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welcome to buddha at the gas pump myname is rick archer buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of interviewswith spiritually awakening people i've done well over 400 of them by now and ifthis is new to you and you'd like to watch other ones go to the pastinterviews menu on that gaff calm dat gaap we'll see all the previous onesarchived in various ways this show is pretty much occupies most almost all ofmy time and wife my wife's time to do it all and it's made possible by thesupport of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and feellike supporting it in any amount please check out the donation options on capcomincluding the paypal button that's on

every page of the site my guest todayi'm glad to say is the reverend cynthia bordeaux phd she is an episcopal priestteacher writer and internationally acclaimed retreat leader she's a studentof father thomas keating whom i have interviewed and several people i haven'tbeen not familiar with maybe she'll mention during the interview such asbruno barnhart and beatrice bhutto and she also studied the gurdjieff work fora number of years she's made her mark exploring wisdom christianity and theyoften overlooked lineage of christian non-duality she is founding director ofthe contemplative society in victoria british columbia and the aspen wisdomschool she now serves as one of the core

faculty there together with richard rohrand james finley of the center for action and contemplation in albuquerquenew mexico when not teaching in and ashley she resides in her seasidehermitage on eagle island maine which is where she is right nowso welcome cynthia well thank you rick glad we've got it up and runningyeah cynthia and i really jumped through some hoops bar on both ends getting thisthing going we're starting about an hour later than we had intended because thereare so many technical difficulties but i think we've ironed them out and i hopeyou'll enjoy this interview i think you willso for starters i thought maybe it would

be good to just have you tell us alittle bit about yourself personally i mean just you know a little bit of achronology in terms of you know your life as a younger as a young girl andwhen you first got interested in spirituality and that kind of thing wellin the way i was born to it as a self defense i was uh i was born just west ofphiladelphia and grew up a little town called west chester about an hour to thewest and that's the part of the world that has very strong quaker heritage andmy mother at least was a very very devout practicing christian scientistand i was raised in that faith without any it's ands or buts that was where wemarched on sunday morning but they sent

me at least four elementary school twoquaker meeting where i had my first exposure to silence and where ibasically learned you know what was formed in me were the basic referencepoints for the contemplative life in these wonderful wonderful unprogrammedmeetings for silent worship which were part of my early childhood life so itwas wonderful colic out there we were on the edge of the horse country that thatopens into the amish country good soulful place back in the 50s wheni was growing up so it was a life in nature a life with the quaker ambience aa ready accessibility of divine presence and i struggled between really twocompeting maps of the universe the one

being furnished to be by my my christianscience sunday-school upbringing and the other by the kind of natural mysticismand intimate silence that i was knowing in quaker meeting so my my life was awonderful wonderful sort of chance to sort of test these out and i guess whatreally jumps started my whole spiritual growth was when i when i hit high schoolwent was sent to a wonderful private high school in wilmington delaware whichwas about 15 miles away and we had compulsoryreligion classes there it was it was a non-denominational school but theythought studying religion was part of every cultural human beingduty so we had a marvelous course the

year i was i was a junior in high schoolon religious thought taught by a gifted man again a quaker that exposed us toeverything from sartre to pol telic and it was in that that course that the realspiritual questions of life began to come right to the fore pretty seriousyoung woman you weren't just sort of like indulging and everything thesixties had to offer you were like you know taking life pretty seriously andthoughtfully well i was ahead of the curve then because the sixties hit wheni was in grad school and so i was in the last drones of that kind of dying 1950sculture and i felt like an alien for most of my childhood so i had to solvethe things on my own you shouldn't get

the idea that i was summer faced andstudious i was also sneaking onto the baseball team and and swimming andriding my bike all over the countryside and i just sort of you know was opposedto the kind of culture that that we grew up and where were young women weresupposed to be objects waiting to be invited to the prom yeah okay iinterrupted you there did i did i break your chain of thought or did you prettymuch cover what you wanted to in terms of that phase no that's fineokay it's good and then at some point you got married and had a couple of kidsa couple of daughters mm-hmm yeah that was early on mm-hmm and that was a thatwas a great thing i i did what would be

nowadays completely illegal and frownedupon and i married my high school music teacher and in those days it was quitelegal and we had a gifted wonderful couple you know about a decade togetherand my daughter's come out of that he was a brilliant gentle souland the marriage fell apart by pretty much what you can expect when there's a22 year age difference in it but we remain until the end of our life atthe end of his life mine isn't over yet very good friends and i had theprivilege of being with him just before his death gifted brilliant gentle soulthat's great it's nice that you have such fondmemories and appreciation doesn't always

work out that way you know yeah okay sothen you i don't know if this is skipping anything important but then hegot into the gurdjieff work for quite a whileyeah that was fast-forward you know a few decades in the in the process so ihad gotten i'd solved my quaker christian science standoff bydiscovering episcopalian ism and was through was already ordained at thatpoint and had been serving in parishes and gravitating towards the monastic andmystical ends of it even then but i got into the gurdjieff work because i becamemore and more intrigued and disturbed about why it was that christianity areligion who you know clearly has one of

the most loving and inclusive gurusthat's ever walked the face of the planet and it's epicenter should tend todevelop itself in formats that were so rigid and exclusive and and you know nongenerous and why didn't people walk the talk and that became more and more of aof a heartbreak to me and so it was through actually reading jacobneedleman's lost christianity in 1980 that the firstpieces began to put together he he said at one point telling people to wake upand be conscious is like telling stones to pick themselves up sprout wings andfly to the sea but that there's a missing piece and until you can get thatmissing piece on line you can't do the

teachings of jesus and something in maysaid bingo that's it yeah i read in your book at one point that if one aspires tolive the beatitudes or any other gospel teaching it is necessary to establishthe level of consciousness from which theymerge i think that's that's the crux of it right there exactly and that wasactually that's a direct quote or virtually a direct quote from simeon thenew theologian in the 11th century who was the first one to be onto the factthat that that the jesus teachings emerged from a very high level ofconsciousness and that until you could basically run that program you weregoing to be constantly dumbing it down

to a place where it made a you know abasically an inversion of itself and and i could see as those sort of ideas beganto wash over me and again it was jacob needleman who first introduced me to thethinking of jeff simeon the new theologian so so needleman was on to thefact that it was something that was broken in the way we pay attention thatkept our consciousness scrambled and low and distracted and not under our freecommand and it was this that wound up constantly making hash out of the out ofthe gospel that jesus was teaching so it was when that pieces began to cometogether and and then just at that time a woman kind of almost casually tossed acopy of in search of the miraculous into

the back of my cards and i saw the wordmiraculous and thought you'd be interested in it so i don't know whetherthat was a setup or not it had all the configurations of a setup but i i readand in search of the miraculous is the the classic access book even today toaccessing the kerchief works so i read that and it was like light bulbs leftright and center mm-hmm before we get into that i think it wouldbe important to just establish a little main point from the thing we justcovered which is that a teacher or anyone can only speak from their levelof consciousness and a student or anyone else can only listen or hear from theirlevel of consciousness which brings in

the whole probe before swineand you know the parable of the sower if you wanna quote biblical references butum you know there's there's always going to be a gulf and and then once not onlyis there a gulf in the contemporaneously in the life of that teacher but then astime goes on and the thing gets passed on like a party game from one ear to theother over time it just gets more and more distorted i think it's happened inevery tradition exactly exactly and that's so right that you've seen thatand you know even our understanding of what esoteric means they but nowadayspeople think esoteric means secret information that's withheld from peoplewhich is ridiculous

you know the esoteric dimension of everyfaith which is a very simple is hidden in plain sight yeah and nobody'sfighting anything but until you reach a certain level of receptivity and naturereaches a certain level of broadcast if ax t you me you just can't see it youcan't picked up my students even ask me when they go home you know that how am igonna tell this to my friends how my husband i say don't even bother becauseit won't be received that it's a long bridge creating a way that reception canactually happen yeah and sometimes it's better to teach by example if you reallywant to convey something like in my case well after i began meditating i wasn'treally pushing my father into it or

anything but after a few months he saidwhatever you're doing i got a change so much yeah yeah yep and that's why theother thing is that the in classic ways paths made themselves a little bit hardto find certainly the gurdjieff work did back inmy days it it took me actually three day three years of pretty hard seeking toget myself hooked up with a group but one of the dimensions going on there isthat they say that an until student has enough collected will and is able tosort out on the moon and discriminate between you know a billion differentthings out there and the thing that really has their name on it that they'renot going to be able to appreciate

they're not going tobe fit for work anyway so you have to it's it's like a chicken picking its wayout of the egg you have to do that work before you're ready to to be where theteaching is going to put you and how do you develop that discrimination to knowwhich of the and these days there's even a lot more to choose from than there wasin the 60s but how do you you know how do you discriminate between all thevarious things and find the thing that's right for you well you know i'd have topull the christian rank and say it's a little bit of race that that her chiefhad a teaching about a and b influences and he says most of us are out there inthe world surrounded by a influences

worth which are all sort of competingthings making a play for our attention and it's not until you can recognizesomething that's a b influence which is a high quality div ly different tastefor you that that you can follow of it and you got to get there yourself howthat happens a little lot little management i certainly think thatmeditation is a really good starting point because it allows you to to filterout a lot of the garbage that's obviously just playing superficial partsof you and to listen from something qualitatively deeper well you know a lotof it continue go ahead you mentioned the word grace and i think that's that'scritical you know there's that old seek

and ye shall find i think if you'resincere and if you really want this whatever you define this to be but ifyou know there's something and you've got to find out what it is then the veryseeking kind of draws god's attention if we want to speak in terms of god and youknow there's a there's a grace that guides you exactly yeah i think actuallywe have the direction wrong and the journey all along we we start from theimpression that we are here and god's over there and that we have to gotowards god oh i love the fact we're on videowhereas i and then if you can make enough noise and jump up without anddown

loud enough you'll attract god'sattention but i think rather it is always the opposite that we are flowingout from the divine at any given moment as a particular path as a kind ofinstantiation of divinity and form and that what we we're always guided and thepath is always totally specific to ourselves what we have to learn is tosimply stay in alignment with it and that's what learning about the binfluences is all about but it's it's easier to stay in alignment once you getthe hang of it then not to stay in the line with it and try on a billiondifferent tasks as they seem interesting yeah but also suggest that god dwells inour heart of hearts and cannot i was

once i once heard someone say god may beomnipotent but the one thing you can't do is remove himself from your heartyeah and so you know even the subtlest impulse to reach god or to reach highertruth or anything like that yeah god hears it you know don't you - out he'sthere adventure that god is your heart of hearts exactly right you know and sothat as you begin to listen and it's basically just an issue of trying toparing away all the conditions stuff all the what thomas calls the false selfagenda is all the all the static on the system so that you listen from the truthof truth of your being the old latin word obedience really means ab out dalisten from the depth and as we learn to

