“Love All, Serve All, Feed All.”
Neem Karoli Baba
The Woodstock Center for Awakening is offering a multidimensional Thanksgiving program this year, feeding an estimated three hundred to five hundred immigrant families across Ulster County. Meanwhile in Woodstock, a loftier feast awaits many of the devotees more commonly associated with the annual Awakening Festival, which will celebrate its fourth gathering next August.
Different schools of Hinduism and Buddhism have long extended tolerance, and even a certain veneration, for one another. Yet fundamental differences remain, particularly around the thorny subject of non-duality. So there is cause for Thanksgiving when mutually respectful authorities from each tradition present alternate understandings of this topic and of the nature of reality itself.
This Thanksgiving, the Woodstock Center for Awakening is pairing a large-scale food effort for immigrant families with a rare public dialogue on non-duality. It’s a combination that captures the Center’s dual aims: tending to people’s immediate needs while also inviting deeper exploration of spiritual ideas.
At noon on Sunday, Nov. 22 at Woodstock Town Hall on Tinker Street, world-renowned Buddhist scholar, teacher, and practitioner Robert Thurman will debate one of his earliest and most ardent admirers, Ira Schepetin. Schepetin’s own spiritual path, involving multi-year retreats and extensive studies as the sole Western follower of two revered Hindu sages, mirrors aspects of Thurman’s Buddhist journey. Their long-awaited exchange is fascinating for precisely this reason. You will not find a more enthusiastic fan of Thurman’s writings and lectures than Schepetin, yet few practitioners hold a core belief more dramatically different from the philosophy Thurman espouses.
Schepetin, who will speak first, will hold to the Hindu “one non-dual self” position. Thurman will champion the Mahayana Buddhist teaching that all phenomena, while exhibiting a functional relative existence, are, from an absolute standpoint, empty of true existence because all is transitory. He is then likely to focus on the famous exercise of experiencing form and emptiness simultaneously.
Non-duality refers to the view that the apparent divide between self and world is an illusion, and that reality is ultimately experienced as a single, interconnected whole.
One of the Awakening Center’s founders, Sam Truitt, devised this dual duel and titled the talk “Non-Duality: What is reality and what is it good for?” The whimsical framing signals both the humor and intellectual athleticism to come. Thurman is well known for both. Schepetin remains more mysterious, except in one respect: he does not lack courage.
Truitt, a poet, offered his own position when asked. He quickly typed the following:
“For those on the hunt for the big samsara takedown, Nonduality is the ticket to ride. Neither experience nor philosophy, and yet uncannily both, it is the recognition that reality to an undivided whole, which we ‘experience’ as interconnection. From this perspective, separation is an illusion, including that between self and the world. A nondual state may be realized through assorted practices, direct introduction or seeming chance, though that last perhaps may be based on past-life experience.”
The invocation at the top to “Feed All” is being put into action by Michael Raphael, a hands-on counterpart to Truitt at the nonprofit Woodstock Center for Awakening. It was Raphael’s idea to partner with the Ulster Immigrant Defense Network. Raphael volunteers as a food delivery driver for immigrant families.
“Action is what is important at this time,” he tells me, “but not divisive action, which creates more division and anger and resentment. Feeding the hungry opens the heart of not just the people receiving but of those giving, and a feeling of solidarity results.”
The Defense Network’s slogan, “Because We All Belong,” neatly unites the two very different arms of the Center’s holiday offerings.
Tad Wise is a contributing writer. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.
