The One You Feed - James Finley on Contemplation and Awakening

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

James Finley is a contemplative practitioner, clinical psychologist and faculty member of The Living School for Action and Contemplation. Drawing from his experience as a former monk and spiritual directee of Thomas Merton, James helps seekers who desire to live a contemplative, whole life. In this episode, he and Eric discuss many of his works and concepts pertaining to contemplation, awakening to our true nature, truth that transcends religions, love and wisdom. We think you will be struck (as we are!) by how expansive, inclusive and edifying James’ words and teachings are when it comes to helping you to connect with that which is loving and true and always present. Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, James Finley and I Discuss Contemplation, Awakening, and …The question: In this moment, what’s the most loving thing I can do?How it’s love that feeds the good wolfHis book, Merton’s Palace of NowhereHis violent, abusive alcoholic father and how that facilitated his seeking a place in a monastery with Thomas Merton Merton’s message that we are one with the infinite love that is God and that is our deepest identity and it is our destiny is to realize thatThat we subsist in a relationship with God as light subsists in flameHow truth transcends religionsThe True Self and False SelfThe lie that the ego is all that we areIdentity: The discovery of the true self is the process of dying to our dreaded and cherished illusion that anything less than infinite union with infinite love has the authority to name who we are.The acts that hurt ourselves and others is the acting out of a mistaken identityHis book, The Contemplative HeartTo contemplate means to pay attention, to observe carefullyContemplation is sustained attentiveness infused with loveHis book, Christian MeditationTaking the stance of least resistance when it comes to awakeningThe welling up of that which sustains us in the brokennessRemoving complexities and distractions to be present in stillnessThe mystic teacher is one whose words awaken your heart to the desire for “the great way” and offers trustworthy guidance in it. The mystic teacher uses language in the service of helping a person to let go of their dependency on the kind of language that stops short at explanations to find the language that is a kind of a cry from the heart, from our true self.The true self embraces both solitude and communion with othersThe metaphor of a high jumper and a very high bar and God’s mercy or compassion then placing it on the ground where we then trip over it and fall into God’s loving armsBeing sustained by a mystery that then brings us to itself – and that is wisdomJames Finley Links:jamesfinley.orgCalm: The #1 rated app for meditation. They have meditations, adult bedtime stories, soothing music, calm masterclasses with may One You Feed Guests. www.calm.com/wolf 25% off a Calm Premium SubscriptionDaily Harvest – Delivers absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls and more. To get $25 off your first box go to www.dailyharvest.com and enter promo code FEEDFabFitFun – A women’s lifestyle subscription box filled with full-size premium items that you will love. Give yourself (or someone special in your life!) this gift – use the promo code FEED for $10 off your first box at fabfitfun.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In each situation, I try to ask myself, what's the most loving thing I can do right now for myself? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort

to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is James Finley, a contemplative practitioner and clinical psychologist.

James helps seekers who desire to live a contemplative whole life. He draws from his experience as a former monk and spiritual director of Thomas Merton. Today, him and Eric discuss many of his works and concepts. Hi, Jim. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad we can do this. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really glad to have you on. We're going to talk about some of your books in the contemplative Christian tradition. But before we do that, let's start with the parable like we always do. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,

In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. For me, a simple direct way to begin would be to say that how I feed the good wolf is in each situation I try to ask myself all things considered, what's the most loving thing I can do right now for myself, for the gift of my body, the gift of my mind, for this person, this relationship, this family,

this community, really this plant, this animal, the earth that sustains us all. And so I would say that it's love that feeds the good wolf. And I try to let that be the place where I check in with myself to stay on that path. That's a really good and simple question, although the answers may not always be immediately simple, but it's a pretty good grounding question. It is. So you and I are going to talk about a variety of topics, but we're going to talk about a book you wrote called Merton's Palace of Nowhere, which is based on your experience of working with Thomas Merton and knowing his readings and his life really well. So let's start by, for people who don't know who Thomas Merton is, tell us a little bit about who

he was. Thomas Merton was born, I think, in 1915 in France. His father was an artist, and his mother and father both died of cancer when he was young. And he went to Cambridge University for one year and was kind of very suspicious of anything religious, basically, you might say. And there were rumors he got a girl, pregnant woman, pregnant there during the war, and he was drinking too much. And so people concerned about him sent him to New York, where people could keep a closer eye on him. And he went to Columbia University.

