The One You Feed - Stephen Mitchell on the Questioning Mind

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Stephen Mitchell is an author and translator who has dedicated much of his life to Zen practice. Eric and Stephen have an in depth discussion about the questioning mind as well as his work of translating many famous texts, including the Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, and Rilke’s “Letters To a Young Poet”. Stephen has also co-authored many books with his wife, Byron Katie, who is a former guest on the show. Need help with completing your goals in 2020? 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, Stephen Mitchell and I Discuss the Questioning Mind and…The parable: how reality cannot be broken into good or bad, it’s just what is.When authentic action that is true to yourself becomes second nature, it’s an expression of your own reality.His wife Katie’s words, “when we believe our thoughts, we suffer; when we question our thoughts, we don’t.”Suffering can end when we awaken to the truthDistinguishing between pain, a physical phenomenon, and suffering, a mental phenomenonSuffering often comes from being stuck in an imagined past or imagined futureHis translation of the Heart Sutra that is about openness rather than emptinessThe “don’t know” or questioning mind and how it doesn’t get stuck in judgementBeing immersed in an intense formal Zen practice for 7 yearsHis Koan studies that helped him get to a state of stillness and learn to hold the questioning mind without any content.Defining Koan studies as an existential problem meant to catapult the student into a space of questioning.  If you can rest in that space of not knowing, the answer will present itself to you.The mind’s relationship with it’s contentsDifference between the mind and what it thinks.We don’t suffer because of what happens to us, but rather how we think about what happens to us.Self inquiry and asking yourself the question, “Is it true”?How he learns the language of the text he’s translating.His work of translating is more than just learning the meaning of words, but also the music of the words.When translating text, his allegiance is to the spirit of the text and not just the literal meaning of the text.Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness: A Biblical Tale Retold is discussed in the post show conversation.Stephen Mitchell Links:stephenmitchellbooks.comFeals is premium CBD delivered to your doorstep that can help you manage stress, anxiety, pain, and sleeplessness. Feals CBD is food-grade and every batch is tested so you know you are getting truly premium grade product. Get 50% off your first order with free shipping by becoming a member at www.feals.com/wolf Daily 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 FEEDIndeed: Millions of great candidates use Indeed every day to find their next opportunity. You can post a job in minutes and use screener questions to create your shortlist of qualified applicants fast. Skills tests for applicants are just one way Indeed helps you make smart hiring decisions quickly. Post your job today at www.indeed.com/wolf and get a free sponsored job upgrade on your first posting.  If you enjoyed this conversation with Stephen Mitchell on the Questioning Mind, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Byron KatieLoch KellySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Personally, I haven't had to make a decision in decades. 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.

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Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Stephen Mitchell, an author and translator who has dedicated much of his life to Zen practice. He is also married to Byron Katie, one of our former guests. His new book is Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness, a biblical tale retold.

Hi, Stephen. Welcome to the show. Glad to be with you. It is a real honor and a gift to have you on. I told you in the pre-show conversation that you and I had about how much your work has meant to me, but you have translated a number of books, but you're well beyond just a translator, but your translations of the Tao Te Ching and Letters to a Young Poet are my two favorite books, probably of all time. Certainly, they're up there in the first few, so I'm really happy to have you on. Well, I'm so honored that you have taken them in so deeply. That's very gratifying for me.

Wonderful. And we are going to talk about that. We'll talk about your latest book called Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness, a biblical tale retold. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her grandson, and she 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 and 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, and he looks up at his grandmother, and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother 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. Okay, well, I probably have a different take on the parable than most people. I think it's a sweet story and probably embodies all sorts of tribal wisdom. But for me, it doesn't correspond to any reality. And what I mean by that is that there are many religious traditions, I can think of the Jewish tradition, that have this kind of duality embodied in their theology or mythology. In the Jewish tradition, there's supposedly an evil inclination inside us and a good inclination that are battling. Many other traditions do this too. The best thing that I know as an antidote to this kind of thinking is something from a

