Transcription
David F: Hello everyone, and welcome to our event here in honoring the book release of Cynthia Bourgeault’s fascinating new book on Thomas Keating. I love this book. I'm so glad that you wrote it! When you sent it to me last May, or so, with the invitation to endorse it, to blurb it, I couldn't put it down and it touched me; it really brought me into a sense of hopefulness and perspective to have this connection, this living connection reanimated with my spiritual father, Thomas Keating, and his penetration of the nondual unitive experience that you described so well in the last part of the book, the last part of his life. So thank you for writing it and thank you Contemplative Outreach and Pamela Begeman behind the scenes for hosting us and playing the technical wizard. Want to welcome everybody. There's probably a few people joining in these moments, so these are just a few introductory remarks.
Our community is the international network of Centering Prayer practitioners. It's an international network; there could be a person on the screen next to you from from Europe or from your next door neighborhood. So this is the wonderful thing about the community of Centering Prayer practitioners – it’s grown and spread and penetrated so many different places and ways. Our format today, after these introductory remarks, we're going to have a little prayerful pause to settle our intention. And then Cynthia and I will start to talk, converse about the book. Partially, this is an interview. But also a dialogue and a conversation, and there'll be the opportunity at about 30 minutes into the hour to ask a question via the chat. The chat is not open for chatting per se, but to record your questions and Pamela Begeman will curate one or two. And if we have time at the end of the hour, we'll ask them of Cynthia. But even if they don't get asked of Cynthia, your question will be preserved and given to Cynthia for her future events so she can know what the book is sparking in people through your questions and a few answers.
And we have this event today, December 10th, because it's the anniversary of Thomas Merton's death. Thomas Merton, of course -- Cynthia actually goes into this relationship between Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating in the book – it’s is one of her many points and themes. They never met, the two Thomases, but they informed each other through their works in different Trappist monasteries in the country, in the in the United States. And Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating, both in their writings and in their beings, they seemed to penetrate the nondual experience of unity, consciousness. So in honor of that and recognition of today, Thomas Merton's anniversary of his death, we're going to open with a little, simple little quote of his and that will set our intention. So you might want to just pause with me. And remember. Remember God. The God of unity, the God of oneness. Thomas Merton wrote, “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of Light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
So we let the living lineage, the living tradition of Christian contemplative prayer, and our friends and mothers and spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers, we have their blessing as we start to dialogue about this wonderful book. Cynthia, I love this book, and I'm so glad they did this cover this way in this embossed version. Thomas Keating is so dimensional; he’s coming out of the cover at us.
Cynthia B: I know. Isn’t that amazing? That was a gift from Shambhala. They decided themselves that they wanted to really sort of throw the gold red carpet at the book. They commissioned an original portrait, and then they embossed it. You really can run your hands over him like he's a little mantra. And then take it right in in the fingers. I love it. It's just so kind of the people there at Shambhala.
David F: Yeah, well, they appreciate wisdom too. I remember in preparation for our dialogue, I remember you and I have had a living friendship for many years. We first met at Chrysalis House at the meeting that you describe in the book, where you first met Thomas Keating -- around 1990 or so -- for the meeting of the faculty. And you came in and you met for a few hours with Thomas and then we had group discussions and after you left, when you drove back to Maine, Thomas and I and a few of the others were talking. And Thomas was so impressed by your wisdom, and your insight and your intuitive experience of prayer, contemplative prayer. A little bit later, he told me that you were “a genuine mystical theologian,” a genuine mystical theologian. And when you started teaching from Snowmass, this is about a dozen or 15 years later, after that first meeting at Chrysalis House, Thomas told me again, he says, “You know now Cynthia Bourgeault is teaching, she’s doing it, she's traveling, she's still in her contemplative formation, and she's really dedicated to the gospel values. She is living very simply -- poverty, even. He said, “She's as poor as a church mouse!” And coming from a Trappist monk who lives about poverty, that was an endorsement of you. And the third thing that popped to mind is, I don't know, I can't recall anyone else that Thomas saw as much as a colleague as you. You did some teachings together, retreat teachings on christophany. He was kind of a one man show, but you broke into that show and enriched it with your wisdom and your simplicity and your experience. So the book is a wonderful teaching on unity consciousness, but it's also a memoir of your encounter with him in those thirty years, and a record of his own life. What do you, what can you share with us as we begin this dialogue about your relationship with Thomas, which you talk about in the book? But what's forefront in your mind about your relationship with Thomas, these years after he's died.
