Howard Jay Rubin
Howard Jay Rubin is a financial planner and professional magician who lives with his wife and twin seven-year-olds in Corona, California. In the 1980s he was a contributing editor at The Sun and did nearly thirty interviews for the magazine. The interview reprinted in this issue was his first.
— From May 2014Ordinary Mind
An Interview With Allen Ginsberg
It could be said that sympathy is our most powerful tool, because nothing stops it, except disaster, but disaster’s impermanent. Hell is impermanent as well as heaven. Therefore there’s nothing to stop sympathy; even in the middle of deepest illusion you can be aware that something else is possible when you see things as outside of yourself and can bear with them.
April 1982The Secret Sharer
An Interview With Jenovefa Knoop
When you’re really down, there are amazing resources that open up, psychic, emotional, ancestral resources and wisdom. Genuine suffering is never so bad. As heart-rending and bleak as it is, it pulls you to the center of creation, where everyone who has ever lived has suffered, to the great wellspring of wisdom and survival knowledge and grace.
March 1982Transfiguring The Ordinary
An Interview With Roger Corless
If the Christian God exists, the plurality of religions is not a problem in his mind. His mind functions in some other way. So it’s only a problem for us. If Mahayana Buddhism is right and the universe is neither One nor Many nor both nor neither but emptiness, unqualifiedness, then it’s not a problem that there are two religions or one or both or neither.
February 1982“All Praises Due To Allah”
An Interview With Brother Yusuf Salim
The music is just a vehicle. I can look around and see better musicians all around me who aren’t getting all the publicity that I’m getting. That makes me realize that it’s not the music. The music just puts me on the stage in a position to reach out. My real profession is human relations. I just happen to play a little piano.
January 1982We’re All Doing Time
An Interview With Bo And Sita Lozoff
People ask me about getting gang-raped and whether they should defend themselves or submit. I can’t say to somebody, “Submit and don’t worry about it,” and I also can’t say, “Defend yourself and die.” That’s his choice to make. Mahatma Gandhi could and would have submitted because he was so non-attached to his body there was no degradation there, there was no undignity. And yet on the other hand, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce wouldn’t have submitted, he would have said, “Ah, this is a wonderful day to die.”
December 1981An Interview With Medicine Story
In the tribal way there is a concern not only with the family and the tribe, but also about a continuum that began with the ancestors, with maintaining a way that has been passed down, a good way, a sacred way, and passing it on to the unborn generations. This is the only major world viewpoint that has such a heavy reliance upon the unborn generations. There is a tradition always to plan for seven generations ahead.
September 1981The Word Gets Around
An Interview With Pete Seeger
One reason racism seems to be more of a problem is at last it’s out in the open. Racism has been there all along. It’s an old, old human problem, that’s been with us for thousands of years, and it’s in every country of the world in one form or another. Some have solved it in one way and not solved it in other ways.
May 1981