brilliant old Zen poem by the third founding teacher of Zen named Seng Tsang. And he said, the battle between good and evil is the primal disease of the mind. So whenever we see that kind of thing in politics or in religions or in our own life, usually we put ourselves on the side of good and put people that have hurt us or people we don't like on the side of evil. And it makes for a very difficult life, a life of excluding. And when you actually look inside the mind, if you've done many years of meditation or have sunk into meditative practice to a certain depth, you'll find that there's nothing corresponding to these entities, these good and evil entities inside the mind. In other words, in reality, in experience, there aren't anything like this inside us. What's inside us are thoughts that we believe. And the process of getting to a point of awakening, in Buddhist terms, or enlightenment, is a process of undoing, of questioning the thoughts that we're believing so that we can become people who live in harmony with the way things actually are, not the way reality seems when we superimpose our judgments and ideas onto it. judgments and ideas onto it. So in reality, there's no such thing as good and bad. When we create good, we're creating its opposite bad. When we create beautiful, we're also creating ugly.

And in the practice of self-realization, we see that all of that is insubstantial. There's just the great, brilliant, joyful reality that cannot be broken into two pieces or into any pieces. It's one whole, it's what is. And in my wife, Byron Katie's beautiful phrase, loving what is, is what we come to after sufficient, deep enough practice. Everything that happens to us, we see as good. There's nothing that's bad. There's nothing that opposes that good. You could also call it God. There's no struggle inside us. So I think that the wolf parable may be helpful to many people. I can see how it would be. But ultimately, it doesn't describe anything that's real. And ultimately, I think it's something we have to grow beyond. So that's my take on it. That's a great take. And I think it's a great

place for us to move into a little bit deeper conversation about this because you're a longtime Zen student. I am a Zen student and a longtime meditator. And there's this idea, which is not an idea, you could say it's truth or reality, that as you said, it's all connected, it's all reality, it doesn't break out into this good and evil in the way that we conventionally think it does. out into this good and evil in the way that we conventionally think it does. And at the same time, there is this world that we live in that does have these characteristics and different types. And Zen will often talk about, you know, two sides of the same thing. There's the absolute, and then there's the relative. And I'm kind of curious how you interpret how to make decisions about what's proper and right action in this relative world when you have that absolute perspective, how those two things

work in harmony is a question. Excellent question. And I'm going to cause another little problem for you. I hope not, but maybe and say that actually there's no such thing as the absolute and the relative. In that old Zen poem called Absolute Trust in the Mind is one translation. In that poem, the poet, the Zen master says, I can't express what the truth is, but here's what you should go back to every time you're in doubt. Not two. It's not two. So when you say absolute and relative, you've already split the world into two. And the experience of someone who is living in a state of awakening is that there's never a decision that has to be made. Everything is obvious, everything flows, and life is very

easy. So there's a union of, if you want to say absolute and relative, which are not true in an ultimate sense, that has already fused in the life or in the mind, one who is living in harmony with the way things are. That's how I'd say it. So personally, I haven't had to make a decision in decades. So as you move through the world, the right action becomes apparent to you without having to think or decide. Yes. And again, it's just the authentic action. The right part is a judgment that, you know, is at a later point in the process, if at all. It's simply action. It's action that's true to yourself. And you don't have to think about it. You know, it becomes second nature. And everything you do, everything you say is simply an expression of your own reality. And it's always good. And there's never a problem. It's the most astonishing thing to experience.

And it's everything that the old masters said it was. There's nothing that they described about this state of awakening that is unworthy of the truth. It's an amazing thing to experience. Right. And you said not to, you know, the master said not to. Now in Suzuki has a phrase not to not one, which I think is interesting. It's, oh, that's cool. It's not quite, it's not really two, but it's also not quite one. You know, you're there, I'm here, you know, physical sense, like I can't, you know, I can't touch you right this second, right? So you're there, I'm here, but it comes from a deeper place. to it is that this idea that it's all good and it's all okay is a privileged white idea because things in our lives generally are all good and okay. And we're in a position to recognize or realize that, but lots of other people, their lives are very different. And what role do we have in helping in that way? And so I'd just be kind of curious your thoughts on that,

because that's a common criticism. criticism personally I haven't heard that but I'm not surprised first of all it's not an idea and second of all it's not white it's yellow if anything comes from many many great teachers in in India and China and Japan so this is a gift to us from that culture. We began to take it on really in the 60s and 70s. And, you know, those of us who began meditative practice back then were and are sitting at the feet of these great yellow and brown enlightened masters. So to say that it's white seems awfully silly, it seems to me. As far as privilege goes, that has a certain truth to it. Most people who come to meditative practice are coming from a somewhat educated background, and that entails some degree of privilege. But more important, they're coming from a vast hunger for the truth.