Cynthia B: Well, it we had to, we had to struggle for a good long time to find a place where we could actually have a relationship that was real and honest and sober and lucid and not based on projections or needs. And I think that we both, when we first met each other back in the 90s, and I was out at Snowmass for my first retreats and then, as you say, I sort of hit the fast track on, you know, and Thomas had me … I took my first Centering Prayer intensive retreat at Snowmass in May, May of 1990. He had me back in December of 1990 for the formation training, the presenter's training as it was then called. I went out of that into the national faculty and …. He was kinda talking behind my back and I heard him at one point say, “Cynthia thinks like a man.” And I knew that was not going to win me friends and influence around the network! He was sort of, kind of, in a sense, intrigued by this. And of course I was an Episcopal priest, you know. In the Episcopal tradition, women are ordained priests; we actually had to work things out at one point where we decided we wouldn't call each other “father”! So there was a kind of inscrutability for both of us. I, at least, came into the relationship originally with all those kinds of fierce needs for affirmation, for in a fatherly figure, you know, I like everybody else who had a little schtick they were running. It would really be really, really neat if Thomas kidding set you up. And so there was always this kind of pulling on the coat strings and pulling on the pipe strings. Thomas, will you help me? Thomas, will you notice me? All that kind of stuff that people do to guru figures. And he of course projected on me all his paternal stuff. You know, I was kind of poor as a church mouse, but not really because I had a very good group in British Columbia that had raised some money to basically put me up and somebody had kicked in this beautiful mansion by the side of the bay, for free. It was the kind of most genteel poverty you can imagine, but Thomas was very much into that, that paternal mode.
David F: Yeah.
Cynthia B: And we had to both sort of breakthrough that, because none of those things were gonna get us anywhere. And it's funny, what you just said comes to me for the first time. Because what I heard from years and years of coming in to Thomas would be, he'd say, “Oh, are you familiar with ….?” And then he launched into some male who was his heir apparent; it was Lock Kelly for a while, it was … And it was always, “OK. Well, now we're just gonna go and talk about the son he never had for a few minutes.” I was sitting out there feeling a little bit about that like that little kid in [the film] Whale Rider, but that's how it went. Gradually we got through that, and we each realized that the way we were going to be most useful to each other was simply to cut all kinds of unstated expectations that either one of us was gonna help the other, and simply be in each other's presence as a witness. So as it so happened, I moved back to Snowmass around 2005 after having taught in British Columbia for about a decade. And I found a little place, got myself a job working at forming the Aspen Wisdom School at the Aspen Chapel, and Thomas and I just hung out. And the format of our relationship was that, you know, once or twice a month for the duration of his life, I'd troop over to Snowmass and we'd sit -- at first it was in the little reconciliation room. And then when he sort of took over the monastery infirmary – the whole library became his parlour – and talked. And we just talked about everything. He told me what was on his mind. He gave me some amazing books to read and vet. I mean, they staggered my mind, what he was chewing through. We talked; he was curious about what I could do. He challenged me to put together a course on christophany for ordinary laypeople, as he always called us! And we did! Then we taught it together. So it began to have this wonderful kind of “seekers of the truth” aspect to it, rather than a kind of guru-devotee kind of relationship. And I don't say that with any lack of respect. Because I I became more and more profoundly moved by the quality that began to skyrocket toward the end of this realized holy being in him.
David F: Yeah.
Cynthia B: But we didn't make a big deal about it. We just sort of hung out and he would go from this beaming divine light to complaining about the size of the eggs in the monastery or something else that that didn't suit him. So he never lost that human touch.
David F: And that's part of the book that I love so much -- your encounter with Thomas as a deeply contemplative man, but also a human being. The two of you were friends and colleagues, and that comes forth for me as the reader. I felt drawn into this relationship that you had. And a greater appreciation for my spiritual father, Thomas. It was just wonderful -- in his humanity and in his wisdom. And of course, one of the biggest themes of your book is that in the last years of his life, you kind of designate a period as “early Thomas”, which is a lot of his life. And then “later Thomas”, maybe the last five years of his life. In those later years, he moved into a full realization of what could be called unity consciousness. He called it that. Other traditions call it perhaps non-duality or full enlightenment, and what that meant for his writings, his teachings. Can you say a little bit more about that? His teachings and his writings, especially in the last part of his life?