And at Columbia University, he had a series of spiritual experiences that led him to want to be baptized in the Catholic Church. And he was considering for a while working with Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker Movement. He was considering for a while joining the Franciscans, and then he decided to enter the Trappist Monastery, this cloistered Trappist Monastery of the Abbey of Gethsemane, to live as a cloistered monk. And when he got into the monastery, I think 28 years old is when he entered, he wrote his autobiography called The Seventh Story Mountain, and it went on the New York Times bestsellers list. And he became known through that book as a source of hope in the world. He went on to write many books and became one of the most widely read and widely loved spiritual writers of our age.

And he died in 1968. Toward the end of his life in the 60s, he got very interested in interfaith dialogue with the non-Christian contemplative traditions, with the Sufi tradition, the Buddhist tradition, the Jewish tradition. And he was in active dialogue with these people. And through that way, he was invited to attend an international conference in Bangkok, Thailand, of Christian monastics with other religious traditions. And while at that conference, he was electrocuted in his room in 1968, December the 10th, 1968, same day Karl Barth died, I think. And he was 53 years old. So that's kind of a sense of Merton's life.

And so tell me how you knew him and what your relationship to him was. When I was born and raised in Akron, Ohio, I was the oldest of six children. My father was a violent, abusive alcoholic, and my mother was a devout Catholic. A lot of the arguments in the home were over Catholicism and religion. And so when I was 14 years old, I was attending this Catholic high school, and one of the teachers in the class mentioned monasteries. I'd never heard of monasteries before. And mentioned Thomas Merton. And so that day I went after school to the school library and found a book by Merton called The Sign

of Jonas, which is a journal he kept as a monk in the monastery. And on the opening page of that journal, he says, as for me, Merton says of himself, as for me, I have but one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear in the secret of God's face. And at 14 years old, I did not know what that meant, but something in me did and said, me too. Like, I want that. And when I read that book, I read it over and over and over, and it was clear that the person who wrote this book knew the way to that secret place in God. And I started writing to the monastery. The violence was still continuing. And my master plan was I was going to enter the monastery. I would be a monk. I would sit at Merton's feet and have him guide me in this path toward this experience of God consciousness,

Christ consciousness. And that's what I did. When I graduated, I went there. And as novice master, he became my spiritual director. I was there for nearly six years. And so I came under his influence first through his writings and then in person, as living as a monk in the monastery. That's how I came under his influence. And you wrote a book that I referenced earlier called Merton's Palace of Nowhere that sort of explores his spiritual life and his approach. And you say,

Merton's whole spirituality in one way or another pivots on the question of ultimate human identity. Merton's message is that we are one with God. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? I guess one way to say it would be first to bear witness to it, ultimately speaking, as a statement of faith, and then to go from there to the ways that we experience that. And I think one way to put it ultimately and what that is, you could put it this way. We could say that if right now we could be interiorly awakened so that we could see, like realize all that we really, really, really are, we would see God,

the infinite reality, the infinite love that is God, pouring itself out and completely giving itself away as our own deepest identity in our nothingness without God. That is, when God creates me, when God creates a person, God creates a kapox dei, a capacity for God. And so I'm subsisting in a relationship with God, like light subsists in flame. And that subsisting relationship of likeness is God-given godly oneness in love. That's my true self. That's my ultimate identity. That's my God-given godly identity, which is also then my destiny to realize that.

And that is Christian terminology or Catholic terminology, but really Merton and yourself are part of a deeper tradition of often referred to as mysticism or contemplative practice. or contemplative practice, and that one way of seeing that is you hear a similar experience described in a lot of different traditions. Would you agree with that? Yes. Merton, in the early 60s, in his own evolving spiritual journey, he was reading the essays of the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. And he wrote a letter to Suzuki, which is in the back of his book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite. And he wrote to Suzuki and said, when I read these Zen stories of enlightenment, something leaps off the page in me and says, this is true. And I would like to know if I, as a Christian, could dialogue with you as a

Buddhist about this common ground. Thomas Merton once said, the world will not survive religion based on tribal consciousness. That in the name of religion, the religious people will be at the forefront of discord. But if those who are truest to what is deepest in their own tradition, which is what transcends their own tradition, if they would bear witness to that, religious consciousness could be a source of unity of the world. And so Thich Nhat Hanh came to visit him when he was still in Vietnam before he went to Plum Village in France. The Jewish scholar and mystic Abraham Joshua Heschel came to visit Merton. He carried on a very deep dialogue with the Sufis, with the Muslim mystics. Yogis came from India to be in dialogue with him about this deep yoga.