It's probably true that poor people don't have the luxury of indulging that hunger because they have to support themselves and their families. But there are poor people who come to spiritual practice. I've met many. And when they're ready for it, it happens, however little money they have. I've seen people from extremely modest circumstances and minority backgrounds plunge into the practice with as much passion as anybody else. As for what to do, I think Katie, my wife, has the best solution, which is to dedicate herself to making everybody in the world or as many people as possible aware that there's a way out of suffering.

Just as the Buddha said, there is suffering and it's very important to acknowledge that in our life. So there is suffering. The second noble truth is there's a cause of suffering, and that's a spectacularly important thing to understand. Katie makes it very simple when she says the second noble truth really means that when we believe our thoughts, we suffer. When we question our thoughts, we don't. And that's a very powerful formulation of the second noble truth. The third noble truth is that there's an end to

suffering, not just that it's possible to alleviate suffering, but that all suffering can be ended completely when you've awakened to the truth. What that means is that there's no longer any anger, any sadness, any fear that it's possible for a human being to live in a state of constant peace and happiness. And that's a radical thing to observe or to experience. So those four truths are what actually she teaches in her own way. She never knew that there was such a thing as Buddhist teaching until I met her, actually. So all this comes directly from the source with her and her job as she conceives it is to put this out to anybody who wants to listen for free on her website. So people can be as poor as they are and if they have access to a laptop, they can learn how to practice self-inquiry and the way she teaches it. That's a great response. Thank you. I want to dig a little bit deeper into that idea of suffering and the ending of suffering because different people talk about suffering differently. Some people would describe suffering as the additional layer of mental consternation that we put on top of experiences that happen, and we usually do it on top of experiences that are quote-unquote painful ones.

Yes, that's an accurate description. Okay, good. So your point is that it's possible to get to the point where we don't do any of that layering, and all we have is the base sort of quote-unquote pain that shows up in life. Your back hurts, you feel the pain, but you're not adding to it by all the stories of why back pain is a terrible thing and what it's doing to your life and all the fear that comes with it. Exactly so.

So the distinction between pain, which is a physical phenomenon, and suffering, which is always a mental phenomenon, is really important. phenomenon and suffering, which is always a mental phenomenon, is really important. So you can feel pain and not project it into the future or suffer because of what you're remembering, even if your memory goes back to a nanosecond before the present instant and all suffering comes from being stuck in a past or an imagined future and I'm actually an imagined past or an imagined future if you actually even with physical pain Katie often says this if you actually focus on the present moment, which doesn't exist because it's always gone as soon as you focus on it, if you focus on that place in between past and future,

you won't be able to feel any pain because it's gone before the moment that you can feel it. So it's possible even with physical pain, not to get caught up in physical experience. That's an awkward way of saying it, but there it is. 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 going to drop by. Mr. Brian 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. Let's change direction here a little bit, although it's not a radical change of difference, but I would like to ask you, this is just for my own curiosity. Well, listeners are gonna be like, why do I care? But I'm curious, have you ever translated or done a version of the Heart Sutra?

Actually, yes, I just did one for a friend of mine who has a small press. So it's going to come out in a very limited edition and probably won't come out in any other edition because, as you know, it's extremely short and would hardly make part of a book. So that's my answer. Yes, but it's quite recent and will be something that only very few readers will have access to. I'm going to need to somehow get on your email list or whatever I need to do so I can get a copy of that. Which I don't have. Well, we'll figure something out. I'll tell you that I translated shunyata, which is usually translated as emptiness, I translated it as openness. about is, for listeners who don't know, the Heart Sutra is a very short reading that is used in Zen very, very much. Most Zen centers that you go to will chant the Heart Sutra at the beginning or during their chanting service. And a lot of it talks about this idea that form is emptiness and