Cynthia B: Yeah. And I think that this is perhaps the most significant thing about him, and one of the reasons I really wanted to get the book out there. Particularly in the last five years of his life -- and I would say, even really intensely in the last three years, he dropped, he broke through virtually all the barriers, and he was speaking from this place that I think only comes together at the heart of the Christian path where absolute poverty -- you know, what Merton called the absolute poverty and the pure glory of God come together in the same spot. And he was in that spot a good deal of the time. So he would be sitting in his room in the in the infirmary, doing nothing special, and yet, when people would come, it was really like those fabled stories in the in the eastern transmissions -- you had only to sit in this room and you felt like this energy of pure attention and pure love was just pouring on you, that he would hold nothing back of his wish for your becoming in that radiance. And people came away, some of them … I remember when Richard Rohr brought a bunch of Contemplative Outreach, younger, contemplative folks up there, and they basically reeled out of the room as if they had been struck by a lightning bolt. It was just an ordinary day with Thomas, but that's the level of spiritual energy that was coursing through him. I think one of the great secrets the mystics know is that as your little self ceases to occupy that place at the center of you, it gets filled and becomes a pure conduit of what Dante called “the love that moves the sun and the stars”. And it's not particular. It's not sentimental. It's fierce. And strong and pure. And that was what we were getting out of him. It was a transmission of pure realized unity energy.
David F: In this deeply transparent and selfless way. I appreciated that part of your book too, where you explore this experience and idea of no self that Bernadette Roberts wrote about. And Thomas was intrigued by this. When Bernadette Roberts came the first time to Snowmass to the monastery, you know, I was with the experimental community out there in 1985. We had her over for dinner many times for our meditation and prayer circle and Thomas would come and say mass or Theophane. And he was so intrigued by her and her writings. No self. He thought that this was an articulation of the Christian mystical, contemplative tradition, in a new way, beyond the experience of union with God, towards unity. What's the difference, in your sense, between union and unity?
Cynthia B: Well, he has a wonderful line that answers this really, really succinctly, in basically his last book That We May Be One, and he said, “Even in the transforming union, we are still two.” Because the two is: there is God and there is me who perceives the doors and “ones” my being with it. But in terms of consciousness, there's still a consciousness of two-ness -- that I am the one having this experience of intimate, blessed union with God. So what happens as you move across this land that Bernadette Roberts first nailed as “no self” is that that bipolar nature of consciousness drops out. They call it self-reflexive consciousness, and I like to spell it with an “X” rather than a “T”. Self-reflexive rather than self-reflective, because self-reflective sounds like you're thinking on yourself, standing outside and pondering what you are, but it's a kind of automatic jerk back response. You know, like when you hit that famous muscle and it goes like that [she demonstrates]. That consciousness will always, at the usual level we're at, set it up with an “I” on the inside and everything else, including God, on the outside. That's the way the hard wiring works. So you will always, the closest you can get to it, is to have the experience of the deep and intimate experience of knowing that you are loved and one with God. And Bernadette Roberts was onto this so quickly back in 1984 and 1985. And incidentally, she wrote at least one of those books, of her no-self books, while on residency at Snowmass. I think it was The Path to No Self, dedicated to the monks at Snowmass. So she was right on location, but she said, “You know, I began to get frustrated that I could only experience God as he was in me. Not as God was in God.” And, you know, she wanted the pure God, the unfiltered, un-Bernadette Roberts-personality tinged thing. So when Bernadette first put this out, which is really in a nutshell, the passage from unity to unity consciousness from transforming unity and takes you off the charts of what classic spiritual road map the Christians have used -- she takes you right off the chart of that to a new level. So I think when Thomas first heard this, he was intrigued. But like most of the male superiors, though, the profound contemplatives of monastic significance like Bruno Barnhardt at New Camaldoli, there was an initial effort to rope her back and say no, no, deary, you're just talking about ego transcendence. She said no! I know the difference between. And she stood her ground with a kind of fierceness that is really all the more remarkable for one with no self! I remember Raymond used to say, dear old brother Raymond, when we came to the monastery for retreats, she'd walk in and he'd say, “Here comes Miss No-Self herself.” But she was a fighter, that no-self lady, and she knew her ground. And Thomas was intrigued. And as his own experience got less and less constricted by what he felt he needed to say to his primary audience in Contemplative Outreach, he just felt empowered and intrigued to explore the same ground that she was pointing to, but to explore it out of his own resources and his own really unique way -- his own relationship in the transforming union with the Infinite Intimate.