listen from the depth then we then wehear them they align and then the path becomes if not ever obvious at leastcomfortable mm-hmm good so um i could sort of get you to talk more about thegurjit thing at this point but later in your book you talk about witnessing andgirja and that that brings up the gurdjieff thing and i'm wondering if wewant to postpone discussion of gorgeous till that or would you like to saysomething about it right now well you're the master of this interview you have asense of the general flow i you know put a quarter in my mouth and i'll respondto any questions alright let's talk about the gurjitthing what the heck i already dropped

the bait so what were you actually doingas a student of kerchief well i guess for me i was spending most of my timesensing my feet uh-huh and that you know i entered that i entered the group ittook a long run around as i said it was three years to get in i've kind of i i iflunked the first hazing test you know that that that as many people in thework we did at that point getting in i showed up for an appointment oh theremust be a mistake there's no lord pentland here andbecause i didn't have the the patience and the foresight to wait i missed thechance my great missed opportunity he was the he was the leader of the work inamerica for many many years and i had

managed to get to the point throughjacob needleman of having an interview arranged for him this was back in 1983and the day i showed up in his office i was told that there was no lord pintronthere and then i came back later and there was a different secretary and saidshe said there was a lord pendulum there but he wouldn't be in until four o'clockthat afternoon could i wait and i had train tickets back home so i didn't ithought it was the stupidest mistake in my life because as it turned out he hedied two weeks later and my my journey towards finding the work was set backanother two years but by then i managed to show up at the doorstep of dr.william were it well she was one of the

first generation magnificent old fellowstudent of your jeef was actually his attending physician in his last illnessand i was admitted and after due deliberation about who i would work bestwith i was packed off to a group and how fax nova scotia which was actuallycloser to me in maine than boston and there i worked but you know in termsof work and in terms of what are really the criteria i was a kind of classicexample of unbalanced development although aa brilliant mind you know ihad done all the philosophy i had a phd i'd i hadn't published any books at thattime but it was like middle all the way and and i'd never been taught any of theodd daav as the su piece collet of how

you behave in a group i was used tobeing the smartest student and you put up your hand and yet yeah you got into adebate with the teacher well they weren't having that they they observedthat when i spoke in the meetings which i did about six months too fast anywaythat uh that i was always taking on the teacher they said you never ask aquestion hmm you talk in parents and then they took to cutting me off andsaying and where were your feet when you said that and over and over and over itwas the slow kind of allowing me to see that that i was just hiding myselfbecause my a journey my my vision of everything was being led it livedentirely in my head and so it took a

couple of years of really kind of comingpretty close stuff i wouldn't say it was breaking my spirit i think the moresnowflakes among us would say that i was handled on sensitively but but dr. welshsaid that you know that one of the one of the responsibilities of an instructoris to absolutely accurately gauge the students strength and push them right tothe edge because that's where they're going to change but if you push it toohard you're gonna break their spirit and that will be counted as an eternal sinagainst you so it was a it's a teaching i've never forgotten when i've wound upin the teaching seat myself that that you have to particularly a strongspirited student you need to go at them

you can't let them get away with youknow all their enabling x' because that's why they'rethere they're there to change but you better not let your stuff get in the wayso that you get irritated with them and break them because that's blood on yourhands yeah but who by little they taught me little by little i woke up and i ifinally a couple of people in the world who were senior leaders with very hugehearts came to my rescue and they they stood beside me and while not letting meoff the hook with with my kind of idiotic behavior they helped me find away to something else and to recognize something qualitatively different in meand they they never gave up on me and

really to them i oh my there myspiritual mama and daddy and i i owe them a heart that's boundless so you youmentioned being aware of your feet a lot and i know what you were alluding to ithink i don't have a intimate knowledge with gorgeous teaching but as iunderstand it it involves a sort of a constant or intermittent remembrance ofthe self and attentiveness to what you're actually doing and i've heard acriticism of it which is that you know it can make your speech and behaviorsomewhat stunted or unnatural because you're dividing your attention betweenwhat you're doing and trying to remember the self and the criticism i've heard isand the the elaboration of that is that

the self is not something to be lived bya conscious intentional remembrance throughout the day any more thancleanliness is achieved after your morning shower by remembering the showerso how would you address those criticisms well i would say that thatthey're quite right that a certain misinterpretation and even miss teachingof the word can wind you up that way the the important thing that that's oftengets lost sight of is that gurdjieff taught 3 centered awareness he said thatthere's a middle there's the the intellectual center which is actuallythe slowest of the three centers but it's counterbalanced by an emotionalcenter which is not synonymous with a

heart it's sort of the joint sympatheticresonance of the neural system and then there's a moving center which is not thegut but is really intelligence in motion it's kind of the intelligence thatallows you to ski down a hill or know how to put your feet when you're walkingdown stairs without watching each one of them faster than the mind and so thewhole remembering your feet was really about bringing your moving's that areonline with it's genius which is sensation and using attention to callsensation into your being which brings you into the now and the idea was thatmost of us in the west are living a mental you know reductionism ourselvesso and and the work can be criticized in

that way when you try to rememberyourself with your with your intellectual center alone you're nevergoing to get it and you're going to do all those things those stilted ways ofthinking and i've actually taken on some people in the work so to say thatdivided attention is the wrong word you we're not dividing our attention i thinkthat's a missed teaching we're expanding our attention out of a core center whichis somewhere around the solar plexus so that it can gradually hold more and morein a unified field but a lot of the early work teaching was having peopleessentially multitask using their mind and and when people understand thatthey've got exactly what your friend is

is complaining about but that was thatwas actually marty he said that when he first in teaching at england in theearly sixties people would come and they'd get up on the microphone andthere was they would say a word and pause and say another word and pause andhe said why are you talking that way and i know we've been told to remember theself he said well no no no the self isn't lived by this kind of mentalgymnastics it's much more yeah exactly yeah exactly but when when you can fillup the body in the being with sensation and the i amreverberates from that deepest core of your heart it's different yes but butyeah that drove me out of the work a lot

because it's very very easily turns intothis sort of stilted mental gymnastics and i was i was actually running intothat in certain corners of the work and my first way and it was only my my mywork parents who pulled me out of that and the gurjeet movements if youactually do them are intended to help you get through that barrier of overmentalizing the work and a lot of the british folks particularly didn't havemovements right before them a lot of the british groups articulated themselveswithout that part in it and if you lose that piece the the gurdjieff work is inmy opinion defenseless against becoming simply a mental black hole yeah okay andsince we're on this topic let's just

talk a little bit about witnessing for aminute there's i think it's treated nicely in your book a lot of timeswitnessing is discussed as something one should try to do in some intentional wayand i always counter that no it's something you are in other words there'sa depth of silence that can be come your you know your twenty-four-seven realityand when it does then naturally there's a sense that you are not in the doeryou're not engaged in action action is going on but you reside in this silencewould you concur with that or would you actually advocate some sort of practiceor intentional witnessing well i i think witnessing is really a gamut yeah youknow and it goes from on the one hand

it's it goes from just just counting tothree before you react you know towards towards being able i think there's someelementary witnessing that goes on in all psychotherapy as you can detachenough from your life to look at it and see it but we're witnessing and i thinkit's companion piece mindfulness tend to get stuck in our culture is it's assumedto be a men full activity and and people when youask them where's your witness they will point to sort of like in the back oftheir head i think that's totally wrong i think that what the what the easternmystics of the of the western church the eastern orthodox discovered was thatwitnessing is what naturally happens

when your mind is in your heart in otherwords when it's carried lower and it has nothing to do as i am watching myselfhave an angry reaction you know to slow you know that that but it really is itbecomes progressively imprinted in one as you move beyond using the mentalsystem to try to generate your identity because it just can't it it's beyond thecapacities of that system here's a line from your book incidentally when i sayyour book i'm referring to this one which i've been reading the heart ofcentering prayer yes yep here it is doing books you say that regardingwitnessing it does not need to be paid attention to because it itself is thesubject of attention i like yeah

so it's not because if it were somethingyou had to pay attention to then it's a thing you know and things come and gobut we're talking about the very subject of all attention which is abiding whichis a continuum it's it's not an object you can sort of try to keep in yourawareness as you attend to other objects exactly exactly and that's that's that'sit it's that overly metallized understanding and and that's what youwere complaining about her and mari she was complaining about a people thepeople on the gertie for it they were doing this mental witnessing i amremembering myself you can't do it from there yeah it just doesn't work it's thebest you can come up on is reflecting on

your being not coinciding with it youever hear that line from one of the apologize that says to birds sit in theself-same tree one eats of the sweet fruit of the tree and the other eats notjust sort of watches or observe it's a beautiful little poetic that'sgreat yeah it's lovely yeah it slowly jakub burma has one very much like it hesays their two eyes and the soul he says one is focused on the outer world andthe other one is always holding in god hmm you know nice all right maybe weshould get on to centering prayer sure yeah how did you first envelope on thatum i first heard about it in 1987 when i was out at newcombe modely hermitagethere that that fabled benedictine

monastery perched above the pacificocean and one of the women who was a sort of long-term resident that in thecommunity at that point had been reading thomas keating's open mind open heartand so i had a look at it and thought wow this looks good uh you know that anan effort to sort of describe and and and and and develop a pattern ofmeditation based on christian reference points so i i took a look at the bookand i i played with it read it practiced it a little and then you knowsort of put it away and then got called back to it by a completely huhsort of circuitous route in 1989 paraboloid magazine contacted me thatthey were they were putting together a