emptiness is form. And that word emptiness leaves a lot of Western minds sort of puzzled going, well, what the heck does that mean? And so I was curious how you would translate that word emptiness leaves a lot of Western minds sort of puzzled going, well, what the heck does that mean? And so I was curious how you would translate that word. Yeah, openness has its own problems. I think the problems with emptiness are acute because usually people think of emptiness as nothing and it's not nothing. So openness maybe is a little bit more useful because what it's really talking about is the mind that doesn't get stuck in its own judgments and that doesn't believe its own

thoughts. My old Zen master used to call it the see what the mind might be like when it doesn't bathe itself in its own experience of reality without judgment. It's a wonderful phrase, I think. I think so too, the don't know mind. The other way I've heard the phrase emptiness translated before, and that I think is interesting, and I'd just be curious what you think is boundlessness. Oh, that's a good way to do it. Yeah, that works as well. Yeah. Yeah. No, no limits, no limitations. All right. There is my overly nerdy part of this

interview and we will, we will get back to other topics, but it'd be curious if you tell me a little bit about, you did pretty extensive Zen training. Are you still involved in that tradition or have you sort of internalized it to the extent that you're not, you know, actively, you know, there and doing that? I'm kind of curious your relationship to it, you know, I don't know how many years, 50 years later, maybe? I was immersed in Zen practice for seven years from 1973 to 1980. And immersion means doing nothing else, no writing, very little reading, practice ranging from four hours a day to 12 hours a day, one seven-day intensive meditation period every month, and then many individual retreats, including a number of 100-day solitary retreats, where the schedule

was 20 hours of meditation a day. So just to give your listeners an idea of how intensive that was. And it was very difficult, of course, in its own way, too. Since 1980, I haven't done any formal meditation except for two mini 100-day retreats where I was sitting between midnight and 3 a.m. every night for 100 days. There were some interesting stories involved with that. But aside from that, I haven't done formal meditation since 1980, and it has all been internalized. I have, after I met my wife, done intensive work in her method of self-inquiry. that experience of Zen meditation and giving me the tools to question them and have them unravel in amazingly short time. So that's basically my experience. And listeners, you are hearing an awful lot about his wife, Byron Katie, and we do have an interview with her. It's back in the archives. It's been a few years, but if you search for it, you should be able to find it. If not, let me know. So thank you for that. Did you

do koan practice as part of your Zen studies? Yes, I did indeed. I studied with Sung San and helped him write a book called Dropping Ashes on the Buddha. And then I studied for two and a half years in Maui with Robert Aiken Roshi, and did koan studies with both of them. Excellent. I am in the midst of relatively early koan study. I've been meditating for a long, long time, but I more recently this year have made a commitment to Zen practice. I mean, one of the dangers of doing a show like this, right, is I talk to a different person every week and I get all kinds of ideas, which led my personal spiritual practice to get kind of fragmented. And so I went, you know what, I want to just pick a path and for my personal

spiritual practice, stay there. And so Zen is what I picked. And I've been doing koan work with a teacher. And it's been a very interesting experience, very different than what I've done before. I'll bet. Yeah. Well, the Cohen experience was really helpful for me and helpful also professionally for writing. It not only taught me how to get to a state of stillness, but also, and more importantly, how to hold the questioning mind without any content, which is really what you need to do to work with Colons. And it was devilishly difficult at first for years. It's more difficult for people like me who are, it's not a question of intelligence, it's a question of intellectuality.

So I came, I started when I was a graduate student and with all sorts of ideas. And it was, it was excruciating the first couple of years, because there were so many thoughts going on in my mind. And it was so difficult for me to experience even a short space of silence. It was like, you know, the whole sky was covered with clouds. And maybe once in a while, every few months, the clouds would open a peep and the sun would shine through and then the clouds would close right back up. And there I was again, as I was at the beginning. So it really required a huge amount of patience and perseverance, but I knew this was my path and I wasn't going to let go. I felt like a bulldog who had gotten his teeth

onto somebody's ankle, a postman's ankle maybe, and that was it. And so maybe just briefly, if you could explain in your words to listeners what koan work is, because I realized we just had a conversation about something that certainly some of our listeners know, but some don't. Sure. A koan is an existential problem or question that's meant to catapult the student into a space of questioning, total questioning. And the rational mind cannot make headway with this kind of existential question. One of the old Zen masters says that it's like a mosquito trying to bite into an iron bowl. No way of doing it. These questions have a great variety, but one of the famous ones, it's an old Japanese question, is what is the sound of one