And so he was one of the Christian monastics who was at the heart of this faith dialogue of this contemplative, mystical depth dimension that's found in all world religions. And Merton also saw that same dimension in some poets and in philosophers and artists and those who serve the poor, bearing witness to this ultimate mystery that utterly transcends us, even as it utterly permeates every moment of our life. And he was very active in that dialogue process. Yeah. Ironically, I came to Merton so many years ago through his writings about Zen. I was interested in Zen and I found my way to him that way. That was my path into Thomas Merton. And so he ultimately talks about, and this is a term that is used very similarly in different Buddhist or non-dual schools, but he talks about a true self and a false self. So tell me a little bit about what that means to him, but ultimately really to you. Yes, I suppose one way, and it's a subtle thing. I mean, reading Merton, you can reflect on different passages and so on, how it's through the lineage or through these traditions. But

one way to express it would be this, would be to say that when God created, to use this theistic language, Christian tradition, that when God created you, God did not have to think of who you might be. For from all eternity, God eternally contemplated you, hidden with Christ and God from before the origins of the universe. This is the you that never began. It's the unborn you. For God never, never, never, never has not known who you eternally are in God, destined for God. And this you, this identity that God contemplates

in God, is you that will never die. And that capacity for God, that God-given capacity, which is really an invitation or the capacity to share in God's own infinite life as infinitely as God shares in that life, and our nothingness without God. That's our true self. Then God endows that person, the person identity, with the nature, our human nature. And the glory of our human nature, the most sublime quality of our human nature, is not reason, is the immensity of that and all of its implications for reason, science, and all of that. The most sublime capacity of human nature is to awaken to the person. And so Merton says that in our nature, in our ego, we come upon within our ego what transcends our ego. And so he says in his closing chapters of New Seeds of Contemplation, he says we do not have to go very far to catch echoes

or glimpses of this oneness. He says, when we turn to see a flock of birds descending, where we know love in our own heart, where we see children in a moment, they're really children. Like the Zen poet Basho, we hear a frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash. He said that the newness, the purity of vision, the turning inside out of all values, gives us a glimpse of this unitive mystery, this one life that is at once God's and our own. And that inner awakening, he saw then to be like the deepest expression of our nature. And then an awakening to it, because love is never imposed, it's always offered. We're to freely assent to that. That is, we're freely to give ourselves in love to the love that

gives itself to us as our deepest identity. And I would say in kind of poetic language, that would be a way to kind of set a tone for the true self and the moments in which we realize it. And Merton goes on to equate the false self to sin. And he says, to say I was born in sin is to say I came into the world with a false self. I was born in a mask. Yes, the false self. I think a distinction that's very helpful with this is the ego, how Merton saw the ego, which he sometimes calls the external self, or it's a

self, our personality is a self that's kind of formed through genetic predispositions and internalizing experiences and so on. That our ego, in this kind of way of looking at things, God wants us to have a healthy ego. Because if our ego isn't healthy, we suffer, and other people suffer. A lot of mental health is devoted to the healing of the woundedness of the ego. So the false self is not the ego. The false self is an illusion that the ego harbors about itself, namely that it has the final say in who we are, that we are nothing but our internalized beliefs and convictions and strategies and goals and attainments, internalized beliefs and convictions and strategies and goals and attainments that were nothing but that. That illusion which is to be exiled from this abyss-like ground of our

identity in God, that estrangement he calls the false self, which we then act out upon ourselves and others by the traumatizing ways we treat ourselves and others in the earth. And so that's what he means by the false self. He goes on to talk about that he says the focus of sin is shifted from the realm of morality to that of ontology, which is being. For Merton, the matter of who we always are precedes what we do. Thus, sin is not essentially an action, but rather an identity. For a long time, I was a clinical psychologist. I worked with trauma, and I went through my own trauma therapy about identity. I'd put it this way. This might be one way to say it. What we're talking about in the discovery of the true self

is the process of dying to our dreaded and cherished illusion that anything less than an infinite union with infinite love has the authority to name who we are. That there's a certain kind of a felt perception about ourself, this self that's autonomous and separate and real all on its own. It has to try to navigate and make its way through the world on its own terms. He's calling that case of mistaken identity, kind of the ontological foundations of this, which the Buddhists call ignorance and Jesus called blindness. So the moral order, the sinful, namely the acts that hurt ourselves and others,

is the acting out of that mistaken identity. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You wrote a book called The Contemplative Heart. So tell me a little bit about what is contemplation to you? A sense of contemplation is, I think I'd put it this way, is, you know, first, to contemplate means to pay attention, to observe carefully. For example, we pause to contemplate something that catches our eye, say a flower in the garden, where we pause to hear the sound of the rain. We see people in an art museum pausing before each piece. This contemplation is in one sense a state of sustained attentiveness.