25th anniversary issue and theybasically asked me do you know anybody anybody any christian you know who wecould put in an issue on non-duality with the dalai lama who wouldn't make afool of himself so i said well maybe thomas keating i didn't really knowthomas keating from adam at that point i just know he'd written a book onmeditation and i also knew he had a brief cameo appearance and in jacobneedleman's lost christianity so they said okay good thomas it is youinterviewing so i i trooped out warwick new york where he was doing a weekend atthe the then centering prayer you know center ashram you could call itthe center for contemplative living did

the interview and in the part of theinterview he said well you should come to snowmass and study it so i signed upfor a 10-day intensive and so in in may 1990 i met centering prayer for thefirst time okay what's your understanding of howcentering prayer originated well i you know the the same information thateverybody else has that that that thomas keating who was at that time abbot ofst. st. joseph's monastery about an hour outside of boston began to becomenoticing it recently noticed an increasingly distressed by the fact thatthat westerners of essentially catholic background christian and usuallycatholic christian were deserting the

faith on mass towards easternmeditational practices and thomas had also been well aware and had alreadybeen working with a month son realizing that that contemplation in the christiancommunity had just gotten rigidify dand essentially non-existent so he he wentinto a chapter meeting a meeting of his monks one day and offered them hisfamous challenge is it not possible to put the whole of the christiancontemplative tradition in an updated format that could be used by modernpeople in the world okay what were year with that you know that was oh somewherearound nineteen seventy four seventy five and one of the months in thecommunity father william menninger took

him up on the challenge went back to aclassic of christian you know the western christianity anonymous bookcalled the cloud of unknowing and they're found in the middle of chapterseven what became the essence of the method of centering prayer that thatsays if you would have not a lot of words are needed in prayer but if youwould have the whole of your aim your naked intent- god put into a single word pick a short word of one syllable clasp it toyou and and never let go of it and ride with it as your shield and buckler sothat became the scriptural basis for the beginning of centering prayer okaythere's a little bit of a back story if

you don't mind my telling it fills insome interesting aspects of this story so in the summer of 1971margie mahesh yogi came to the university of massachusetts at amherstfor six weeks and first he taught a one month course and then he taught a twoweek symposium where buckminster fuller and hans selye and people like that cameto speak and i was there for the whole thing and several of the monks fromjames st. joseph you know came over let's check to check out what's going onhere and they ended up learning tm and ultimately 80 of them ended up learningtm a pretty much everybody at st. joseph's was doing it and they were thiswent on for a number of years and

they're happily meditating along andseveral several of them became what are called checkers which is involvesmemorizing about 30 pages worth of notes on the fine mechanics of meditation soas to be able to correct somebody's practice if they begin to get off off ofit you know and begin to get unnatural with it or something and you know baselpennington came out here to iowa to visit and so on then around 77 or 78marshy came out with what he called the tm city program which was based on theyoga sutras of patanjali which purported to be able to teach people to levitateand things like that and father keating was like oh my god this is going to thisis going too far the tm movements going

to be destroyed by this and i suspectthat even prior to that they were looking into like is there somethinglike this in our own tradition but i think at that point he decided to severinvolvement with any tm related thing and just let's just let's just do thisin our own tradition and find the source of it and as you say the cloud ofunknowing has something that sounds remarkably similar in its mechanics andso anyway that that's kind of a little interesting story of the way it went andi'm not saying that this was wrong i'm not passing a value judgement i thinkso many people have benefited from centering prayer who would never havebeen interested in tm + tn i'm not

suggesting either that centering prayeris some alteration or bastardization or something of centering prayer i'm sureit's totally legitimate its own right i'm just offering that as a littleinteresting aside and perhaps you and i can compare the mechanics of these typesof meditation and other types of meditation as well in the course of thisdiscussion i would be really interested in that and of course the earlyleadership in intimacies movements and template of outreach came very stronglyout of tm gus riding er was a big tm person tom paul who's on the board eventoday came out from a teen and background so tm was one of the majorinputs for sure in the in the practice

and as well as thomas was getting sortof shouldered on the other side by by some buddhist roshi's that he introducedto the monastery he had an intuitive sense like i mean i've known thomas nowfor thirty years or so and he has an intuitive genius for the inter spiritualdimension it's still as he as he saw as he's now sort of midway through his 90sit's emerging as the one great love of his life the inner spiritualunderstanding of non-duality but even back when he was an abbot in the in thelate 60s early 70s he sent so keenly that the christianity had gotten stuckand it had become overly doctrinal and contentious and legalistic and that thishad something to do with its failure to

access what had once upon a time beenaccessed in christianity under the rubric contemplation somehow that had toget kick-started again contemplation by the time thomas became abbot had becomesome of the eagle scout of the contemplative life and it was such ahigh and mighty thing that nobody could do it and if you felt you were called toit it was a proof that you weren't ready for it because only pride could make youfeel like you were called to it so it just wasn't happening andpeople were stuck in their minds and there wasn't any going deeper so heintuitively were this open open spirit that he has reached out to what wasavailable and he grabbed him and he

grabbed the roush's he he was doingcones cohen's study at st. joseph's for years while this all kinda there wasthere was water in the well down there and he was gonna find it i i'd love totalk to you more about techniques because i've heard different stories buti know that one of the things that's happened in thomas slowly over thecourse of his own teaching is to move centering prayer progressively away frombeing a mantra based practice to be away from being an awareness based practiceto finally being what he calls a receptive practice what i call asurrender practice and i suspect there were some incremental notches in thatbut he's where he's where he's wound up

with centering prayer for metoday i think the closest equivalent is he's come to understand it it's actuallyis actually as ugh chin but i know he didn't start out that way and i'd beinterested in seeing where he what your piece of the back story is about howhe's moved that way well there's some interesting and subtle distinctions herepronoun connect my pronunciation but you at some point you talk about the catyphattic and now what was the other one a placenta pathetici was chuckling i hear calif attic cuz we used to have a catyph attic but shedied she was kind of fat and got old but um and explain briefly what those arebecause this relates to what i want to

say okaythis is all doll distinctions that have been around since the third or fourthcentury and christian spiritual theology catyph attic is is essentially prayermeditation practice that engages the faculties faculties are you know thethomas aquinas define um is our will reasonemotion in other words that prayer that works through the normal access routesof our mind apathetic in some sense transcends thoseusual middle rational faculties and therefore is often described as the vianegativity the prayer of emptiness the prayer of no form i think that's amisunderstanding i think it's it looks

like no forum from the basis of thekatha fatik faculties which are much more coarse but it's it's a prayer thatreally engages the subtle you know higher noetic intellect of capacities ofthe of the of the of consciousness so so in that sense centering prayer is apathetic pop prayer but you have to be careful with them because i think peopledon't understand the terms they often think that that apophatic prayer meansyou're worshiping silence or you're worshiping emptiness it's it's not thatyou're just switching to a more subtle operating system yeahnow when i heard you discuss those terms one thing i inferred correct me if i'mwrong is that the katha fatik is more of

a willful doing intentional individualapplying some kind of effort kind of thing whereas apophatic is more of asurrendering letting the divine intelligence letting natural tendenciesrun the show is that true or sure yeah well i i would say that's probably abyproduct okay i think that what happens is it's not so much the direction of theaction but the sense of where the self is located in katha phonetic prayeryou're really operating out of what you i would call your your phenomenal usualsense of a small self would i am praying i am acting i am receiving bliss fromgod i am surrendering i am having visions but it's still coming back tothat finite self in a pathetic prayer

whatmakes it possible to step into that larger more space yourself is thatyou're simultaneously stepping into a witnessing presence which is not doingbut being in the way that you've talked about before it's your your your youyour stepping into a fundamental different system for perceiving realityand the finite self is not at the heart of it and so it will appear then thatit's surrendered it will appear that it's that it's letting be but i thinkthis is because it's a self for that there isn't always holding on to itsboundaries and so things flow with much more graciousness and give-and-take soyou can say that if meditation is going

well you might very well move fromcatyph attic to apophatic in the course of a single meditation pretty much everytime you do it i think you have to yeah i mean if you're not you're notmeditating at least you're using some of the cat fat ik forms of meditation andyou know visualization is catyph attic meditation petitioners catyph atticmeditation there's a lot of forms of it and many many forms of meditation andpathways will start in catyph attic and move towards apathetic okay but at somepoint when you move in debt when you think and those deeper waters of themind as the buddhists like to say you're moving into the realm of the apophaticokay good the reason i wanted to offer

that little prelude you mentioned mantrameditation and pasta and that kind of thing and there's a real subtledistinction between focusing on the breath or a mantra or something likethat as as sort of and something that is important that you should keep in yourmind versus doing it in such a gentle subtle way that it's not really theprimary intention really the primary intention is a surrender into silenceand the amount or whatever just serves as asort of a catalyst or an aid to that do you know what i meanyeah i think so yeah and it it helps me said i've gotten conflicting reportsabout you know i never practiced

stamping myself i started right fromcentering prayer but some people say that in in in tm the mantra is recitedyou know consistently as a touchstone for attention the year giving your monzaand you you recite it others say no you only use it discreetly when you realizeyou're being pulled to a thought and that that's what thomas keating pickedup from tm so if you could clarify that for me sure my own history first youstart by just closing your eyes and doing nothing for half a minute justreally letting yourself settle down and then you know when we close when youclose the eyes like that naturally you do settle down you feel some quietnesssome silence and then you know thoughts

may be coming as they always do in lifeand if you think about it you know you don't really make an effort to thinkthoughts they just they just pop into the mind you don't try to articulatethem clearly you don't kind of persist in repeating them or keep on rememberingthey just they just come up as a gentle impulse and they go so then havingsettled into that silence one begins to think the mantra as effortlessly as youthink any other thought which is to say it's a faint idea just subtle in boltsand and you don't try to persist and repeating it or keep on remembering it'sjust it's a subtle impulse and immediately it begins not immediatelybut maybe amelia it soon begins to

become more refined more subtle moremore delicate more and your what you're actually doing is kind of tracing athought back to its source automatically not intentionally not like okay where isthis source but just each repetition takes you to a sort of a subtler stepsubtler steps other steps oh so and then the thing will just disappear at acertain point and you're left with pure awareness no mantra no thought so that'sa brief explanation yeah great that makes a lot of sense to me becausethomas had the devil of the time you know i think it really plagued him forthe whole night atheists to try and explain what washappening you know that uh and of course

you know he got nailed for it severaltimes because it sounds like as he puts it out that that you start out sayingyour sacred word and then that's the way the early explanation is used to go whenyou realize you're no longer being attracted to thoughts it's okay to letgo of your sacred word but of course there's a catch-22 built right in therebecause how can you decide to let go of your sacred word without that being athought and yes so people nailed him at the start saying that he was teaching amagic practice that shifted to an awareness practice and then shifted backto a mantra practice and what he was trying to do is talk about this subtlersubtler dimension of letting it letting

it fade but there weren't really wordsthat he could put together that that conveyed that yeah well there's a niceprinciple here which is that the mind has a natural tendency to seek a fieldof greater happiness and these subtler dimensions are more gratifying than morecharming and so if if one can successfully begin to move in thatdirection then it's just the the mind is drawn effortlessly toward the greatercharm so there's this if there's no effort involved also well i rememberwhen i talked to dr. keating that he had a brilliant and clear explanation of theoutward stroke of meditation as being the sort of natural sort of bubbling upof impressions that had accumulated and

that the the sort of the deep inwardstroke of meditation is conducive to the unwinding of those impressions in thatas they unwind one begins to have thoughts and that that's what kind ofbrings you out and so there's nothing wrong with having thoughts it's just asnatural as as anything else but then once i don't mean to be talking so muchhere people hopefully excuse me for going on like this but youknow how it is when you can have a thought and you don't even know you'rehaving it for quite a while and then maybe after five minutes or two minutesor whatever you realize yeah i've been thinking of thought all this timeyeah yeah and so the reason for that is

that the sort of the thought is intenseenough that it totally grips the attention it totally consumes theattention there's not even room for a second thought which is oh i'm having athought you're just absorbed in that thought anduntil the impression that's causing the thought has dissipated to the pointwhere the thought itself becomes sorta more diaphanous and then you realize ohi'm off and and then that's time for another inward stroke yeah yeah yeahi've been working with that myself you know i was trying to add my own kind ofcontribution that's to sorting out the confusion around this subtle state froma different point of view and i i

