it's it's a very private and direct experience um.

So mysticism is a direct experience of the divine. And so the mystics, like the ones that I've translated, like St. John and Across Saint Risa Vabula, um Julian of Norwich and others had experiences of union with the source of all love and kind of melting into the beloved like a drop of water into into the sea and then returning back into individuated consciousness again but completely changed by

that encounter. Also, I think within the Buddhist tradition, right, there's less focus on a god or beloved and more into um you know, as you said in your book, a sense of no self or into the empty nous

or connection to everything that's right. And those distinctions actually dissolve in themselves in the in the field of mystical experience, because mystics who conceive of ultimate reality as beloved are having the exact same experience that a Buddhist is having moments of deep meditation, and their individual consciousness dissolves into the one, or into the into the emptiness sunyata or

the or the state of unitive being. So I think at that level, it's all the same experience it's just how we tell the story to ourselves afterwards that makes those distinctions. And the mystics all claim everyone that I've ever encountered anyway, that the mystical experience itself is ineffable.

It transcends language, it transcends all concepts. And yet the mystics are the ones who can't help themselves but overflowing their feeling of exaltation from that experience into language, and usually the language of poetry, because discursive prose is an effort to explain reality, but poetry evokes the very states that it's attempting to speak of. So mystical poetry is

is metaphorical, and it and those metaphors are powerful. And I mean that's why when we read a poem by Roumi or Rilca or Mary Oliver, we often have I don't know about you, guys, but but I and many people I know in love have a kind of spiritual experience actually reading the poems. They shift something in us.

So one of the things that I think is interesting about mysticism it is very much the experience, which I think then leads a lot of people on the search for that experience, and at the same time, a lot of spiritual traditions are also saying that's not what it's about. It's not about seeking a particular state. Do you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, it's one of those paradox is that I love. You know, I'm quite comfortable with paradox,

And paradox characterizes the mystical life. It's the longing that is the path to union, the shattered cup that is filled with the presence of everything we want um And so the paradox of the choiceless choice or searching for that which we know is not outside of us, is all part of the mystical journey. So the mystic is one who knows really in her bones that there is no separation, that she's never been separated from her beloved

and never will be. And yet there is this innate sense of longing that drives her into the remembrance of what is her birthright, which is union. And and also, you know, there's this sense that a lot of people who speak about nondualism or non duality, which is very popular spiritual philosophy right now and one to which I subscribe in many ways, but by always telling us that there's nothing to do and nowhere to go, because we're

already there and we're already it. Just remember, in some ways, it denies the human birthright of love, longing and the satisfaction of meeting the beloved. It's like, who was it? I think it was rama creation of the great nineteenth century Hindu saint who was a little bit of everything. He wasn't just Hindu, he was truly an inter spiritual being. But he said, I don't want it be sugar. I want to taste sugar. So there's some beauty to the

dualistic um experience of being a human being. I mean, here, we are embodied, having an incarnation here, and that involves all the things beautiful and terrible that being embodied involves, which I wouldn't trade. I mean, as long as I'm here, I want to experience embodied spirituality in every in every cell. I want to experience my relationship with the earth. I

want to experience community. I want to find the face of God in everyone I meet, from those on the margins to the people who think exactly like I do. I'm having an embodied experience, and that means beautiful separation as well as as blessed moments of union and remembering that there is own one. So it's the paradox of all of it. We're separate and we're unified, and I walk with that paradox in my body and I'm okay

with that. There's a concept in Hinduism of of different ways of approaching the God had so to speak, and one is very much what you're describing, which is sort of a love based feeling. They also talk about people that approach it more intellectually, and I'm curious what you think about that, because you also have said that you think that a lot of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with the soul's need and longing for transcendence.

For myself, a former addict who certainly has has striven for the striven is that a word? I don't think so striving that doesn't sound right either, had well, whatever a tendency to strive for um transcendence. Yet I don't have a lot of the feeling of it. It tends to be more of an intellectual exercise. Do you think that that's something that transforms or do you really think that people go different paths. It's just something that I think about a lot. Well, Hinduism has at least four

main branches, right, and and they're called yoga's. Yoga means path to union with the divine, and Hinduism is so beautiful in the sense that it's in some ways it's the most inclusive of all the world's religions, because it really makes room for different kinds of people in different temperaments, and really recognizes that there are as many paths up the mountain as there are hikers, and we all have

our different ways. But these four primary ways are the intellectual that you mentioned, Yana yoga, Bakhti, which we also talked about, which is devotion um or the yoga of love, and uh Karma yoga, which is the yoga of action for those who are much more action oriented and not interested in sitting on a cushion um, you know, gazing inside within, but want to get out and do something.

And then Raja yoga, which is where hatha yoga and asanas and a lot of the kind of breathing practices and other other kinds of practices that are designed to transform consciousness come in. And most of us find all four of those as strands that are woven into our spiritual path, but there's usually one that dominates for most of us. And so you're right, Eric, it doesn't make sense to judge one person for being on a on a kind of non dual path when somebody else is

on you know, devotional bok de path. That one is lesser, one is greater. The important thing is to engage in one of those yogas, and we don't have to be Hindu to really get something out of this understanding of

cultivating that relationship with ultimate reality. It's interesting to me that in a culture that tends to be so intellectual and thought oriented, that the primary ways in which that Eastern wisdom has evolved in the West has been it seems like to me, the intellectual side at least is less focused on and the physical and the love and the devotion. There seems to be a lot of conversation or would you consider mindfulness meditation as part of the

intellectual practice? Yeah, but right, mindfulness is much more of a Yana practice. But you know, it's interesting what you're saying, because most of the Hindu world is definitely bak the like of Hindus practice Boka yoga. It seems like most of the world's religions appeal to people on that kind

of emotional level that that baka yoga does. The path of love and devotion, you know, that's what many of the Catholic rituals are, or anybody who goes to church is really in some ways engaging in a kind of bakty practice that drops it from the head into the into the heart. I think that's where the human consciousness naturally goes it. It takes a certain kind of discipline actually to shift into a vaster kind of consciousness that

isn't dependent on those forms to connect us to the sacred. Well, we're nearly at the end of our time. I'd like to ask one last question and then we can wrap up. And it's it's another term that you know, it's starting to show up a lot more often, which is inter spiritual. Could you define what inter spirituality is? Sure, I'd be happy to first, I'll do so by contrasting inter spiritual

with inter faith. Interfaith dialogue is about trying to cultivate an understanding of other religions and their views and their scriptures and our traditions in order to understand and build tolerance.

But inter spirituality is about dropping from the head back into the heart and actually experiencing directly uh the other multiple spiritual traditions, so that as a Jew, for instance, I would go to a Sufi zicker and sing to Allah, you know, chanting with a group of people with musical instruments, lah ilah Allah. There is no God but God, or there's no reality but the Divine, and in doing so, my heart would open and I would have a direct experience of what Muslims love about Islam in in my

own being. So it's about allowing ourselves to have an encounter with the other that is a transformational one, such that by entering into the heart of another's religion, we experience it directly and it changes us in a good way. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Like I said, I really enjoyed uh enjoys a weird word for a book like yours. I thought your book was wonderful and very revealing. So thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you, Eric.

I love your show and I love what you guys are doing and offering to this world. So thank you. Thanks for inviting me our pleasure. Okay, bye bye, you can learn more about this podcast and Mirrabi Star at one you feed dot net slash star that's s T a r R like Ringo Star or Mirrabi Star