hand clapping? So if you try to figure that out, you'll be looking for quite a long time. And if you are able to get into this space of questioning and hold that for hours, for days, for weeks, for months maybe, or some people for years. I know of one Zen master who worked on his first koan for 19 or 20 years before he was able to answer it. If you're able to rest in that space of not knowing and be comfortable in it and persevere, then one day the answer will present itself to you, the answer will present itself to you, possibly in a spectacular, joyful way, as happened with me when I answered my initial koan. So that's what it's like. There are all sorts of other koans, and there's a whole curriculum of koans that was devised over the years by some of the great teachings and masters. But it all comes down to being able to immerse yourself in that space of

active, glorious not knowing. 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 going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you 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. 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. The thing I found interesting about koans is, as you say, the intellectual mind, if it wants to, can exhaust itself because it just, there's nowhere to go. And I'm like you, you know, it's not so much a question. I like the way you said that of being intelligent, but having that orientation, my orientation is towards thinking and koans help do that. And the other thing I found so interesting about them is they're always talking about and this goes back to what we talked about early on they're always talking about true undivided reality that's where it all points back to and even knowing that that's sort of the orientation to try and take sort of helps

position the mind that way a little bit, or at least I have found that to be so. And like any really powerful spiritual practice, what it's all about is the mind's relationship with its contents. And most people don't even realize that there's a difference between mind and what it thinks. One of the most important realizations for people to have, which really goes back to the Buddha's first noble truth, is something that was very elegantly put by an old Greek philosopher named Epictetus, who said, we don't suffer because of what happens to us. We suffer because of what we think about what happens to us. And that's an amazing thing to understand that that changes people's lives in an instant.

Right, right. I think even slightly more fundamental than that is the idea, at least it was for me, that these thoughts are just thoughts. Just because it shows up in my head does not mean it's a true thing. And it doesn't mean that it's, it feels like it's us, right? It's like, that's the voice and it feels like it's us and realizing like that discursive voice that just secretes thoughts, the way glands secrete their various, uh, hormones or whatever the gland does. Once that is realized, it can become a totally different relationship. This makes me think of one of the, in some of the earlier Buddhist texts where thinking is categorized as a sense, like seeing and hearing. It's just another thing that happens

that receives in stimulation and processes. And realizing that we don't have to believe it is such a fundamental step, I think, for anybody on a spiritual path. Yes, yes. And that's another reason why Katie's first question is so powerful. Is it true? If you've done self-inquiry long enough and deeply enough, whenever any stressful thought arises in your mind, instantly along with it arises the question, is it true? And it meets the thought and the thought unravels by itself before it can cause any damage, before

it can result in any action. So it's a very powerful method. Indeed. Let's talk a little bit about how you do your work, because you are a translator, but I've also heard you say that, and I can't remember which particular, oh, the Diamond Sutra in one of your books with Katie, you say that this is not so much a translation as an adaptation. And I think that's an interesting way of doing it. But tell me sort of your process. You've done so many different things from Buddhist works, the Bhagavad Gita, the old ancient Greek tales, Christian stories. I mean, you've done, the breadth is amazing. Talk to me about how you get into these things and what's important to you in making a translation. into these things? And what's important to you in making a translation?

Well, sure, I can take a stab at it. It's a very big question. At the beginning, I'll say that if I've fallen in love deeply enough, I may learn a language in order to read it in the original. That's what happened with Hebrew in the book of Job, and German with the poetry of Rilke, and Greek with Homer, and some other languages. I don't learn a language for the sake of the language, but so that I can become more intimate with that consciousness that I've fallen in love with. So it's like falling in love with a woman and wanting to marry her because you want to sink into a years-long state of intimacy and always go deeper and deeper. So my experience of doing that with a text is very much in parallel with my experience of marriage. It's subtle, and it's not something that you can acquire a skill for.

It's something that the skill has to be discovered. But what I'm doing is not translating the meaning of words. It's that I'm translating the meaning plus the music of words. or a great text like the Tao Te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita that are originally in verse or the Book of Job, if you don't translate the music, you're not translating the text, because much of the meaning of the text has to do with the concision or the joyous subtlety or the powerful beating rhythm of the original text. And not to reproduce that in English is to fail in your job, in my job as a translator, I think. It's both and rather than either or. And that's a very tricky thing to do often.