started with the idea in the that thatcentering prayer needs to be grounded theologically in the whole motion ofkenosis or letting go because people were people were we're you know upsetabout centering prayer and stiller thomas takes a lot of cat flak becausepeople say oh he's just teaching a christianized tm and and that he's notteaching anything that jesus taught he's not teaching anything that will help youin christian practice and so i i realized it was going to be reallyimportant to get a a theological basis under that that was indigenous leechristian and realized that that what centering prayer is really looking atand concentrating on is the act of

letting go of a thought you know andrather than trying to to describe the thing in terms of subtle attractions andmore subtle thoughts or more subtle states to put it in terms of when youlet go of something when you break that subject object attention you are atleast temporarily for a nanosecond tasting an object with awareness andthat what really stabilizes the field of consciousness in those other states isbeing able to hold objects awareness which i see as an incremental learnedskill that that centering prayer teaches so i went from from putting the kenosispiece in which i did in my first book on centering prayer- then taking it through the cloud of

unknowing to the attention piece and thecloud of a nice clear understanding that when the attention is in theconfiguration of focused on any object no matter how holy your mind is isessentially not in the heart it's it's essentially it's essentially caught in aform which is lower than contemplation so so my two contributions in thedirection of this 20 year conundrum have been canosa sand object lists awarenessand i i think thomas is moving along a parallel track on those things as he'sgradually as he's gradually learning to language talking about an attraction areceptive attraction to more and more subtle states but i think it's not somuch a batter of attraction as a matter

of graciously letting go the of theattention and a certain configuration yeah well you can't sort of storm thegates of heaven you know i mean it has to be a letting go as a matter fact ihave an interesting experience in reading your books i've been meditatingfor over forty nine years and yet it's like it's like it can always befine-tuned you can always sort of you know how are you're driving a car you'realways making these subtle adjustments to the steering wheel without eventhinking about it and and and you know perhaps if you're not perhaps you coulddrift off a little bit too much and you start hitting the rumble bars on theside of the road so you come back well

even after many years of meditation it'sit's possible for sort of this subtle sort of effort or subtle unnaturalnessor something to either creep into the practice or to have been there all alongand you didn't realize it anyway when i we're gonna started reading your book itlike shifted me to an even more innocent thing and this this whole emphasis onjust completely letting go and and just resting in god you had that nice quotefrom father keating about the nun who said she had 10,000 thoughts in hermeditation he said beautiful ten thousand opportunities to return to godso i don't know it just had this subtle influence on me which i really hated andactually made my meditation even better

yeah that's great you know i mean somany of the problems we have a meditation or youstilted miss entering anything i really only solved until that level of selfgood can be seen and laughingly looked at you know as long as i'm meditating toimprove my meditation to have better periods you know any of that kind ofstuff it's gonna wind up just kind of bending you over backwards yeah and it'slike you could be beyond that but there's no you left anymore yeah i'veactually had people say to me that when they finally awoke to somehow somewhatof an enlightened state whatever state you want to call it where where god wasreally in the driver's seat for the

first time it's a they and then theymeditated they feel like i've never never done this correctly now i'm doingit for the first time in my life in a maybe because i'm not doing it anymoreand this is the way it should be yeah yeah well i would say that i'm still c+meditator after all these years but sometimes i sit down there and you knowi'm not meditating anymore i simply i'm entering a state of total connectedaliveness all right so where'd this come from youknow this is all to be the fruits of being a good meditation and you knowwhat you were saying a minute ago about how did you phrase it about sort ofmaintaining object is a object less

awareness or something yeah i reallythink and i'd like your comments on this that ultimately it's not something thatthere should be any that there would need to be any sort of intentionality tomaintain it should become as automatic this breathing like a great athlete whodoesn't think okay now this is how i'm supposed to move my tennis racquet youknow but they just do it it's so engrained that it just is spontaneousexactly exactly it's it's carried the other systems take over and it met getsinto the moving center and it gets into the emotional center and you settle downand you do you do it yeah that that i one of the wonderfulthings that happened to me when i was

working with the book as i got to spendsome time with a with a with a neuro meditation guy at scripps college whosethomas keating's and we were able to look at pictures of people meditating ofpeople doing centering prayer of advanced tibetan practitioners doingsuction and and we we saw that in the advanced meditators of the you know inboth both of those pads now what you see neurologically is this drop this dropinto some you know that is simultaneously an activation of thehippocampus deep memory but there's this very clear you know it's not there's noeffort inning there's no will there's no tuning up parietal lobes or anythingit's like you know you fall into the all

and and i feel that of after years now30 30 years or more centering curving my practice i certainly feel that as a as akinetic motion within me what do you mean by that kinetic motion well you yousit down on your cushion a room deeply embodied yeah yeah and you probably alsofind that even when you're not on your cushion even when you're running througha busy airport or something there is a deep silence that's been establishedthrough all that meditation and automatically it's just there with youyeah yeah or the meditation as a quick device step to remind you of the isnessthat is yeah and since you mentioned the physiology i would suggest that allthese 30 odd years of practice has been

you know transforming yourneurophysiology your brain there's plenty of research on that that you knowneuroplasticity sometimes people refer to meditation as brain sculpting reallydoes change well that certainly has been my understanding i think you'rebasically upgrading the operating system eventually installing a whole differentway of making connections and it's only when you installthat that human beings are are good for solving you know some of the problemsthat beset humanity because the the device of separating measuring comparingbrain that we normally is to figure our way around the planet has outlived itssurvival value with long sense mhm and

so the that the capacity to graduallydevelop holistic perception and and in the classic days of christianitycontemplation didn't it it wasn't sunyata it wasn't emptiness that's beena modern spin on it it was i quote knowledge impregnated with love it was akind of luminous knowing unknowing from if you want to if you want to translateimpregnated with love and a more modern kind of quantum physics language itsknowledge within the felt sense of the relational whole that you're a part ofit's a deep it's a deep sense of collected holistic empowering knowingand that is a has always been seen as a higher intellect 'iv capacity and noeticcapacity not a a listening to god in

silence not an emptiness path so and ithink we need to get that understanding back because you you certainly have toturn off the brain that's thinking according to the old operating systemsthat brain is just getting in the way but i think the idea that a patheticprayer is content less is a reductionism of our era i think it's a mistake ithink there's a subtly imprinted coherence that all the great mysticshave acknowledged and are striving for and which is really necessary in our owntimes yeah if i understand you correctly i think what you're saying is that whenwe enter into deep states it's not just emptiness or nothingness but there's awe we sort of dive into the home of all

knowledge we could say i mean they'reexactly there's yeah i mean it's even said that the whole the vedas i thinkthis may be true jewish tradition - but that they werenot written or anything they were cognizant that they actually exist insome kind of deep deep you know fundamental level of creation and thatthose who were able to do so or actually discovered them there and then justspoke them out but yeah yeah yeah that all makes sense to me i mean you youenter into a foundational you know causal ground through which throughwhich the patterns are continuously replicating yours themselvesand it's not a matter of content you

can't come out of that with any sort ofthing you know that you didn't know before that that what you need to knowwill be given to you in a moment in a situation but but it is a matter ofhanging out in a wellspring and just sort of understanding that that your ownmind and your conscious perceptive system is part of is not separate fromour different from a greater comfort comprehension a greater coherent fieldand and just to sort of become aware of that is to send you out back into theworld with a deeper sense of of connectedness to the stream you'reflowing from yeah i don't know if i would agree that you don't come out ofyou won't come out of there with

something you didn't know before becausei think that you know mozart and einstein and many great people have feltthat they didn't sort of dream up their creation they just kind of cog nice titsyou know wrote it down or thought you know expressed it in some form i thinkthat deep inspiration and insight and wisdom can often be mined you know if inthat interior state yeah yeah yeah i mean it'sit certainly is correct that products emerge from them but they're they're nolonger your products i mean that just as you said mozart didn't say oh i've justgotten this wonderful idea from hanging out in the country akashic records ithink i'll you know it was more like it

just flows through you in the momentyeah exactly i'm like a scribe or something of some deeper way yeah it isand it isn't even a chair because it there's part of you thatshuts up and there's another part of you it flows through your own particularityi mean mozart wouldn't have sounded like mozart if it had been de token right butbut but it's it's effortless and i would say it's always situational i mean thewhole idea of you getting visions i mean visions happens sometimes but i'm muchmore interested in the visions that happen on location as you're suddenly ina place and you understand that well back to the very first conversation wehad you can't push the student any

further than this or you're going todestroy her and you just see that and you don't know how you see itbut but you see that you see from someplace that you can't usually seefrom that's the kind of practical vision visionary skill that i'm much interestedinterested in yeah and something that's been in the back of my mind that youmentioned earlier that this current conversation reminds me of is just thethe idea that you know you mentioned how you were kind of turned off tochristianity originally because it seems so rigid and doctrinaire and you knowstifling and so on it's like i would say that this has been a problem with everyreligion that and there's a there's an

inner core to every religion that properthat its founder was likely living as a you know daily reality and that overtime that that core is lost that that deeper dimension is lost and so thereligion becomes like a dead body without the spirit which yeah animates alive body and so there's nothing necessarily wrong with the outer formsof religion but without their foundation and inner experience they becomecalcified and problems like so many ways exactly and and and i think thomaskeating very very correctly intuited that that meditation or contemplationwas the sap was the flowing fluid that would would would restore the body ofchristianity out of its calcification

and back to life and i think he's ahundred percent correct in the and and that the practice really justopens up capacities to comprehend the gospel which is the non-dual teaching ina non dual way and without it you don't have a prayer so his his sense that thatsomehow we had made this so high in so mighty that nobody was doing it was justabsolutely locking christianity at its lowest level of expression mmm and thatthis you know and every religious tradition will have a lowest low levelof expression it's always going to happen but when you have only yourlowest level of expression you don't have a living religion anymoreyeah you know how it is that when people

kind of get on to a spiritual practiceand really begin to make some progress they begin to see realize not only thetruth of their own religion if they have oneit begins to make sense to them for the first time but they begin to look atother religions say oh yeah they were saying the same thing just in a slightlydifferent way in a different culture and so on exactly yeah exactly and untilthat happens you know i think that really you have to break through to theplace where you see that every religious path all the great sacred traditions areare absolutely precious and necessary and irreplaceable like colors in therainbow if you lost one of them but the

ability to understand what's in theinvisible light spectrum of god would be diminishedso that and i've also found for a lot of people that they will leave christianityfor example just you know just because it's still for many of us our religionof upbringing leave with a lot of wounds go to another path embrace it and becomevery very adept of that path but you find that until they can come back andheal the ones that they've had in their religion of version it's going to limittheir progress on the path they've they've chosen mmm they always hit astop place that's not going to be resolved within that path it's going tobe resolved by going back to where the

