Rodger Kamenetz Quotes

“We can't choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones - but we can choose how to come to terms with them.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

“According to the Buddhist tradition," he began, "there is no sort of conversion or missionary work. It is not good to ask someone to follow a different faith. Yet, because there are so many different mental dispositions, one religion simply cannot serve, cannot satisfy all people.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

“The preservation of Buddhism is preserving your own internal heart. If Tibetans became terrorists they might win back Tibet, but Buddhism would be destroyed by that attitude.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

Our ancient sources of wisdom call on human beings to rise to their highest capacity and behave in extraordinarily open and generous ways to one another, under difficult circumstances to transcend differences and create understanding across all barriers of convention and fear. This wisdom is fragile as our environment is fragile, threatened by an overwhelming material culture. I believe in a spiritual ecology. In today's world, Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions are endangered species.

— Rodger Kamenetz

“So," Art [Green] said, "it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

In our society, to be obsessed with a vision about how to make a better automobile makes you a genius, but to be obsessed with a vision about the nature of reality makes you a nut.

— Rodger Kamenetz

“Historically, the rabbis are split on the question of dreams. None of them denied their power.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

“A dream ignored is like a letter unopened.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

Direct religious experience is threatening to organized religion, which often mediates it with a rabbi or priest.

— Rodger Kamenetz

“Mainstream rabbis essentially closed the book on dreams by the sixth century, and Church fathers established that only certain saints have the discernment to determine which dreams are from God. The dream is exiled.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

“Freud "interpreted" dreams by treating them as intellectual riddles whose details, once processed through free association, exposed hidden wishes.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

“Your dreams change. Initially the belly-buttons help establish the dreamer's predicament - the situation you are trapped in or held back by.”

— Rodger Kamenetz

I'm too intellectual. I don't think that the theological vocabulary is as important as the experience.

— Rodger Kamenetz

“Dreams are at the foundation of all religions.”

— Rodger Kamenetz