David F: Yeah. I remember one time in those early years when the two of them, Thomas, Father, Thomas Keating and Bernadette, were over for dinner at our community dinner. Thomas was describing something, waxing eloquently about some metaphysical topic as he was wont to do, and he said, “Well, in my humble opinion … “ And across the dining room table, Bernadette Roberts shot this phrase at him, just like an arrow: “No one cares about your humble opinion!”
Cynthia B: [Laughter] Yeah.
David F: Such fierceness and such directedness, and he was just quiet. And of course the rest of us at the table were wanting to protect him. And he said, “Oh no, that's fine.” I never heard him use that expression again.
Cynthia B: Yeah, yeah.
David F: “In my humble opinion” because what does that expression betray? Or what is possibly going on in that? It’s like that self-reflection of a spiritual self who has a humble opinion rather than just radiating the humility, which is what he then moved more into after that dinner.
Cynthia B: Yes.
David F: He could.
Cynthia B: Yeah, the old humility of which I am so proud!
David F: Again, that's one thing I loved about him. He was able to learn, and over time he began to learn even more through his friends who were women, and fierce and direct women. He had so many good friends. Who, after a lifetime with men in the monastery, the dynamic spirit, the Shekinah, the Shakti that was coming through these living relationships with women, such as yourself, were a great source of his inspiration and his spiritual growth.
Cynthia B: Yeah. Yeah. Mary Mrozowski, God love her, who midwifed and mentored him into a whole new side of himself that I just loved to see emerging. Although I think he followed Bernadette's lead brilliantly into that final no-self land, one of the points I make in this book is that I don't think he wound up in the same place that she did. She wound up in the pure transcendent. She discovered how to get rid of this annoying shadow of God as he's perceived in “myself” -- she got rid of that. But Thomas saw toward the end -- and for me this is the whole essential transmission of his poetry, The Secret Embrace – that it's by the Divine Unmanifest’s own will that everything comes into form and is held together, so that the whole thing is the expression of the Divine nature. Both the manifest and the unmanifest -- the itsy bitsy particular, and the infinitely unboundaried vastness -- they are all part of the Divine nature, which expresses itself not in a static state of being, but in a dynamic flow between the two. A kind of polar flow between the infinite and the finite. The unmanifest and manifest, and the name of that flow is Love. And for that, the whole pleuroma exists. And that was a realization of nonduality for Thomas, that was uniquely and profoundly his own. It's personal, it's flowing. Its Trinitarian I believe, but it's his unique resolution of the dilemma of the unmanifest and the manifest, and which one is more real.
David F: Yeah, in the book you define in such a simple and concise way unity consciousness as “flowing oneness.” Flowing oneness. And I use that now -- I mean, I have a little bit more complex statement of what unity consciousness might be -- but I've been using your simple, cogent, piercing statement and description of flowing oneness in my conversations lately. So to have this sense of oneness with everything that's flowing in love, as love is, is descriptive of what Thomas moved into more fully, completely at the end of his life. But also for us, as practitioners, say for the Centering Prayer audience who are, you know, perhaps struggling along in their daily practice of sitting with thoughts and emotions and distractions -- what does this vision and this experience of unity consciousness, this flowing oneness, what does that mean for the practitioner of Centering Prayer who may not be at the entry of this stable state of unity, but just struggling along on their cushion?
Cynthia B: Well, I think you have to come back to the simple bare freedom of letting go of a thought. And whether you, whether you're doing Centering Prayer for the very first time, or whether you're doing it after 40 or 50 years of intense rigorous practice, it's always the same brand new moment on the plate. A thought comes in -- you have a choice. You can get taken by it and get wound up thinking about it, you can get down your own rabbit hole or you can say, as Thomas said, “Not now, dearie. I'm doing my Centering Prayer,” that to the Virgin Mary, who comes up and offers to grant him a full revelation -- and I think that it's in this point of freedom that is where the absolute nothingness and the pure glory of God come together, and they come together the very first moment you ever try to do Centering Prayer. And it's there with every fresh moment, every time you do Centering Prayer, there's never a repeated moment. And it's that exercise which is the exercise of the giving that you will make on your deathbed. The giving he finally made. And so, in that breathtaking, boundless freedom of discovering that point where nothing and everything join in the free act of kenosis, or giving -- we get out of the major trap in Centering Prayer practice, which is to think that we're actually on a self-improvement project. And Thomas, in his earlier phases, sort of allowed us, and rightfully so, to work with this metaphor. You know, you got this ill-formed thing, this false-self thing, so your job is to dismantle it. Take it apart, move it away, get it off the tracks and when that's all done, when you finish your deconstruction project -- boom, transforming union! There you are, the smiling, you know, realized version of yourself. And so, so many people will enter the prayer with the sense that there's a lack, that there's a project, that there's a mountain, that they have to tackle before they get to look at the view of the top. And it sticks you in a way with a little bit of a slavery to your small self, whether it's the false self, or your own version of the true self which is always smaller than the real true self is. So it's because we start from a position of fundamental discontent and acquisitiveness that we experience the difficulty. And if we could take every act in this, in every moment as a pure exercise for the exercise of the one freedom that the we human beings have that never gets any larger or any smaller, because it's always seamlessly whole. Then we can join right from the very first time we do Centering Prayer in nanoseconds of tasting that Wellspring that was drenching him toward the end. And so, rather than deconstructing everything that you see to be lacking, all you have to do is build stability, in those moments of absolute abundance.