issue was in their in their christianityworking through that so they're genuinely forgiving of the hurt thathappens and then they're liberated they can be a buddhist or a sufi againbut the rigidity always enters at the same level yeah yeah they could be ahinge ooh yeah exactly where the jew is still aching there would something oftenthe perfect-10 do expression yeah you know it occurred to me as you werespeaking that just as father keating and his associates discovered centeringprayer in their own tradition as a very effective technique for unfolding thethis experiential dimension that the religions words had been referring tothere may be some such thing in every

religion if it could be found i meanislam and and hit well hinduism has a lot of pretty active already and so doesbuddhism but judaism and the you know every religion must have these sort ofhidden keys if they can only be exhumed and and properly understood yeah exactlyand along with a kerchief work that another of the very great gifts thatcame to me and my in my practice of christianity has been time spentseriously working was with some rifai sufis mostly in british columbia but tohave the to have the touch of that whole wonderful sufi presence which which ithink took the transmission of the living heart of christ and kept it alivein in almost more pure form than any

other place without ever acknowledgingit as christ or any of that it just it was able to open for me andreally engage the emotional center in a way that had never happened before so soagain i've seen many times how the the great traditions bootstrap each otherand realize that they have to pull each other up because we're all you knowwe're all needed either we're all needed or none of us are needed we sink or swimtogether yeah and you know what i often do is when i think along these lines isi think of the fact that you know according to nasa with the keplertelescope and so on they're they're probably as many earth-like planetsthe universe is there are grains of sand

and the earth that it's rather small tojust think of the religions that we know about i mean i think that there areprobably trillions of religions there throughout the universeall of them referring basically to the same thing whether they know it or notand you know all of them potentially viable paths to that you know innerreality yeah i think so that keeps you humble as you gaze at the stars it doesthat's my screensaver on my computer is always pictures of galaxies keeps thingsin perspective they take a little interlude here andask a few questions that people have sent in and then i have plenty more iwanna talk about and and from your side

you know if anything comes to mind justas i'm doing as we speak if anything comes to mind that i'm not thinking ofto ask you just pop it out you know and we'll get into it thank youso here's a few questions so we were just talking about hinduism and stuff afellow named david laws from hampshire england wants to know what do you makeof the evidence for reincarnation and cases of people seeming to rememberpeople in this life from past lives well you know i would have to say it's upit's never been useful to my own work and and i know that there is a you knowthat that some of the early christians seem to the origin in particular seem tobe very attracted to this one of the

reasons it hasn't been been useful to meis because i think that in the west we tend to get it and in dumb lout dumbdown versions but the eye that continues to be born the eye that remembersomething the eye that always seems to me like a more finite eye it's like ijust keep having cereal lives and my senses that we get this one shot in thisform and that the continuation which is clear goes on in other forms and otherdimensions and that that that the idea of reincarnation is probably a necessarybook in to karma but that if you you can cut through thewhole thing and write and you know it's it's i'm not going to say that theteachings about coming back and finding

the tulku karmapa are not truethat i think that we we live these things into reality in the fields thatwe live in and i think in a buddhist reality reincarnation has a very verydifferent flavor to it than it does in a western reality but for my my work ifound that it's much more useful to think about that then i'm out of thisfinite form when i'm out of it and that that what has has retained any kind ofviable solidity in another dimension will will will either do that or not doit if it doesn't you know i'm dissolved back into primitive elements again ifsomething sustains it sustains but i don't think there's any need forcontinuance

certainly not my continuance i irealized one day walking up a path i'd sold popped into my head oh i coulddisappear and god and the cosmos would still be fine mmm i thought what arelief so so i would say i basically passed on that question i like i'mcertainly in no basis to to to judge whether i and any august way deem ittrue or false it just hasn't been one of the the principles i find useful to workwith okay sure fair enough i would add thatyou know whatever the reality of the universe may be it's not and dependentupon us for its existence and you know there isn't like buddhist reality andhindu reality and you know any more than

there's buddhist gravity and hindugravity the universe probably works the way it works and if there's if there'sreincarnation there is if there isn't there isn't i'm not sure we get tochoose yeah well i think we we call endedbeing as society's you know sheldrake called him more for genetic fields butwhen you have a group of people really poised around and feeding energy intoand drawing meaning from a practice it does live it into existence a little bitthat makes it more real for them or more vivid in their away yeah and i don'tthink this is entirely just subjectivity i mean there's a there's a eucharisticreality that up you know for the for the

believing christians in the spherechrist does literally become you know present in the body and the bread andwhen you're in a sphere where nobody thinks that way and they think it'sgreat easier toto mystic you know it doesn't come through with that kind ofclout so i i think that there is a feedback loop between you know call itfunky funky heisenberg but that where the where the where the perceiver iscoming from is part of the dimension of the field explain that less sentencewell that uh that the deep beliefs that we create even if they are totally falseand dangerous become part of lived reality i mean to take it to to take itto up perhaps political and dangerous

extreme now we've seen such a rise inthis country of racism and bigotry p just in the past you know few monthsbecause the thing is out there it's become what valentine tom berg called anegregore it it begins to have psychic critical mass and then it easilydownloads those forms in people's minds and the more they're into it the morethey live it into existence so so i think there's a need to be responsibleand responsive to the to the thought-form climates in which you liverealizing that there there may not be such a thing as a universal objectivescientific newtonian truth which is applicable everywhere and you know and ithink that that the that when i was in

bhutan and spent some time with putinis buddhism the configurations the the angry day it is the all of that sownstuff that doesn't have much meaning in my western worldi had a felt sense of depth and coherence because it was on location andi think we do need to factor in the particularity of each stream i think isee what you mean so it's like if enough people are believing a thing andthinking along certain lines it it sort of gives it a bit of some kind of areality like in ghostbusters you know towards the end when they were up on thetop of that building and they they said you know don't think of your worst fearor whatever it was and one of them

thought of the stay puft marshmallow manand he came marching along he kind of gave it a form yeah we gotta be carefulabout our thought forms and what we call into existence and what we work withbecause we can whether or not something is true it can be real yeah but i wouldalso say that the well it's real to a point i mean it's it's relative so it'sa sort of a manifestation or a fabrication of collective consciousnessbut i would i would posit that there were deeper truths that are beyond thewhims of human understanding and and belief and attention that sort of youknow more there's an old saying that which is closest to truth lasts longestso yeah and i'm sure there's something

in plato or whatever about this but thatwhen you really get down to the bedrock of reality there there are certainfundamental laws of nature that are immutable and that are not subservientto our understanding or whims yeah yeah but i you know on the other because ourour fascism and hostility could wind up blowing up the planet of course yeah youknow so that there is certain there is a certain importance in being carefulcareful with those sort of transient realities we create yeah absolutely itotally agree i don't think two points we're making orcontradict yeah are different yeah i don't eithergood well i think we've beat that one to

death yeah and any of these things ifpeople find this thought-provoking and want to pop a question and go to theupcoming interviews page on deathcap and there's a form at the bottom of the pagehere's a question from a julie hansie who wants to know does cynthia believethat breathing and practices to open the heart help prepare the body for theexperience of being aware of the divine's indwelling yes and no i mean ithink that embodiment is really really important i mean i think embodiment wasthe neglected piece of the particularly the christian tradition for many manymany million of many many centuries and so i would say that embodiment is goodbut i i'm a little bit reluctant about

this preparing the way from the thing itbecause it already sets it up on the i am doing this i am getting better thereis a goal i'm going to get there and the point is that the divineintimacy can come screeching in and out of anywhere and all of a sudden you'reyou know your coffee log you're sleep-deprived you're in the middle of afreeway in a traffic jam you're late for your appointment and boom all of asudden for some reason you have no idea where it came fromyou're in the heart of the divine intimacy so that i think it's reallyimportant to take our practices as fruits and gratitude of the oneness asas as avenues of expressing our joy of

participation rather than a means ofacquiring something or making it better but can't we create the conditions thatare more conducive to a deep practice for instance if you've been up all nightyou know partying and and you know drinking or whatever and in the morningyou have a couple of cups of coffee to wake yourself up and then you sit downto the centering prayer it's not going to go as well as if you had you knowtaking better care of body so i mean all these practices ofyoga and this and that aren't they meant to sort of just culture the physiologyto to give us a bit more of an advantage in terms of clarity of experience well iwould disagree with that and i've been

incorrect politically incorrect foryears but i'm often i've often had friends who i we were sitting down andmeditate one day with some dear friends of mine in toronto and just as we weresitting down the phone rang and it was an angry person running where theelectrical bill was and threatening to disconnect and he hung up the phone in afury and i said i thought were meditating he says how can you tomeditate now where do i calm down but the idea of trying to start byphysically inducing a calm state or a deep state or a preferred state and thenmeditating is i think a backwards understanding of meditation and it's avery powerful and common one and it may

be the team and the yoga movement havecontributed it to it but we tend to think that meditation is about optimalstates and i don't think that has anything to do with optimal states ithink it has to do with with the instant timelesscausal connection of consciousness to consciousness and i not only believethat have experienced it many times that it's it's it's often when you're in thecopo worse states that that meditation becomes the most powerful the most fullycontrasting because it doesn't operate at the level so that it's it'smanipulable by outer factors what you can increase is your subjectiveexperience of having what you have pre

identified as an optimal experience ithink it's a trap and i'm with aah-aah moss here he's got in his wonderfulwonderful book of runaway realization he names this trap so clearly that we useour embodied practices in order to acquire what we think are bettermeditation experiences deeper states per founderthat we think are closer to god and he says that's backwards and i agree withhim i think that the the realization of our unbel oneness is instantaneous andtimeless and it's out of that that we that we get motivated to take care ofour bodies and embody our bodies so that there can be a fullness fuller more morerich presence and how we carry that

instantaneous oneness out how we embodyit how we connect so i i find that the practices are the fruits of oneness andnot the means to it i agree with you and i can still play the devil's advocateeven though i'm agreeing with you i'm reminded of jerry seinfeld who's beenmeditating for decades and and he said one time that he would have continued hegot kind of burned out and stopped doing the seinfeld show and a friend of hissaid well your meditate don't you and he said yeah in the afternoon and he saidoh you should do it in the morning too and he said why i've just slept allnight i don't feel the need to do it in the morning he said during the morningit'll set you up for a better day and

and he said but the thing is in theafternoon he felt the contrast you mentioned contrast because he was tiredi'm doing stuff all day so sometimes when you're tired or things have beencrazy you the contrast can seem you know like you're giving is giving rise to amore profound experience and also acknowledge that having any kind ofexperience is really not the purpose of meditation like father keating saysyou'll you'll understand the you'll know the benefits of it from how it goes inactivity right yeah it's like fruits in life yeah exactlybut you do devote a whole chapter in your book to neurophysiology and andwe've talked about how this is a

