Learning from the Master of Old

“Our Father, who art in heaven”

--King James English translation from Latin

“Abwun d’bashmaya”

--Aramaic transliteration

“O Birthing! Father-Mothering of the Cosmos,

creating all that moves in light and sound.”

--English translation of Aramaic

These are the first words of “The Lord’s Prayer,” when Jesus of Nazareth’s

disciples asked him how to pray. In Aramaic, the word for “prayer,” “meditation,”

and “contemplation” are the same. So, originally the Lord’s prayer was all of

those—a prayer, meditation, and contemplation.

Lately, I have been learning about Jesus’ teachings that were spoken in Aramaic.

Although he must have known Hebrew from growing up in a Jewish family and

Latin while living under the Roman occupation of his homeland, he spent most of

his time with the peasants living in Galilee, which is in the northern part of the

Hebrew. It was populated with many poor people, some Samaritans, who had lost

track of many of the Judean temple practices. These people spoke Aramaic, a

language that is spoken by only a few people living in the current Iraq-Syria

region today.

The Aramaic worldview of Jesus’ day was very different from our English-

speaking, Western worldview. Aramaic is one of the Semitic Middle Eastern

language and lifestyle groups, which includes the languages and lifestyles of the

Hebrews, Arabs and Canaanites. The early Semitic world was connected to the

rhythms of nature. People lived in tune with the vibrational patterns of life that

were quite different from our current scientific understanding and patterns of

reality.

In the Western worldview, people generally separate nature from human life. We

separate the spiritual and mental aspects of our lives from our material and

physical selves. We even separate ourselves from each other, and, of course,

God, our Creator. We believe and act as though God is in heaven and humans

are on earth. That was not the case with the Middle Eastern understanding of

reality. Aramaic-speaking people experienced life more unified. They recognized

their individual lives as individual breathing (“naphsha”) beings who were

connected to the universal breath (“ruha”). This “ruha” is the Aramaic word for

the Hebrew word “ruah” that “hovered over the waters” in the Genesis’ creation

story.

Jesus taught that “ruha,” that creative life force of the universe, that pervades all

of reality is united with the life force (“naphsha”) in each human being. This is

similar to Sankhya Yoga’s understanding of our individual “prana” being united

with the Universal Prana, Ishwara. All of life is a continuum of breath throughout

all of creation.

So, when Jesus taught his Aramaic-speaking disciples how to pray, he taught

them how to connect with the Universal Life Breath, not a father figure. He taught

his disciples how to make that connection within themselves and not imagine

that the Universal, Creative Life Force was separate from them, but was actively

one with their own individual selves. Yoga calls this uniting the small, ego self

with the higher Self, called atman.

The implications of this Aramaic way of understanding Jesus’ teachings are quite

profound and quite beyond the current non-Middle Eastern understanding of God.

I’d like to pursue those implications more next time.

I bow to the divinity within