David F: Oh, wonderful. And it comes down basically, practically to sitting, coming to the prayer spot, to letting go of thoughts, whatever thoughts they might be, to integrating that into a life of service and community, and respect for the Earth and the things that were enjoined in the ground of being with other religions and other people and sentient life.
Cynthia B: Yeah. That's how it builds, right! That’s how it builds from the kenotic freedom in the prayer period out, as gradually you learn that that freedom to give, to accept, to receive, to defer, is the gift. As Thomas says, the fruits of Centering Prayer are not found in the prayer but afterwards. That's the gift. And as you work out of that gift and realize your utter power to heal almost any situation by your capacity to defer, to accept, to transform, to welcome -- as you begin to discover that power in you, you flow more and more, nearly and dearly and clearly with this Higher Love.
David F: Flowing oneness, Flowing oneness. So this means that even though the book is about Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk for 75 years, who had a very long life and lived, you know, in the cloister, in an environment set up to support contemplative prayer -- still, the path that he blazed into unity consciousness can help us, who are not monks, who are living in the world, because he's offered a practice that helps to realize flowing oneness when we approach it in the right way. And integrate it into life. So even though we might not have that kind of longevity, or that kind of supportive environment -- the silence and the separation from an active life -- we can still feel encouraged by this vision that you articulate in the book, that Thomas Keating left for us. He blazed a path into unity consciousness so that it's more easy for us to walk that path, even though we might not have the same supports that he did.
Cynthia B: Yeah. Well, I think we have to get over monastery envy. You know, the fact is the monasteries are dying and closing and we're still here. And he knew this, and he knew that, you know, for all the beauty of the conditions and the privilege of the conditions, that even there, for a lot of the monastic tradition … So my teacher, Rafe, was raised to me -- another famous Trappist monk in that band -- he said he watched the brothers just spend all the day going up and down the stairs in this little monastery chapel! And that without the waking up of an engaged conscience and consciousness, without work, you can't become conscious unconsciously. And conditions that put you to sleep, however privileged, are going to put you to sleep anyway. And so it's for the very, very degree that Thomas found himself -- you know, he thought he was going to retire, and God knows what -- but he found himself as apostle to the world. That wasn't his doing, that was God's doing. And he got yanked out of his home in Snowmass to go and sit in how many thousands of Centering Prayer meetings! And the last real meeting I had with him in July before he died, he was sort of lying in his bed in and out, as he always was, and there's some agitation comes over him. And he bolts up and he says, “Cynthia, you have to tell them, you have to tell them, phone Pat Johnson, phone Joanne Warner, we have to talk about this thing!” And I said, “Thomas, I'm here at your deathbed waiting to receive your eternal wisdom and you tell me, ‘go call a meeting’?!” [laughter] But that's how it was. He was a stranger in a strange land, learning to talk a foreign language because he knew. And I think this comes actually from God, that there was going to be a radical shakeup in the delivery systems by which spirituality is transmitted in this world. And that we, rather than thinking of ourselves out here in the world as failed monks or “also-rans”, think about this as laborers in the vineyard, the vineyard of a one world that is desperately in need of our confidence, and the charism that was placed in us by joining this band.
David F: Yeah. And our relationship with God is the real driving force. It's in the relationship with flowing oneness that we discover ourselves in, over and over again, in life, being awakened by events in life, whether it's sickness or joy or tragedy, new birth, crumbling society. That too is in God, if we relate to it in an open-handed and open-minded way.