It's a state of awareness in which all our discursive thoughts tend to fall into the background. And there tends to be this sustained attentiveness infused with love. If I abide in that, it is if I stay in that state, it brings about a qualitative transformation of my deepest sense of my own subjectivity. I kind of drop down into a qualitatively deeper sense of myself, unexplainably one with the beauty and the mystery of that which I'm contemplating. That deep depth, we would say then, is really an abyss. It's a bottomless abyss. And we begin to make our descent into this bottomless abyss of God, welling up and giving itself to us as the virginal immediacy of that moment, like in the arms of the beloved or reading a child a goodnight story or up in the night or sitting in meditation, whatever it is, the pause between two lines of a poem,

whatever that opening is to the deeper place, contemplation is first an event, but then we can choose to sustain that, which is a meditative practice. We can choose to sustain the stance of habituating every deeper habituated states of oneness of that mystery. And so contemplative prayer is a practice. I don't like that word, so I'm going to use it just to start, right? You actually say a contemplative practice is any act habitually entered into with your whole heart as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience. But one of the things that you often talk about, and Merton did, and sustaining a contemplative experience. But one of the things that you often talk about, and Merton did, and how almost impossible this is, you say,

in solitary prayer, we find ourselves facing the dilemma of having to do what we are incapable of doing. Let's say we would begin first with one of these moments of awakening, these kind of inner quickenings that happen, that kind of wash over us, like turning to see a flock of birds descending, or a moment of intimacy with another person, or poetry, or whatever the realm is in which the deepening event happens. In that deepening moment, in that inner quickening of momentary, we might say we're a momentary mystic. It doesn't lie in our power to sustain it. That is, it doesn't lie in our power to make it happen. But what we can do is that we can freely choose to assume the stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by what we cannot

attain. It attains us in our powerlessness to attain it. And that's meditation practice. So meditation, the Christian tradition, one of the books I wrote called Christian Meditation, there's a chapter on it called A Ladder to Heaven. And it's this classical thing one finds in the tradition that begins with Lectio Divina, like this listening to a word that's heard. And even before you think about it, you immediately recognize that it's beautiful, and it's beautiful because it's true. So then that stance of receiving that word evokes a dialogue from us,

which is discursive meditation. It's like a loving, prayerful exchange between ourself and God through a text in scripture or a poet. Whosever voice that is, it resonates with us in this way. And then that lexio and that response in meditation gives rise to prayer, which is the love response of the heart center, like help me with this. That process, that dialogical discursive process can give rise to a moment where we find ourselves resting wordlessly in the presence of God beyond thoughts and images. And I think this happens in human intimacy too. There are certain moments between two people who are lovingly sharing in a very vulnerable way their love for

each other. And this loving exchange back and forth with each other opens out a moment where they're kind of silenced by the depth of the love in which they are one and for which they can find no words. In which case, then, the relationship becomes meditation for two. They're in a meditative state of realizing together the divinity of the incarnate intimacy of their love for one another. I love what you just said in there about it's taking the stance of least resistance. We're told, particularly in Zen, that you're just supposed to sit. That's it, right? And we realize that we can't do that, but we can do many things. We can sit and sleep and think and all sorts of stuff, but your sit is beyond us, right? And

that ultimately awakening is a matter of something happens to us. We can't make it happen. And my experience has been sometimes the more I'm trying to make it happen, the more I stand in my own way. But I love that idea of a posture of least resistance. It's another way of explaining what I often say, which is how do you try not to try? Exactly. But see, I wonder if to like a couple of years, I was invited by Chakram Trump or Rinpoche to be one of the Christian teachers at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. And which also I got in touch with, sounds true. Also, Tammy Simon, sounds true because they're there in Boulder. And the talks there with these Buddhists and Christian teachers,

