Discernment is in short supply these days - leaving too many of us drowning in negativity, cynicism, meaninglessness, anxiety & depression, externalizing our unresolved, unprocessed inner conflicts onto other people, living creatures and the Cosmos.
"Despair is only for those
who see the end beyond doubt.
We do not."
J.R.R. Tolkien
A radically different, infinitely healthier, wiser perspective is that of the mystics and an increasing number of intelligent AND wise scholars like Jeremy Lent ("The Web of Meaning" 2022), Iain McGilchrist ("The Matter with Things" 2021), etc who masterfully integrate science and traditional wisdom to help us feel at home in our Universe.
A wonderful living example of a highly-evolved mystic is James Finley, author of the exceptional biography, “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation” 2023 - which I highly recommend!
An excerpt from an excellent recent James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :
"One of the Holy Cross brothers, teaching at the high school I went to, talked about monasteries in religion class. He spoke of monasteries as places where people go to seek and to find and give themselves to God, who’s fully poured out and given to us in each passing moment of our life. And they believe that their hidden life of fidelity to that search touches the whole world in ways we don’t understand.
Thomas Merton in ‘The Sign of Jonas’ on the very first page wrote, ‘As for me, I have but one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear into the secret of God’s face.’ At age 14, I didn’t know what it meant, but something in me said, ‘Me too.’ That is the depth from which he spoke of his own longing for God, awakened that depth in me. And for the next four years, I read that book over and over. And later, I lived in the cloistered monastery for almost six years - it had a profound effect on me.
And then Merton, as a novice master, guided me in the search. And he led me into the classical texts of the mystics – St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Meister Ekhart, Julian of Norwich, etc. I was so radicalized by this sense of communion, this deep experience of incarnate Infinity intimately realized, like the divinity of standing up & sitting down, and how reflective prayer becomes words of wordless silence and oneness, and so on. And Merton once said in one of his talks to the novices, that monastic life is carefully crafted to nurture and protect that oneness. But there are people in the world who are being led to it and they don’t understand what’s happening to them, and have no one to guide them.
So when I left the monastery, I found that that was true. I still wanted to live that way - my meditation practice and the mystics … So I started giving meditation retreats.
I had a chance to study medieval philosophy under Daniel Walsh, who taught philosophy at Columbia, and was influential in Merton’s coming to the monastery. I was very affected by the philosophical theology of the Middle Ages. So when I was writing ‘Merton’s Palace of Nowhere’ on the true self, I said I don’t know how to communicate this to people out here, that we subsist in God like light subsists in flames – the Oneness. And Walsh wrote back. He said you can’t communicate it. But it will communicate itself through you if you’re convinced in what you say. And he said, if you are what you say. And you know it will communicate itself because there’ll be a response in the listener that knows, something very deep inside of them that matters very much is being awakened.
I think that’s what I do. I try to speak from my heart about this oneness. I try to help people look for little moments where they had a glimpse of it, in the midst of nature, in the arms of the beloved, or reading a child a good night story, or lying in the dark listening to your breathing - how it washes over you like a taste of it, and how in that taste, you get the intuition that in these awakening moments, not that something more was given, but like a curtain opened and that you tasted momentarily the abyss-like divine nature of every moment of your life.
And so then ... What’s the way of life in which I can be liberated from what hinders me, from habitually abiding in the divinity of the immediacy of my life? And I get the feeling that people come to the retreat when they hear that it’s in silence and about the mystics, that they’re in some way been touched by that. Like how do I deepen that? Or how do I be faithful to that? How do I understand it? How do I live by it?
For me where it started was because of the (childhood) trauma that was going on, a lot of the arguments with my father was about Catholicism (but) they fought about all kinds of things. So (my mother) would take us (6 children, I was the oldest) to mass on Sunday. And she would ask us to pray to God to give us the strength to get through the things that happen when daddy gets mad.
And so I was lying in my bed at night – I was maybe 4 – and I could hear my father screaming at my mother outside the door. And maybe earlier that day he had hit me. I knew tomorrow he wanted to do it again. And so I took my mother’s word and I prayed to God to give me the strength. I was lying there in the dark, and the experience I had was that God heard my prayer, came to me in the dark and in a moment I can’t remember merged with me.
So when I woke up the next morning, the trauma still went on. But when I came out into the living room, it was different, because if my father hit me, he thought he was hitting me, but he didn’t know he was hitting that other me, that other people could see. My father didn’t know that the real me was secretly carried by God into a secret place (my father) didn’t know about.
Later, when I became a psychologist, I learned that I was dissociating, that I had borrowed the religious imagery of my mother to give meaning to dissociating. But that doesn’t mean that God didn’t merge with me in the dark. And so I had a lot of moments like that. I had a lot of these unitive moments.
So when I read Merton, I saw monasteries as places where you can actually go and live all the time, because I was like a flame flickering in the wind, it was very much in the heart of me. But I thought the monasteries were built so people can surrender themselves over to that.
If we think of the word trauma, the root of the word means a wound or a source of suffering. So we might say that all of us are subject to traumas great & small that can and sometimes do occur in our life together. Small traumas are the slights and the insults, the abandonments, the accidents, the hurts. But the point is, the center holds.
Big trauma gets so intense you kind of disappear into the trauma – kind of a psychic death really. If you survive the incest or the beating, whatever, you’re so glad you survived, but not quite, because it got inside of you. And then a triggering event is anything in the present that resembles the original trauma, your autonomic nervous system, you’ll re-experience the trauma – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And so then as a clinician, that needs to be dealt with in its own right. That’s the therapy. But what happens is this though really, is that the foundations of trauma – like, where’s all this trauma coming from?