Cynthia B: Right. And I'm not trying to do a stupid “either-or” here. Because it's both-and. As the monasteries close -- the closing of St. Benedict’s is an irrevocable loss and a tragedy and a disgrace. But there it is. And that deep, beautiful silence that so many people just fell into. Snowmass was properly Mecca for this movement. And you drink in the blessings of that pristine silence that cuts as sharp as the December air. And you stand at the graveyard in the presence of these watchers and holy ones. And you receive a blessing that you know it is not transmitted in that degree of purity anywhere else. And we're going to need this in new generation to find out how to midwife those conditions again in their own form, because they are essential to the spiritual plate. It takes a really, really advanced Being to be able to hold your center in an environment of total distraction, dissipation, gossip -- you know, everything leaking out of leaky buckets. And these places where you can come and concentrate and magnify the Lord are not only profoundly important for yourself developmentally, but for the world, where they form as a sort of megaphone, beaming out the message of the reality of God to all who can hear. We've got to find ways to not let these trekkers slip astern, because the people who've been holding the post are old and tired and ready to throw it in. But how that form is going to happen I don't know yet.
David F: Yeah. And of course, this is what history teaches -- spiritual movements come together at a particular time in a particular culture. They provide support for service and for transformation. And then there's a challenge in the next generation … to preserve what was good and then to be open to the new, to new initiatives, and to listen to young people and their needs and the way the Spirit is coming through them. It’s like an intergenerational thing going on between the elders of a generation and the young people, the seekers. New kinds of seekers coming from different areas. And so I’ve enjoyed you and I coming together and collaborating and talking about a few projects this year. One is a retreat and a symposium at Garrison Institute next March [2025]. With this in mind, you're calling together a group of people, young people, people who knew Thomas through interspiritual connections and Centering Prayer. And seeding a kind of experiment in the listening container that you talked about. Can you say a little bit more about Garrison before we lose that community to tell people about it?
Cynthia B: Sure. Well it has two parts to it, and they're interlocking parts, if you could possibly swing it. There is a 5-day silent retreat that's going to be co-led yours truly, David and Cynthia, the reunion of the “TK twins” after all these years -- to really work with the material that comes from what I call the second tier of his work, the transformations he was making. My teaching will concentrate on The Secret Embrace poems and rigorous practice at beautiful Garrison Institute, which is an old Capuchin monastery up the Hudson River, about an hour north of New York. Beautiful grounds. Beautiful retreat spaces. But then we're preceding it on March 7, which would be his 102nd birthday, with an all-day symposium that will be bring together people in various strands of the tapestry of his life – his Contemplative Outreach “old guard” regulars; his inner spiritual buddies. You know, he had this extensive Snowmass conference network of friends and colleagues that were standing shoulder to shoulder with him as he sort of went off the roadmap of the known Christian universe and helped him bring it back for Christianity. So we have those people there. We have a whole wonderful core of younger contemplatives being organized and marshalled by Keith Kristich and Contemplative Outreach's own Colleen Thomas. And we have some artists and poets, you know, Thomas' nephew, Peter Jones, will be there, who made some of the most important videos about Thomas, “The Rising Tide of Silence”, who edited and put together The Secret Embrace. And Thomas's other nephew, Ted Jones, who's a Buddhist practitioner and was with Thomas at the end. So what I’m really hoping for is just a lively interface and the recognition that in this puzzle there are still the seeds of the living energy to reform and face the future. I'm afraid of simply thinking the only treasure that we have is to circulate and recirculate and recirculate the works of Thomas with everything that gets published -- starting with a Thomas Keating quote and a little bit of a reflection on Thomas if nothing except the retroactive idolizing of a dead guru is the source of authority. The source of authority really lies in the fact that he's given us this gift. He is here in the future and I swear he's taught you everything you need to know in Centering Prayer to drop out of the time dimension that makes him feel absent. I can tell you flat out that he is still around and that he has a will, because it was not my will to write this book on a beautiful sailing summer. It's like every time I went somewhere else, he says, “Girl, how would you like a little fog until you finish this chapter?” Boom! All of you who lived with Thomas for any time know that quiet, subtle iron will, when he's just not going to let you off the hook! He's around. The future is there. There are people all over this network and standing right close alongside it with a love for Thomas -- the heart, the imagination, the brains, the piece of the puzzle -- to really March forward confidently into the future, bring in a teaching which I think, of all the practices in Christianity is the most prepared platform to launch people into unity consciousness. Between what Thomas was teaching about this unboundaried freedom of purification as the essence of Centering Prayer and Mary's Welcoming Prayer practice, which shows you how to just knock it out of the ballpark, doing that in daily life, you have the joysticks to get you right there to unity consciousness because that's how it's done.
