| This dissertation explores the nature of the self and self-transformation in the thought and practice of R. Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira (1889-1943), the Piaseczner Rebbe, a Polish Hasidic master.;Part I introduces a new methodology of a performative historiography of spiritual practice. Based on arguments from philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology and the history of material culture, it is argued that performing spiritual practices themselves and developing expertise in their performance is an important research methodology for historians of spiritual practice.;Part II focuses on the body and corporeality. It argues that R. Shapira both reinvigorates a radical early Hasidic position of the divinity of the body and corporeality and creates innovative understandings of the place of the body in spiritual life and self-transformation. Following early Hasidic precedents, and in contrast to some later Hasidic developments, R. Shapira champions the divinity of the body and corporeality in general and the centrality of the body to spiritual practice. Still concerned with a potentially dualistic, and for him damaging, relationship to corporeality, R. Shapira teaches a non-dualistic relationship to the body and the material world.;This non-dualistic relationship is achieved through a variety of embodied spiritual practices including classic practices such as the performance of mitzvot and the study of Torah and Hasidic innovations such as worship in corporeality and what R. Shapira calls "non-corporeal sensation." R. Shapira innovates both in the centrality and place of the body in traditional practices and in the new uses to which the body is put in Hasidic embodied practices, particularly in the realm of sensation.;In many ways the culmination of such practice is a new way of seeing the world which I term embodied epistemology. R. Shapira argues, paralleling contemporary philosophical and neuroscientific claims, that we know ourselves and the world through our bodies in a different way than we do with our 'minds' and that it is crucial for the practitioner to develop and utilize this other way of knowing. Part II concludes by exploring the texture of R. Shapira's relationship to the body and the intimacy, softness, presence, acceptance and wholeness with which he urges us to relate to our bodies and the material world.;Part III focuses on emotion in the Piaseczner Rebbe. It begins by contrasting R. Shapira's unique focus on emotionality, the full feeling of emotion in general, with earlier Jewish and Hasidic interest in cultivating particular virtuous or positive emotions. Establishing the centrality of emotion for spiritual practice for R. Shapira, its essential connection to the soul, autonomy, a developed consciousness and non-duality, it then presents R. Shapira's fundamental understanding of emotional practice. R. Shapira argues that humans are generally emotionally blocked and that a key component of spiritual practice is to remove that block and fully feel the full range of emotions, whether joyous or sad. The only emotion he argues we should avoid is the anti-emotion of depression, despair or dullness.;Multiple forms of emotional practice are then introduced including mindfulness, emotional cultivation, mantras, visualizations, and music. Each practice is carefully analyzed and understood in terms of R. Shapira's broader emotional goals and how it fits into a broader notion of spiritual emotional practice for him. Finally, the relationship between emotions and the self is explored, demonstrating how R. Shapira sees emotion as crucial to self-overcoming and non-duality and how he views the false sense of self as the essential block to feeling one's emotions fully and truly.;The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the self in the Piaseczner Rebbe and his notion of an epistemology of presence, unity and change, non-duality, and the fundamental textures of acceptance and softness which run throughout his work and teachings. |