one of the things that came out in this exchange was that people who are faithful to meditation practice are not people who know how to meditate, but rather they're people who sit deeply in their inability to meditate. Yet by meditate meaning they can achieve through sheer effort of their will, the sustained meditative state, because the only thing the ego can achieve is more of itself. But if I come to the impasse where I can't go on, I do not know how to go on. But instead of stopping and running away, I place my trust in the mystery that unexplainably sustains me in my inability to meditate. And if I sit there, whatever my tradition is, it might be a word,

or it might be bear attention, shikantaza, or it might be, that stance of sustained vulnerability, trusting that I'm being unexplainably sustained, I would say, you know, it's really what's unexplainably given in the miracle of each breath and heartbeat. Merton says the most important thing in your life is something that you don't understand and don't need to understand because God loves you. This happens in therapy too. It often walls up out of powerlessness where we don't know how to go on. And it's very risky, but if we don't panic and we keep our balance, we can discover that there is the welling up out of the brokenness itself, that which unexplainably sustains us in the brokenness. And I think

meditation is a kind of artistry of kind of gently practicing that radical vulnerability and where the unitive consciousness happens. Yeah, I had a teacher once in discussing this matter of the will. He said, the will is useful to get you to a place of sitting down to meditate. And then it's not really of any use at that point. Certain people are accident prone, right, by putting themselves in a position. Merton once told you to quit trying so hard in prayer, right? He said, how does an apple ripen? It just sits in the sun. And by the way, it's interesting about monastic life. In Buddhism, all monastic traditions are this way, really. It's very strange in a way, because what it does is a it's a tradition of attrition not addition

that is what it does is it removes complexities and distractions and you're left to live in silence in the ordinariness of the human experience prayer and work so this rhythm of the psalms and manual labor in silence and you kind of settle down into this deep kind of being present to yourself as unexplainably precious in your brokenness, and you're kind of led along that path. I'll tell you a story I share with people in the talks I give on Merton, on what we're talking about right now. I say, imagine there's a woman who marries a psychologist, and on their 25th wedding anniversary, he gives her a book that he's been secretly writing about her over all those years. And when she lifts the heavy tome from the box, he says with pride in his voice, if you look in the back there, you'll see you're completely indexed.

So anything you want to know about yourself, you can look yourself up. And tears come to her eyes, and she throws the book down, and she's so upset. And he's crestfallen because he's already secretly begun work on their golden anniversary present, which is a three-volume work called Us, cross-referenced with the U-volume. That is, the heart knowledge of intimacy is not achieved by the sum total of internalizing facts. It rather is achieved in a transformative process of surrendering to the gift and the miracle of what love asks of us, or the way love is translating us into itself. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to

Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. No Really. Go to ReallyNoReally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iheart radio app on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts that using of our intellect as the tool that we think gets us there i mean i was this way for a long time i would much rather well i'm still this way i have to work against it i'd much rather read about spirituality than I'd sit down and actually sit quietly and practice it. Like it's a far easier thing for me to do. To sit there is way harder.

And so I've been recently doing a little bit of koan study with a teacher. And it's very intention is to undercut that entire process of intellect. And it's just a new type of practice I hadn't really done before and am finding interesting to see what happens when I deliberately try not to solve something that I'm also trying to solve. That's really true. And it means, of course, that the conceptual mind has its role, of course, up to that. means, of course, that the conceptual mind has its role, of course, up to that. Another thing I think is very significant about these mystic teachers, whether it's koans or sutras or Christian mystics, scripture understood at this level, is that then in that breakthrough into that wordless state, the mystic teacher is the one who uses words in the service of the unexplainable.

That is, the mystic teacher is the person whose words bear witness to this. Zen Master Dogen says, find that person whose words awaken your heart with a desire for the great way, then forget everything else. And so they bear witness to it, and then they offer trustworthy guidance in it. And so then they use language in the service of helping a person to let go of their dependency on the kind of language that stops short at explanations, to find the language as kind of a cry from the heart. The language is the expression of our true self, or the Dharma, or Christ consciousness, and so on.

That's a beautiful way to say it. One of the other things that Merton talks about is this paradox that in solitude, he rediscovered the heart of the world. You wrote, it is the paradox that true solitude draws us into communion with others, and true communion with others draws us to solitude. And you say that the monk's vocation was to find others in solitude. The vocation of people in the world is to find solitude in the midst of others. The true self embraces both solitude and others. Yeah, let's say in the light of this talk we're having right now, for example, let's say that I'm learning to live in this unexplainable intimacy of myself and my poverty, unexplainably sustained as precious in my poverty.