David F: Yeah. So we should feel encouraged, encouraged by the spirit that was animating Thomas' life and the spirit that's animating our life. I'm wondering, Pamela, while you maybe pull out a good question from the audience, I just want to say one thing more about the book that I appreciated Cynthia. The first thing that you say in the book, the opening sentence in the forward and then for those first three paragraphs, you say that you are not writing this as a biography of Thomas. It's not about his life story. You're talking about a particular period of his life and a particular experience of his that can help us as practitioners -- this movement into unity consciousness as flowing oneness. I love that you say this in those opening paragraphs that there are more people able to write other biographies of him, perhaps with more experience of him in a certain way than you had, in a different way. From the outset, the first sentence, you're casting a wonderful discriminating light on what you're doing and what you're not trying to.
Cynthia B: Yeah. I mean, when I just take two examples, yourself and Gail Fitzpatrick -- here we have just two examples of people who have been faithful friends and servants and walked with Thomas just neck and neck the whole journey through the nitty gritty, through the hard, the ups and downs of the struggles, the formations and the heart breaks. These are the stories -- we have a foundational guard of people there that were at Lama and carried it forward and birthed it -- that know Thomas in ways that that I never know. Our relationship was sort of like a reciprocal spiritual guidance kind of of relationship and it's precious in its own right, but I claim no inside track, as a matter of fact, it would be stupid to do that because I don't have one. It was a very special nugget, facet of a life that was so much bigger.
David F: And that love and that respect and that incisive way that you infuse your writer's voice with your personality and your knowledge. So it's a living book. I'm so glad that you have written it. And maybe we can just touch in – Pamela, is there any good question that you'd like Cynthia to answer?
Pamela B: Well, there's a lot of good questions and we don't have time for all of them. One that's come up is, “What is unique about Christian non -uality as opposed to other interpretations of non-duality?” And apparently, Cynthia, you talked about this when you were speaking with Colleen during the “Opening Minds, Opening Hearts” podcast. But could you say more about the Christian experience of non-duality?
Cynthia B: Sure, I try to do that in the back of the book, I have a little very short chapter that talks about the think it's seven salient points that characterize Thomas’ Christian nonduality in a nutshell, but I would say up at the top of the list would be that it preserves the personal. And that so many people, so many people seem to feel, because we've taken most of our parameters for our understanding of what nonduality is from Asian paradigms, that as you as you go up the ladder of consciousness, you have to leave the personal behind. And that it becomes like a little crutch on you. And I think Thomas knew from the start that you can't have Incarnation, you can't have the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, without a deep valuing in God of the personal as an essential component in the full manifestation of Divine love. So that remains. It's this giving back and forth between the personal, the specific, the idiosyncratic in myself and the ultimate unboundaried -- the flowing back and forth between them, that's characteristic of it. I think it's Trinitarian and I don't think I have time or the place to explain that now, but it doesn't collapse two-ness into oneness, the great monistic tradition, nor does it try to hold them as an eternal polarity. But it takes out of this tension between the infinite unmanifest and the manifest. A third term comes in that holds them together, and that's what Thomas is referring to and alluding to in The Secret Embrace. I would say those are some of the big things. It's warm hearted, but one of the wonderful things about being able to preserve the personal is that personal is the supreme language of love and love, the ardor and devotion, is the transformational fire in any spiritual path, and it's also the place where the deepest tendernesses of the heart can be conveyed. And so in the end, you know, one of my favorite explorations in the book was that at the end, having reached sort of the outer limits of vast cosmic spaceless unmanifest experience, Thomas comes back, and in the last 6-7 months of his life begins to very, very deeply recapture some of his earliest Christian devotions. The Breviary, the reserved sacrament, the devotion to the cross. His final sufferings in life, he computes immediately in terms of the suffering of Christ, so he doesn't lose this, he doesn't leave this stuff behind because he's grown into the non dual. It becomes rather like the concentrated raindrop of all the love, all the ardor, all the unbounded, spacious love he's touched, as he says, “I love you God,” as he prays the de Caussaude prayer of surrender, “Into your hands, I commend my spirit.” It's real. So don't ever look on your personal as the problem. Just try and find out how to get it clear enough and clean enough that the light of God can fill it. Joyously inhabit it.