long-term process of restructuring thefunctioning of the neurophysiology so i would say in response to julie'squestion that anything even like diet and exercise and anything else which isconducive to a healthier body healthier physiology will be conducive to theimprovement of everything whether meditation or your health or yourrelationships or anything else this is the instrument through which we doeverything exactly yeah so try to be sane trying tobe respectful and try to be grateful of it and but but don't be afraid becausebecause meditation isn't delicate and these these these subtle states althoughthey're subtle or not delicate yeah uh

and they're they're strong they're lionswell i definitely have seen meditators including long-term meditators getreally weird model mollycoddling themselves and just getting really fussyabout you know everything what they eat how they dress you know and just youknow i don't know just getting off balance so i mean you know anything canbe taken to extremes exactly when fear enters in it's adistortion hmm and the fear that if i don't meditate if i don't eat right if idon't you know if i then i will have less i mean when you went whateverpushes you into a scarcity mentality is going to be going in the it's going tointroduce one of those subtle

distortions i think yeah and that andsometimes i just blow it out for the fun of it just because because i think lifeis a forgiving partner and an exuberant partner and that and that that ourpractice really needs to be allowing us to live life more exuberantlynot with more and more guarded measured this yeah yeah so certainly meditate butthen plunge into activity don't be afraid of it yeah you know my life tothe fullest 200% exactly the question came in from a susan in new york whosays who what is jesus just now cynthia mentioned the living heart of christcould you ask her to explain what that means to her yeah well there's just alittle question oh i think what i'd like

to do is to give us other descriptiveworld description of it that i i think jesus is one of our greathuman treasures that he's one of the one of the great messengers that seems tohave been sent to the cosmos from all the in all the great religious paths topradas along to open up new horizons of consciousness and new standards ofbehavior no visions of possibility and jesus is one of the great ones i thinkhis his particular message that he that he took on cosmicallywas to model and teach non-dual consciousness in the west for the firsttime the the vision of the vision of the world if it was lived out of anundivided clear heart and he brought

that he taught that it was happening inother parts of the world there's a there's a lot of energy there's a lot ofconversation between jesus and mahayana buddhism i mean because these movementsdon't just compete they all flow across the planet and great waves but i findthat that that is a comprehensive and safe and comfortable way of talkingabout the great ones that gets us out of the usual theological things thatchristians wind up in is you see the only son of god well you can hear thedualistic thinking in that you can hear how you know the very thing that sent mescreaming for christianity the need to controlnon-dual gift with all these dualistic

categories but he's a great teacher he'sa first order guru and whether you think he's the only one that was ever thedivine the son of god or not well the one thing that is true is that firstauto gurus don't disappear from the planet they're always their first orderthe highest one definitely those which means that his presence is accessiblehere and now i mean and a lot of christians have gotten very deludedabout well he's gone and he'll be back at the end of time but every time heenters your life which can be constantly it's the end of time and so uh gotchaso he's up he's an infinite and still configured personal presence attendingshepherding aiding illuminating and

drawing the planet forward in my in myunderstanding in my you know in my trying to to extend this he would not bethe only one because this limits the vastness of the imagination of thedivine but he's the one that most immediately impacts on my sphere ofexistence i see him as operating in in deep solidarity and unitive love withother great teachers both on this planet and no doubt on other planets too to aidin the perfecting of consciousness towards its divine capacity yeah whensomebody tries to tell me the only son of god thing i tend to start talkingastronomy with them and bring out that kind of a point about the number ofearth-like planets in the universe and

then i say okay was the only son of godthen is he kind of on tour the way santa claus is on new year's eve we had allthese households in a short period and and if so i mean and if the world isonly if the universe is only six thousand years old then we've really gota problem because he's got to cover a lot of ground and he couldn't possiblystay on every planet for 33 years that but they usually hang up the phone andonce i get to that point exactly it's it's the problem with doing that thelimitless boundless nature of non-dual love with mine because we wind up makinga fool of ourselves because the categories were wired to thinking can'thandle the immensity of it yeah so we

haven't talked we haven't talked a lotabout a lot of things here that we could get into but um obviously non-duality ishot term these days there's the science and non-duality conference which you andi are going to in a couple of weeks and everybody's reading books aboutnon-duality so and i underst well let's let's have your take onnon-duality and maybe you could also allude to what father keating andrichard rohr and people like that understand it to meanwell i think the problem is when you throw this term into christianity you'redealing with the term that just didn't exist in christian self-consciousnessfor more than the last 50 years it was

just never a category that thechristians or the western christians used to compute reality so in the term iwas well they wouldn't call that non-duality oh i mean yeah i mean iexperienced exists but it was never language that way you would not youwould not have that explained in a theology classes non-duality you wouldhave it you would have have it explained as homeo the homeo usages or theconsubstantiation they didn't use the categories because the west was nevergiven to thinking about things two levels of consciousness that map thekind of map were all used to the ken wilber map the spiral dynamics map neverreally existed in the west they they

thought in terms of degrees of onenessof affective union how close can you get it was much more like a lovemaking modelthan it was a levels of consciousness level so when the term began to bepopular in the great inner spiritual dialogues of the late 20th centurypeople started scrambling to figure out what it means and i don't know any twochristians that have the same idea of it you know that that as i say richard forrichard rohr who i think has the simplest and most straight-up an easilyaccessible version of it it's the opposite of duality and what do all itis is polarize thinking is either-or thinking this are not this thinking andso for richard non-duality really begins

in and is largely about paradoxtolerance and process tolerance that you can live with things in the messiness ofbecoming that you don't have to be pushed towards one extreme or anotherso they're definitely advanced categories of of psyche but i'm not sureit would qualify for non-dual consciousness the lake and will reducingthe tone i'm not sure it wouldn't but and many people try to see non dualityor unity or unity consciousness is somehow equivalent to the highest statein the classic christian road merits which was the unit of state the state ofbeing one with god but i think that's more of a way of extending a comparisonbecause the again that the western

tradition is not filtering or is notmeasuring four levels of consciousness my mind way of using the term is perhapsunique to my own looking at it but i think you have to start looking at theoperating system that's running and how its setting up the perceptual field anddualistic consciousness runs the program of identity through differentiation it'sthe core principle of lodge and it gets the core i am me because i'm differentfrom you and and and that non dual perception doesn't structure realitythat way it grasps a pattern it sees the mandala and all its wholeness and thatdoesn't mean that it cancels out the individual parts a lot of people confusenon-duality with monism with it's all

one but it's a oneness that admits forgreat particularity great great itching in of individual bits and pieces thatare objectively different you know they're not the same but it's not losingtrack of the sonority of the whole texture it's like being able as asymphony conductor to hear all 83 different instruments playing differentparts and to know that each part is doing its own bit and at the same timeto hear and not lose track of the whole that they're all a part of so it's allthey are desired chardin and once mostly said it's a it's a paroxysm ofharmonized complexity so so we have many many different on clarity's and i thinkit's going to take a long time before

the the christian you know nish reallycomes to any sort of consensus of what we're talking about about non-dualityand how we even recognize it much less how we train for it mm-hmmwell you said earlier that in your heart of hearts you are god and if we think ofif we understand god to be omnipresent and i think that there's actuallyevidence for that if we want to look at it that way anything we look at closelywe see that amazing intelligence functioning then if god is on thepresent then can there be anything other than god and if there is anything otherthan god then he can't be omnipresent there's something that's separate anddiscrete from from that ocean of

intelligence and if that's the waythings are things are that's the way it is then that allows for all thediversity and complexity and so on that you were just mentioning well at thesame time containing all that diversity within a unified wholeness and i thinkthe whole open ocean is that one that unified wholeness can become a livingreality thus kind of reconciling the paradox and ambiguity that richardrourke talks about in fact miss argued i'm sorry dada said that used those sametwo words he said spiritual maturity is the capacity to appreciate paradox andambiguity exactly exactly and of course you know one of the most valuable toolsthat has come to us from ken wilber in

as many many valuable tools is hisarticulation of what he calls the line level differentiation that we tend tothen that we tend to mix up the level of consciousness and a religion or thelevel at which is the the truth is being articulated wea whole kind of theology of the religion and and that christianity has often beencastigated as being a dualistic religion because most of its theology has beenarticulated at a dualistic level in which god is perceived to be other andwe're that we are creatures and we are not god which means presumably there's aplace where i stop and god begins and vice-versa we're still taught to quakein our boots when the word pantheism is

mentioned and so christianity is largelyplaying out and articulating itself in dualistic spheres so people say it's adualistic religion but i think this is not the case but and i think that itmaintains a very very subtle teaching at the non-dual level but that to accessthat teaching requires you to move beyond not only the theology but thesort of perceptual mechanisms that people are doing are using to reinforcethe level that's the dominant level and whenever whenever you start to do thatyou just trigger the alarms of of people that are working at a different level imean thomas keating has been so castigated by the evangelicalfundamentalist arm of christianity they

say he's teaching buddhism they'reteaching they say he's teaching you know new age you know he's not he's teachingthe non dual level of christianity but they can't hear it yeah yeah i mean achristianity it's not a monolith the the christianity of billy graham or oralroberts is not the christianity of teresa of ã¡vila or saint john acrossthem exactly yeah exactly and i mean referring to those latter two wouldn'tyou say that if you really understood their experience and teaching you dofind non-duality yeah i haven't studied oh yeah it just doesn't it doesn't reachthe mainstream of christianity exactly exactly that they learn all the mysticsyou all find that there's a deep

apprehension of what would veryvery very clearly be cleared you know that that jim marion set the easybenchmark when he when he said and jesus is non gold because he sees noseparation between himself and god and he sees no separation between self andneighbor well i think any of the mystics would would have the same experiencesthat's non-dual christianity and i think jesus would rather have a beer or maybea wine as the case may be with with say teresa then with oral roberts i thinkprobably yeah they'd have a lot more in common yeah question came in from scottin phoenix he says i keep coming back to the simple ideas of surrender andcompassion surrender to the isness and

compassion towards myself when i failjames finley jim finley says something about love stepping out and setting thishigh bar down on the ground so that i may trip over and fall headlong into godcan my practice be this simple yep yep yep that sidebar of love on the groundis about as good as it gets and it's absolutely real good okay um all rightlet's go back to non-duality a little bit here for a bit um there's some nicelittle quotes that just jumped out at me as i was reading your book you see onethis because you see from oneness i'll just read a few of these and you justjump in if you want to comment on them that's one yeah a mind that does notneed to separate and exclude in order to

perceive reality will encounter far lessresistance in the current of life and and inflict far less violence on othersmm-hmm yep these are the cynthia sutras here non-dual does not mean renouncingthe capacity for critical thinking yeah yeah that's a big one for many peoplethat they learned again back in the 90s when i first came out to to be withthomas keating in in snowmass there was this soft i would think it's almost akind of marijuana drug culture simplicity that any attempt to use therational mind was dualism and anytime any any attempt to drive fineintellectual arguments or or done to in any use of those was dualistic and soand so what was non-dualistic was just