So what I do when I'm working on a translation or an adaptation is I'll get very still. Again, it's a meditative practice. I'll get very still and tune in stereophonically to the original language when I know it. And if I'm translating from a language I don't know, that's a different process, but not so different as you might think. But I'll have the music and meaning of the original in one ear, and in the other ear I'll be listening for some equivalent music in English. And again, talk about don't know mind, it can sometimes be a long wait, but I have enough practice in this to know immediately when I'm hearing that music. And when I do, it's just a question of writing it down, and then I can make it more subtle and powerful in later drafts. But essentially, that first hearing is where

the poem or the text comes into reality for me. And it's always a gift. It's nothing I can make happen. It's nothing I can force into existence. And it's the same as with Koan study. It's just a question of waiting till the answer presents itself to me in its own good time. That's wonderful. And I have about 50 questions following up on that, but I'm going to try and keep them relevant. So much of what we do here is try and make it relevant for listeners. And I think you've said before a couple of things that your allegiance is to the spirit

of the text, not the literal meaning. And I think that that is a great spirit that we can all bring into how we relate with great works, is what is the spirit here, not the literal meaning. So many people get hung up on exactly what the word is. And not that there's not a time and a place for that, but you're really going for what's the heart of this thing. Yeah. And in that work, as in, I'm going to bring this up again, simply because it's my experience, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are not opposites. You can be extremely faithful as you're being very free with the text because your allegiance is to the spirit of it, to the music of it, and not to the literal meaning. Although you don't want to stray too far from the literal meaning. But that freedom is something

that I learned early on when I was doing my Rilke translations, because I went back to Rilke, most of your readers probably have heard of Rilke, the great German poet who many people consider the greatest poet of the 20th century. But in any case, he himself was an excellent translator, and he translated some of the great works of one of the other master poets of the 20th century, a French poet named Paul Valéry. And he translated these poems in a stunningly beautiful way where he was on a very long leash. He made a very long leash for himself and strayed out into the not literal with great abandon. And yet it all sounded like the original poem. And it said exactly the same thing, though in a different way. So I learned from Rilke to trust that instinct of

what feels right, and to know that that kind of freedom was a higher faithfulness than the literal constricted sense of it. And, you know, this really is a very practical application of the word that you mentioned before, boundlessness. You can't give readers that sense of boundlessness if you're afraid of being unfaithful to the poet or transgressing the strict limits of literality, etc., etc. It's something that you come to and then realize that your faithfulness is the same thing as that boundlessness. That's great. When you say you learn a language in order to do the translation, I assume you learn that language in a different way than somebody who is trying to learn a language to be fully fluent in it or speak in it.

Oh, for sure. There's a different way you go about it. You're not going and getting, I can't even think of what the most popular learning new language apps are, but you're going about it in a different way. Yeah. For example, I can't order breakfast in German. I mean, I don't know the, with all my German, I don't know these basic words. And I'm often baffled by regular conversation because the German that I learned was Rilke's German, which is very peculiar and beautiful and sometimes esoteric and elitist, etc. And that's what I learned. So it's a kind of sub-dialect of German,

you might say. And the same with the Hebrew of Job. I never learned modern Hebrew. And the Hebrew of Job, I used to compare when people asked me about it, how it was to learn Hebrew through working with Job. I would sometimes say, not entirely facetiously, that it's like learning English by reading Finnegan's Wake. So it's not your standard English. Right, right. Well, that is a good place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to, in the post-show conversation, do a little bit of talking about your new book, which we didn't even get to. Oh, yes we didn't even get to. Oh, yes, we need to get to Joseph.

And the way of forgiveness. Yes. So we're going to talk about Joseph. And I could tell, Joseph loves what is. Let's put it that way. And that's part of what I think draws you to that story is your idea of loving what is. So we'll talk about that in the post-show. Listeners, you can get post-show conversations, extra mini episodes, ad-free episodes, all that stuff at oneufeed.net slash join. And you also get the pleasure of supporting this show. So Stephen, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you.

A pleasure for me too. Thank you. You're welcome. 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.

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