David F: Beautiful. Beautiful. I think we have time for another. And then wanted you Cynthia to close in whatever way that you feel drawn.
Pamela B: This is more a personal question about Father Thomas, and I think the two of you could maybe comment on it from different aspects, but, “what effect, if any, do you think Thomas' illnesses had on his spiritual development?” He had a lot of physical ailments throughout his entire life, and how do you think that played, if at all into his evolution and his process?
Cynthia B: David, do you have?
David F: Well one thing, one simple thing I observed of him over the years was that with each new experience of his humanity, including illness, he was able to identify with the common human experience, with other people who were suffering in that way or in that way similar. So his prayer, the prayer of his being -- he was a prayer in the world because of his being -- was also colored and textured by pain and suffering. But also joy and friendship. And he became fully human, united with the human experience in so many ways.
Cynthia B: Yeah, toward the end, what he began to see in his illness was powerlessness. And he speaks about this really, really beautifully in Reflections on the Unknowable. But he understood that powerless -- he says at one point in The Secret Embrace, “powerlessness is my daily bread.” And he means this exactly and literally, just like the consubstantial bread, because in powerlessness, he feels the actual sacramental presence of Christ. So people wonder sometimes, since he's not including a lot of devotional language, where does Christ live in this? But it lies in his acceptance of powerlessness, not simply as a condition he has to put up with, but as an actual meeting ground with the heart of the Paschal mystery. And I think that he also discovered in his illness – Rafe used to say to me, “Well, I actually look forward to illness because people say, well, you don't look like yourself. You don't feel like yourself.” He said, “Well, that's the whole point of it!” He always saw that illness was a time that really forced you to get rid of your usual constructions of yourself and to see just with absolutely unflinching clarity that most of what we think about ourselves when we say, “I am” comes from our level of bodily vitality. It really speaks more about our sense of natural energy that we have no control over whatsoever, than it does about any sort of nature and dependency. And as long as we're healthy, we will not see that; we absolutely cannot see that. But when we are lying there, immobilized, we have to make a separation and see it for the first time beyond the physical life energies that support our being and our usual persona. And something finer, subtler. Almost not energy at all, that runs through it that really carries the seed of that “I am” who we are and that “I am” who we will still be when we go through the sieve of death. He saw. He knew that it and it was the gift of his illness, and it's there that his Christianity comes to its most radiant fullness, I believe.
David F: Well, thank you. So how? What can you give us in at the end of this time?
Cynthia B: Well, you know, I had been thinking about reading again of the Merton quote and that's what I was actually gonna do. But I wanna see if somehow out of the book I can turn up that beautiful Jean Pierre deCaussade quote. I don't know whether I can do it. I know it's here at the end. But his beautiful, beautiful gesture, if one of you have a biography and could put it up there. It just kind of strikes me that that's what he what he wanted to have said over that. But I may not be able to turn it up and I don't think I can quote it from memory. So, well, let's see if I look up Carl Arico in here, I can get it that way. Abandonment. There it is, page 172 and 2:04. I can do this. I think this is what Thomas would want us to go out on. This was the prayer that Carl Arico brought to him toward the end of his life. It's an old, old prayer by that that early monk Mystic desert solitary, and from the moment Thomas heard this, he latched onto it like an old friend, and asked it to be said over him right to the end. For me, this is the reunion of everything we're talking about. The infinite, the finite, the boundless, spacious freedom of knowing yourself beyond form. And yet the very personal petition to a loving father who's carried you through this life. “Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may, do I thank you. I am ready for all I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands, I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord. And so need to give myself to surrender myself into your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence. For you are my father. Amen.” And wherever we are on our journey, whether just beginning in Centering Prayer, or there for 1000 years, whether feminist or non-feminist, can we take this prayer offered to us by Thomas as a kind of tie rod that runs through the whole track of Thomas Keating, of his life of his ministry, of his prayer. And perhaps in these times, as we all get used to being without him in the physical flesh, to find our common collective heart in the joining together in this common collective surrender that was his final gift to us and to the world.
David F: Thank you, Cynthia. Thank you.
Cynthia B: Thank you.
Pamela B: Thank you both. Advent Light! Blessings, everyone.
Cynthia B: [with hands up] So I guess we'll just all send each other a wonderful blessing to all of you. Thank you for joining us and sign off when you need to, but let's be solid and together in this work as it moves on into the future.