kind of holding hands and saying we'reall one yeah yeah i come by are kinda but it but it's still we don't realizethat many of the the finest christian thinkers and some of those ones that youname that you said i don't know who they are beatriz berto and barnbruno barnhart yeah beautiful 20th 20th century examples of non-dual thinkerswith very very finely tuned critical minds you know and we just need torealize that non-dualism is not an excuse for intellectual lazinessyeah same is true in the eastern traditions i mean shankara had abrilliant intellect and wrote are these deep penetrating commentaries with biglong sentences of you had to very be

really clear to follow the logic and soon exactly the founder of vedanta and i mean albany how did you pronounce hisname ah being a gupta who is one of the founder of kashmir shaivismsame thing brilliant intellect so they're just no no conflict and you knowit doesn't living non duality does not necessarily mean dumbing it down on theunderstanding level intellectual level exactly exactly my my metaphor i usethis many times but it's still such a good metaphor that i keep coming back toit it's an image actually i the image of the stained glass window and you knowthe the undivided light somehow or another gets itself into bits and piecesand they're red and orange and yellow

and little trays and the stained glasswindow maker rolls them into a beautiful beautifulwindow like the rose window at snowmass monastery using his craft to do so hercraft and creates this beautiful artifact with all these little bits andpieces of color but it's only when the light rises the sun in the morning andhits and back lights the window that the whole thing comes together and you seethe act of dance between in the particularity the the created light andall the bits and pieces being harmonized and brought to a high much more intenselevel by the the white light that comes through it and i think it's a perfectimage to me of how the nam do on the

dual the infinite the finite workedtogether to mutually enhance each other's capacities and domains so thatthe non-dualism doesn't mean oh we're not going to deal with the color traywe're not going to deal with the fine glass artist we're not going to makepictures we're just going to sit out here and bask in the uncreated light youhave to get in there and and and struggle and create and take on theconditions of this life and the conditions of this planet arejagged-edged as they may be because something is being woven through themthat is not simply a return to an original purity but is a pulling alongof finitude into some sort of

transformed or alkalized infinitude souh so the the non-dual vocation i think to me is really about learning to jumpinto life and allow the light to flow through it as a harmonizing oneness andwhatever particularity you find yourself in yeah and if i could translate thatinto real simple terms maybe non-duality if it's truly a livingexperience is it's not going to sort of reduce life to being simplistic it canbe in canon needs to be lived in the midst of all that complexmodern day life and will only help to enhance life and help us deal with itsproblems much as nourishing the root of a tree is going to enable the whole treeto flourish exactly we is that along the

lines of what you were saying there it'svery much so and i think so many of the models that we've used in the past idon't know whether is it's true in the east but certainly in the west have sortof been agrarian models of contemplation and non-duality you get up on abeautiful mountain in a beautiful mountain valley and you ponder the vastdarkness of god and you feel the expensiveness of your soul all real goodbut it doesn't it doesn't speak much when you're actually in the conditionsof the slums when you're in when you're in you know a lot of a lot of non-dualspiritual cultures and any technology is any present and i think it's one of thereasons why it's not attracting young

people at least in christianity the wayit is because if this if this higher as we're calling it higher consciousness isgoing to be worth its moxie at all it's got to be able to get in there andactually count for something in the ordinary you know currents of life itcan't seek refuge in the place to us where the currents aren't flowingbecause the current is life it's one of the reasons why i took it on when we raninto the challenges around you know getting our computers so that skypewould run them by computer and so that a couple trips to ellsworth vein and youknow some money and technological things and i thought well i could have said ohi'm a non dual master i don't i don't

bother with this technology you knowthat's just intellectual laziness this is the challenge these are the terms ofof working in this world and the conditions we're working on and youeither take it on or you don't take it off yeah and as it is the computer guystold you that doing that upgrade that i forced you to do extended the life ofyour computer a couple of years so yeah i know i really you know speaking of this whole well onthe same topic you know the word yoga really means nandu it means union andthere's a little line of the gita which is yoga is skill in action so it doesn'tmean yoga is sitting on a mountaintop

staring at the clouds it means you knowwhatever you have to do you'll do it more skillfully if you're established innon-duality truly exactly exactly here comes a question from a cynthia inoregon she asks and this is a little bit long but it's a good one in awakeningrecognition there is an experience of the self capital s being all andtherefore no separate deity yeah there is still for me an inclination tooccasionally pray or communicate to that which is being kept would be through allwithout a living guru i speak to something greater than my appearancedoes prayer or hearts calling to something greater even within the selfas self capital s have an effect is it

heard and responded to by a greaterawareness nice question is it yeah very nice question very subtle question and ithink it cuts right to the chase of of one of the kind of most dysfunctionalmyths that we've brought along when when you know western seekers awaken errsbegan to jump sort of willy-nilly into models that were just emerging from theeast so we get the idea that the non-dual is the top of the pinnacle andall these sort of provisional transitory senses of selfhood are simply unreal andonce you hit an on deal dole and recognize your oneness with the all younever go back again and those other kinds of prayers of like getting down onyour knees and saying lord help me you

know are no longer valid conveyors oftruth but there are just seen as you know immature we still have a lot ofthat thinking but i think the fact is it's all all the time that that we humanbeings as long as we're in human skin are always mediating in aof way like honeybees between the finite and the infinite and and as ken wilberpointed out so brilliantly another of his many helpful tools in this spiritand first second and third persons he points out that that whole channel ofbonus that that whole channel of adoring and a worshipping and being devoted isnot as it's often construed an immature channel it's not something that yououtgrow and you realize your oneness

with the all but it's a very very realparticipation in the heart energy and the basic intimacy of the field thatthat the felt sense nature of the universe of eyeness of realness is aboutus and we never transcend it and when we become so arrogantis to say i am the all and then there's nothing left to bow the knee of theheart to you've simply frozen the that we have to move in these lower levels ofselfhood are these more provisional ones are extremely not only useful but sacredas channels for the energy of adoration devotion and humility which are thelife-giving transforming substances that what are the life of this planet niceyou know i don't know if people realize

this but all the sort of non dual heroesthat people refer to these days such as ramanamma ha you know nisargadattapapaji shankara all of them they were all very great devotees i mean eithertwo different aspects of god such as kali or shiva or this or that or totheir own gurus or whatever but they were really into devotion and and andchunker actually said he said the intellect imagines duality for the sakeof devotion so there was seems that there was a sweetness in devotion thatthey didn't want to miss out on and here's an exactly here's an interestingquote from nisargadatta which everyone knows who he is he said forget i am thathe said i realized so much more since

then it's so much deeperhe said that shortly before his death yeah yeah that raimon panikkar the greatchristian non-dual master said you know he realized that he was he was the vowof an eye in other words that he was not he was not the i and god was the vow butthat that god the the great i had called him into down us it was a beautiful kindof realization that that both of these paths wine around each other yeah that'sgreat and well it pretty much covers it but it's just one one little thing i'dlike to throw in is that you know we have all these faculties right we weretalking about the intellect earlier and how ya non-duality does not obviate orobliterate intellect and we also have

the heart and i actually i want to talkto you about the heart now so this is a good segue but full of development orenlightenment or whatever we want to call it is probably going to beconducive to the blossoming of all these faculties and so when the heart blossomsthere's naturally going to be devotion so it's not only its non-duality notincompatible with devotion but it's actually conducive to it exactly andi've come to realize more and more that one of the reasons why christianlanguaging hangs on so much for the language of the devotional is becauseit's bearing witness to the fact that that in christian tradition non-dualityhappens as the mind gets into the heart

and when one perceives in entrainmentwith a heart what one experiences the felt sense equivalent of that isintimacy so it speaks of you know and one of the reasons why christianityhangs on also stubbornly to its devotional and therefore theoreticallydualistic language is because it's bearing witness to the to the emotionalsignature of a universe seen through the heart hmm so let's talk about wroteabout the heart now because you write about a lot about that and and you knowthere's this putting the mind in the heart that you referred to and he canexplain that yeah rama had talked about self-inquiry but he actually located thethe self if you had to locate it

someplace as being in the heart you knowslightly to one side and so on i heard you say a similar thing so let's let'sgo on them for a bit about the heart and you take it away i mean just what canyou tell us what is what is meant by the heart in your teaching or the teachingsof those who you have been following and what does it mean to put the mind in theheart okay well there's a couple of major major truths here first of allsharing you know the greater western tradition including particularly sufismchristianity and and i think in in the kabbalah as well the the heart is anorgan of spiritual perception it's its first and most important function is tosee and we get this right out of jesus

and they beatitude blessed are the purein heart for they shall see god and over and over the the sufi traditionreally really takes this to a fine fine point that and they have a veryelaborate teaching about the shields of the heart the layers the veils of theheart but it's clear that that this is the organ of spiritual sight that thisis the noetic organ that it doesn't have to do with the brain it's it's the brainin the heart and the the second aspect of this is here are we talking about thephysical heart muscle the heart chakra or what are we referring to that's yeahthat's where i've been going to where we're talking about the physical heartokay to begin with you know that were

and that upin the eastern orthodox tradition which is where they developed the most subtleand consistent teaching of the mind in the heart it's clear that they'retalking about the physically in fleshed heart the the heart you know there'sactually a wonderful little quote that i quote somewhere in the book about one ofthe guys talking about the holy spirit residing in one of the upper you knowother chambers yeah so it's very clear when the with theattentional practices that that accompany the prayer of the jesus prayerthe prayer of the heart that there is an attention actually bringing bringing ourattention than allowing it to collect in

the region of the physical heart sowe're not talking about a metaphor for for the center of the person or the seatof the soul or where we're talking about a connection with the embodied heart thethe western tradition by and large does not deal in the chakra language thatthey they would not you know so you're not going to find anywhere in theeastern orthodox talking about what about the heart versus the heart chakrait's all clearly are talking about the physical heart there's no there's noexplicit recognition of a heart chakra that whether there's an implicitrecognition as an open question and when you you know robert sardella who hasexplored this very very deeply from the

contemporary sort of a phenomenologicalpoint of view is very clear that that he's talking about the physical heartand he believes the texts are as well not the heart chakra one one writer whoi haven't met personally but as a very interesting commentator olga luca cavawho studied the the jesus prayer the prayer of the heart from orthodoxmasters and also did some work with the with a vedanta teaching is much moreopen to talking about the chakras and also the the chambers and the nervenexus is on either side but i think for the point of view of the where thechristians have to get over the hump is to understand we're talking about aphysically embodied heart something