Sometimes we get this feeling that we’re skimming over the surface of the depths of our own life, and our own woundedness is carrying us along, as part of that. And we realize somewhere that we’re suffering from depth deprivation.
And we know of depth deprivation because we can single out certain moments when we tasted depth: in the midst of nature, in the middle of the dark, or in the arms of the beloved, telling a child a good night story, a pause between two lines of a poem that shimmered & shined. So you know it’s there.
So then the question is, what are the ways where that depth dimension starts shining out of the therapy itself?
Let’s say you call me for therapy, and I really don’t know what you want to talk about other than the little bit you told me on the phone. But I’ve done it so much, I already know what’s going to have to happen between us, if the healing you’re looking for is going to occur. And here’s what happens.
It’s like a liturgy or a ritual. We’ll both sit down. You’ll talk and I’ll listen. At a certain point, I’ll ask you a question and it’s a real question. I want to understand you better. And the question is such that you can’t respond without pausing for a moment to listen to yourself. And in that moment, you’re becoming more present to yourself in my presence. And it’s already started.
You don’t say it. You’re not ready yet, but it’s already begun. So little by little, this way of growth forms an alliance.
And in that trusting alliance, the person goes through their work. So one of my theses is that, when we risk sharing what hurts the most, in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we can be re-parented in love. Sometimes you get the feeling you’re in the presence of someone who is more present to you than you are. And they see a value in you you’re not yet able to see. And you have faith in their faith in you. And little by little by little, it arcs over and becomes internalized and so on.
But there’s another level to this. In that process, there is the opening up of what Jesus called ‘the pearl of great price.’ And what opens up within the person is a depth of presence that’s abyss-like. They might start laughing or they might tear-up. It’s deeper than simply freedom from symptoms.
And so sometimes at the end of therapy, people are grateful that they have less anxiety with panic or self-cutting, whatever it is. But often they’ll say something like this: ‘Something was given to me and I’m so grateful for it. I matter. I didn’t know that I mattered. I have a value that cannot be calculated. There’s a preciousness about me that came shining out through my woundedness, and no one can take that away from me.’
And that’s the spiritual dimension. I think that starts to put words to that dimension.
'Sometimes, when having to endure the worst, yet finding God in the darkest place, you are liberated from the tyranny of shame over your heart. Where anguish and ecstasy intersect, it becomes incandescent — it becomes oneness.' James Finley
Being a therapist was a good fit for me. I felt so grateful for it - to experience the unrelenting courage of the human spirit. Sometimes people would say something to me like, ‘I feel so safe in here.’ I’d say, but notice I’m not doing anything to you. And I think what it is, when you’re in my presence, you’re more present to yourself. And if you can be more present to yourself in my presence, you can literally be more present to yourself (also) when you’re not in my presence. And you keep sifting it out and sifting it out. I felt so honored by that process."
“A mystical experience is experiencing God’s presence in your life.” James Finley
"The question is, ‘what does that mean?’ I’ll give some examples from Thomas Merton and all the mystics.
This is from the last chapter of Merton’s ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’: ‘The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.’ So there he’s bearing witness to the already perfectly holy nature of what is – this dance.
And then Merton said a stunning thing. He said, ‘We don’t need to go very far to catch echoes of that game and of that dancing.’ And he gives very simple examples. He said, ‘You’re out walking alone in the midst of nature, and you turn to see a flock of birds descending, and as if out of the corner of your eye, you catch something in their descent that’s primordial, vast and true.’
And then, to use faith language, although the person might not explicitly say it in faith language, you know that the presence of God is the infinity of their descent. And their descent is the incarnate immediacy of God. ((Self realizing that it's looking in the mirror)) And God is the infinity of your awareness of their descent. And your awareness of their descent is the concrete immediacy of God. And that’s the experience of God.’ ((Perhaps it's just a matter of remembering - remembering our True Nature, our Self, our ‘Original Face before our grandparents were born’ as we co-create the Cosmos))
Another one is, there are moments between two people, in moments of loving union with each other, when they sense something within their love that’s beyond what words can say. It is a boundaryless quality. And in faith, you say, ‘God’s the infinity.' The infinite love of God is the infinity of their love. And the infinity of their love is incarnate in the midst of God.
You’re reading a child a good night story. You sense that in the presence of the child you’re in the presence of God. That’s why they’re so disarming.
And then what I’m saying also then, in love lost, as painful as it is, if you just sit with it very quietly, you can sense something of God’s sustaining presence guiding you through the loss. And when you come out the other side, you’re grateful to get your balance back, but you know, it’s so important to never forget what learned in the dark – about fragility, the delicacy of life, grace."
James Finley interview: "A Momentary Mystic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQtvkwu2jA :
"Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper, more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence.
If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words, we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle,
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it;
only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure & silent merge with formless truth.
As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself;
you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.
Whole, you enter the Whole.
Your personal self returns to its radiant,
intimate, deathless source.”
Mundaka Upanishad
"To have the radiant calm and unswayed balance of mind that we call equanimity is to be like the earth. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold onto, but it is the perfect size for letting go." Sharon Salzberg
"The clouds are thin, the wind is light,
the sun is nearly overhead. Past the flowers,
through the willows, down along the stream.
People don't see the joy in my heart.
They think I'm wasting time or acting like a child." Cheng Hong, Chinese poet
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| Beyond Time - photograph by David A. Lovas |
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