And I have this experiential self-knowledge, which is humility. I live in this experiential self-knowledge. The more I deepen that experiential self-knowledge, the more I know you. more I deepen that experiential self-knowledge, the more I know you. Because each one of us is a unique edition of the universal story of being a human being. And so the more I sit and listen to you out of the depths of my own intimate unfolding, the more I can quietly listen to you and join you in your way of expressing that vulnerability. And we can kind of meet each other. your way of expressing that vulnerability, and we can kind of meet each other. I know the interconnectedness of all of us in this interior enigmatic richness and poverty of the depths of the mystery of being a human being, which then in the Christian tradition

becomes the basis for the corporal works of mercy or for social justice. Once I see the dignity of the human person that we're each worth all that God is worth, then that moves us or even impels us to respond to wherever there is injustice or any human being is being treated in any way less than they deserve to be treated as a precious presence in the world. So Jim, how does that apply to what we were talking before about this idea of not being able to make effort? Let's say it applies in this way. Let's say that solitude is the experience of being less and less able to explain to anybody, including ourself, what's happening to us.

ourself what's happening to us, or to explain to anybody, including ourself, this desire to reach this realized unitive state. And we sit in meditation, therefore, in that kind of solitude of the inability to adequately articulate the unconsummated longings that moves us to continue on in our meditative practice. And what we find in the practice is that we come up against the arduous nature of it all. It has an arduous quality to it. One of the things that helps me, like an image for this, this is deeply Christian as God's mercy and Buddhism as compassion as the body of emptiness. Is that I say, sometimes we think that meditation practice, realizing this unitive state, I compare it to like a high jumper, Olympic high jumper, trying to jump over a very high bar. And the bar is so high, we exhaust ourself, repeatedly running up to it, trying to jump over it.

We cannot jump over it. And when we've exhausted ourself, when we've spent ourself in this effort that we can't do it, an amazing thing happens. Compassion steps out, takes the bar, and places it flat on the ground. And approaching the bar, bewildered as to the complicity of the task, we trip over it and fall into God's arms. Well, we trip over it and we fall into the pure dharma field that the Buddha realized on the night of the enlightenment, the intimate immediacy of the divinity of the phenomenal world. So it comes about actually

in coming to the end of our resources. And then in the very end of the resources, in that very point of poverty, and then staying there, that's where that which is infinitely beyond us comes rushing through the opening of our poverty and grants itself to us. And I think that kind of imagery helps to understand, in Buddhism, like right effort. What is this effect of effort in awakening? How are you using that word poverty? I mean it, one, in the deepest sense that it, just as it doesn't lie within my power to bring myself in existence, it doesn't lie in my power to keep myself in existence. To be at the deathbed of a

dying loved one is tangibly clear that our next breath does not belong to us, lest we be presumptuous, that my life arises moment by moment by moment by moment as a gift and a miracle in the virginal immediacy of the present moment. That's that deep poverty. Poverty is also expressed. Thomas Merton once said, we should all get down on our knees right now and thank God we can't live the way we want to. God doesn't let us get away with it. Our poverty is our inability to rise to the occasion of our own ideals, of our own aspirations, of the should that we're trying. And by the way, then we tend to do the same thing with other people. We impose that on them. And so my poverty, as I come to this acceptance of my poverty,

there's a noble aspiration. And I come to the poverty of my ability to actualize that aspiration. And if I sit very deeply in the acceptance of my poverty to make it happen on my terms, it can unexplainably start to happen on God's terms, like a mysterious granting, a mysterious kind of light that shines so brightly in the very darkness in which I'd lost my way. And I think this happens in marriages, this happens in parenting. Anything real has this quality where if we let it, it sifts us like wheat and brings us to the end of our resources. And we learn to open ourself to being unexplainably sustained by a mystery within and

beyond ourself that takes us to itself. And I think that's wisdom, really. I think that's one way of understanding wisdom. Well, that is beautifully said and a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation about a quote of yours that I want to discuss. And the quote is, the depths of the self are the heights of God. So you and I are going to discuss that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you are interested in that, you can become a member by going to oneufeed.net slash join. You get access to all the post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and a special mini episode I do every week called A Teaching Song and a Poem

and Usually a Dumb Joke. So one you feed.net slash join, uh, Jim, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you and I really enjoyed reading your work. So thank you. I want to thank you also for inviting me to do this and it feels such a kinship with you and this ministry of trying to offer this to the world and help other people. So I'm glad we could do this. Yes, I feel the same. Thank you. Okay. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.