actually in your being in your body thatserves as the on-site trans mission receiving and transmittingstation for the the conscious awareness up you know a dipole with the brain andthe heart math folks were onto very quickly not too systematically but butbut you know they got the idea that the mind and the heart is about in trainingthe you know the vibrational rhythms of the brain to those the greater rhythmsof the heart and when that happens you can see very clear neurological effectsof of coherence and a whole different way of thinking so the science needs alot of calibrating yet but i think the important thing is to say that we thatas we learn to bring felt sense

awareness to the reason region of theheart and allow that to be the place where this new operating system isgrounded a lot of what the tradition is saying begins to make sense okay and myown experience just it's like you know when i have when i am experiencing myheart it's obviously much more than the physical muscle and and okay whenever ithink of anything including the body i think of its gross and subtle dimensionsso even though chakras and all that may not be a thing in the western in westerntradition doesn't mean they're not real or that we don't have a subtle body orthat there's not a subtle kind of correlate to every gross form exactlythey're manifestly is and the western

tradition has been slow to emphasizethat because it's it's always been a little bit spooked about talking aboutenergy but i think that it's becoming more and more clear that this thesethese you know even as we understand how the heart works it's an electromagneticresonator much more than a pump that it's dealing with you know energybandwidths yeah you also say in your book that the heartis an organ of spiritual perception its primary function is to look beyond theobvious and i and obviously that's ratherwe're just talking about the blood pumping muscle you know how could thatbe exactly yeah yeah so here's another

thing you say which i think will helpour discussion you say that the heart seems to mediate between our individualself and a universal process well being representative of that universal processso it almost sounds like you're describing it as a sort of a lamp at thedoor between the universal and the individual yeah yeah yeah you know andthat i'm spinning off of a wonderful line from joseph children peirce butreally thoughts who really sees the heart as the ombudsman of divine love ina person whereas the mind as the ombudsman of our individualparticularity it's not very scientific but it's a lovely image to think of theheart in anything is the ombudsman of

the ombudsman of divine love explainthat word for those who might not have english as their native language orwhatever ombudsman well ombudsman of course yeah is the one in a in auniversity system or a corporation is the one who's really appointed to beyour your your your supporter your defender proactively to champion yourcause your spokesperson your you know your da and you say the heart needs tobe purified it gets jammed by lower-level noise the passions whichdivide it a heart that is divided by competing inner agendas i love this aheart that is divided by competing in origin des is like a wind toss seaunable to reflect on its surface the

clear image of the moon yeah yeah and ofcourse in the in the classic tradition of the west which was in in effect up toat least the 19th century the passions didn't mean your drama it didn't meanyour joie de vivre or your vital a line like we now see it today passion is avery specific even technical word essentially meaning stock emotions it'sa lot of emotion a lot of energetic turbidity and turmoilstuck around a fixed agenda or fixed sense of self so your classic emotionsif you if you look at even the aaa mad bad sag lad you notice they all have apoint of view in them they're all with regard to me you know and what's bad forme you make somebody else glad so when

things get stuck and when they get whenthey get when when the feeling fulness the flowing nosov that energy gets stuckaround a personal agenda particularly an unconscious one or a very identified onethen you get stuck in the situation called the passion and what that doesclassically it's a it's a direct quote from the the from one of the greatdesert fathers or the russian fathers in the fall of kalia the problem with thepassions is they divide the heart in other words they make it incapable offunctioning in its in its primary function as an organ of sight and whenjesus says blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see godhe doesn't mean blessed are those who

don't have sex for they shall see godpurity and purity in heart men undivided this and then the field was not parceledout and and entrapped and held held captive to the passions so a lot of thework was teaching what in the in the east has the wonderful name nonidentification equanimity the capacity not to not to reactively grab on tothings and make it all about me all about my drama because when you do thatyou're you're sabotaging the capacity of the heart to really process cosmicfeeling fulness nice and in your book you say attention of the heart isattained not by concentration but by letting go of all that one is clingingto that would be the passions i guess

relinquish yeah relinquishing thepassions and relaxing the will so that kind of brings us full circle to whatwe're before with centering prayer andmeditation which is exactly kind of a surrendering process of releasing thegrip like you you you yeah straight by dropping a pencil or something you knowhow hard is it exactly yeah that's what centering prayer is it's releasing thegrip and so that's one of the one of the two joysticks if you wish for our fourfour really beginning to move towards the new problem because when you let goof that which you're grabbing or which is more likely grabbing you then thenyou're quiet clearing the space and

you're returning the the heart to itspure or if you want to call it that virgin the state of non-attachmentso that's that's the practice that's the piece that centering prayer captures andworks on so brilliantly that classic repeated small teaching people to let goin they're trapped mm-hmm to let go when they've grabbed on and when you begin tolearn to do that in the laboratory of meditation just practicing releasingreleasing releasing it has carryover value into life you begin to spot morecarefully when you're getting seized in the grip of an anger or an entitlementor a self justification or you know and you do the same thing because it's cometo represent prayer to you prayer is

release and so then you're reallyworking that the other joystiq of course is the concentrating of attention at thesense8 level in the region of the heart which is an advanced practice whichshould most likely be done under a guide it traditionally has but those twotogether the the letting go of the attachments which is the preparatory forrecognizing and letting go of passions keeping your heart clean and keepingyour heart virgin is is really supremely the work of centering prayer which setsus up to move into the into that that site that that work in of luminous siteimpregnated with love because it's in the heart and i suggest i would surmisethat you know if your heart isn't clean

and virginthan somehow cleaning it and restoring its its integrity and purity right andjustice that has accumulated you know yeah it's it's moment by moment and youknow if you take virgin and pure and clean not to be idealistic states but asa and not a second and something that's always moving we're attached orunattached and in every instant we're grabbing on and let it go and grabbingon and letting go so so the the use of the word virgin which is by word issimply to say it if it looks at the place where we've let go where we're notgrabbed or grabbing or entitled or clinging or clutching either tosomething really simple like a thought

or a state that we prefer anything butwe're able to just be there with the is that's the virgin state the the state ofequanimity and the the impure which we fall into we tumble into it you knowalmost with every breath is the the grabbing the fixated the clinginginsisting all that so it's flow it's not one or the other neither one can be asteady state without the other at least in this life i think but as we're morequick to recognize when we get trapped and pulled back into the small self andthe heart goes offline like my television camera because it's it'senergy as being absorbed in the passions if we recognize that a little bit moreclearly then we can move back to it much

more quickly into a state where we're intouch for those non-dual caught currents and moving with the skillful skill inaction of the yoga yeah i would suggest that even though it is amoment-to-moment process at the same time it is phenomenon that the heart andthe nervous system in general accumulates impressions deep impressionsyeah and that there can be and that the more burdened the one is by thoseimpressions deeply-rooted the more inclined one willbe to sort of act reactively or impulsively or inappropriately and so onand so you know we have our work cut out for us as a long-term project toprogressively even though there's a

moment a moment thing to be done there'sa also progressive purification to be accomplished exactly and and you watchit them mature people who put in their years in the journey i would say thatthat i've noticed a couple of stages first of all the the moments of purepellucid seeing and presence tend to come more often and last a little bitlonger but the other thing is that there's a greater alertness andrecognizing when you're getting caught and and shifting yeah a greater abilityto see and because of that kind of paradoxically there's less fear offalling and i think this is really important because a lot of us are reallyafraid to fall and so we try and

maintain this kind of artificial highpurity of the enlightened i think that's great when you're in your 60s but forthe ones that get older and you watch them growing they they're totally notafraid to be essentially simply human because they know that quickly they canyou know they can smell from the inside when it's gotten caught so it's it's gota different quality to it yeah someone asked nisargadatta about that you knowwhether you get caught up in things like we do and he said yeah but only for amoment and then i'm back whereas you might get caught up for days orsomething yeah exactly i think the only way to understand that is if i use thisanalogy before but if you could if you

could sort of like if you're at the ifyou're at the source of a river theoretically you could send the riveroff in any direction whereas if your way down halfway downstream or at the mouthof the river it's too late the river has this momentum and it's already gone runits course back so if you don't catch the impulses of desire and thought untiltheir way expressed it's too late to redirect them but if you can sort ofreside at that level from which they arise then you'rekind of at the master switchboard and without being manipulative you have asimple gentle shift of attention or will can send life off in a completely moreappropriate direction exactly and what

happens is the river of the live lifewill catch up with you and carry you at some points so that so that i've alwaysbeen a little bit reluctant about having people cut off experience too quicklysometimes you've just got to go through a bad day and deal with all the thingsand it'll come out then it that it'll be because it's periodicity as the next dayit's not going to solve itself naturally in 24 hours so you just realize okay i'mgonna be fragile i'm going to be vulnerable from the time don't take itseriously and allow things to have their natural swing without always using yourspiritual practice to correct back to fast which becomes a kind of repressionactually yeah yeah you want to be

spontaneous and natural by all meansyeah good well we've covered a lot i'm sure we could probably do another twohours but not right now yeah it's probably your lunch time yeah it'sgetting there so do you have any thoughts that you'd like to wrap up withwell nothing in particular i mean like i'm thrilled to know that i'm gonna beseeing at this sand conference in a couple of weeks now yeah that'll be funmaybe we can come to a gentle talks if we're not otherwise engaged hopefullythat'll be great and i really appreciate you know i waiting it through thatwonderful biographies and program titles and contents that you put together andsuch a usable form it's gonna be quite

the conference it will be yeah i do thatbecause it's impossible to figure it all out otherwise there's so many thingsgoing on at the same time so i always create this program that i can soquickly scan yeah it's like how many nando's does it take to change a lightbulb yeah all right i may send an update tothat actually all right well thanks to the fellow who's been watching the chatnamed jeremy who made a nice comment what an extraordinary teaching thankscynthia for a truly experience so that's a good right yeahgreat wonderful well i think i know that that jeremy is so i'm sitting in gradinggreetings good well go out and enjoy

your sailboat and oh like a fun thing todo i spend a year at a prep school in massachusetts when i was a teenager anddid a lot of sailing on buzzards bay wow okay with the fellow and fellow i did itwith was it was from maine actually so wow i will think of yours i get the boatoff of its mooring good alright so let me just make a couple concluding remarksyou've been watching in an interview with cynthia bordeaux on buddha at thegas pump this is an ongoing series go to bat capcom and check out the menus andyou know see if there's anything there you'd like to do like sign up for emailor sign up for the podcast or donate or you know anything else there's not toomany it's not too complicated just check

out the different venues and see younext week next week i'll be interviewing another woman with a french name vera -elam bear i'm on a roll here and i think she'll be a very interesting she's alsoassociated with the sand conference i i was reading one of their emails and ithought this is so beautifully written who wrote this and i checked withmauricio and said oh is vera so i thought i've got to talk to vera so i'llbe doing that oh yeah like she interviewed me for something on sayashe's just lovely yeah just such a gentle heart fullbeautiful soul so you should have fun i will yeah baby i'll tune in alright sothanks everybody will see it for the

next one thanks cynthia sure hi rickthank you you're welcome

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