first class last time
we spend most of our time and then more or less in contact with section one of britain's interior experience how get into this with know how hundreds know in minute when for the cover
when was the first section average reserved
we could more or less of what is contemplation
all his titles is no such an of
i'm so first it's it's a question of giving a sense of the condemn the experience of what a man's pilot
and then putting it into context and is very important to to realize rather reflexively what context he puts it in that connection with the in herself okay because her
and you don't find that and most of the a christian writings about contemplation that's something that a murderer has more or less him is i rediscovered okay even then the word self or whatever you want to or use as equivalent for her
is not something that you find a lot of before the merge time in the west that is in our modern period okay
and what you do find is a lot of talk about the sole not much about the psyche you have been about the soul
and the spirit
and often very analytical and looks at the human person and a scholastic or posts scholastic way which attempt to break down the person into the faculties but what's lost as the sense of the unity of the persons who have something of returns at our time that diabetic and to and murdered is a profit of
that along the line of spirituality
he may make dichotomy but he's good along the line of anthropology and spirituality about read grasping the unity of the human person and a contemplation is not one of your faculties in contact with god and is not the basically a dualistic relationship between in your gut is that a unity of experience
in which all of his dimensions of unity or non dualism come together is very important and about the kind of person is not something to do with it the sent and a sentence the activation the realization the actual realization of the car of your being and the whole or he'll be okay now that puts the hold him accountable asian
a completely different i have related to the center and an unrelated to everything so as not as without it everything in substance that can be overdone tours will say however it's very valuable okay for finding our way around in the monastic code remember panic ours notion of the center with which he defines the money
rustic live open the market rather up one hundred times but that was a very precious thing for me when petticoat the equivalent i remembered my reading was one i read the a series of articles on purity of heart and could locate the heart as the core of a monastic theology or a monastic spirituality and the biblical tradition and panic average of
at the center and generalizes him a bring us together and you've got an excellent a framework axis for understanding monasticism ugly monastic spirituality and an interior way and monasticism as the interior as it were dimension or interior level idea be speaking of
have a life of the church and of human life
henry sense of the cosmos
as merton brings out when he talks about the contemplative is adam
adam in the garden in the place of unity prior to all that economies in a place of the integrity the wholeness the resonant when human nature rang as a ago before the switch and the alienation of fragmentation expulsion from the garden and oliver
hemorrhoids another problems
oh i'm so gonna patient for him is a
is an awakening of the inner self
and most of the rest of the first section is and with giving your experiential
witnesses to that awakening from various angles the first time goes out of a zen
contemplative remember joe was at his name the on my old man sitting in his office one is found mind was was placid and clear and and the doors of the mine a thunderclap he heard his hundred and the doors of the mind burst open
and suddenly nothing happened and everything happened and he was the same old guy and all of a sudden everything is filled with light everything is somehow made no and interest as it was the indescribable unit of experience and then he called several christian texts remember who decided customs and per an open and jonathan
growth and without getting very analytical about it he sort of a just sketching out the area just to sort of driving posts in the ground and then he's going to move around in that area afterwards with a more go to call it more rigorous approach
he was staking out the territory on that first section
it's very important to to realize what merton is putting in their know which one you read martin writing about constellation writing about these things he's not simply giving you the tradition of the church is not giving you a kind of orthodox version of a standard version it's got a spin on it was time it's got a special framework which he has
very painstakingly worked out in the course of his own life and he's trying to write about experience and not just theory
as reported realize that both because a lot of the value of what it gives you is in that particular point of view and also because it's a personal point of view it's not infallible so it has to be evaluated you have to you have a right to check it out with your unexperienced to check it out with other things that you read and here
it's not an absolute
note a kind of parallel here and member that axis of the movement from the false self to the true self and marks we looked at at positively and then criticized a bit but notice a parallel and that movement from the false self to the yourself in merton and to a true contact with reality and it's moving from
an exterior snow which is determined by member where elliot such marta the face to meet the faces that we need
i could make a face and we put on a face to meet the faces that we need that kind of thing as a persona the kind of personality kind of self image that has created to get along in the world and we have to have one in such as but when we believe in it ten were in trouble and the for self is a self which believes in at persona
it believes in his batting average with believes in its fan mail that believes in in the the percentage that it gets the kind of feedback that it gets and it is built upon that it doesn't have anything inside to rest upon the true self is the self which somehow is springing up from inside
and doesn't need a it may receive it now it doesn't dwell on it doesn't live on it is not based on that feedback based on that mirroring from outside itself but somehow it's identity is flying mysteriously from my them from the invisible from the father as we say christianity
i now notice a kind of parallel to what's happening in the church at that time this is the time about vatican to martin died in nineteen sixty eight this inner experience was written one night and fifty nine okay so it's right in that time that the church is undergoing a similar journey during that time i don't want to makes us to sharp but
the church is sort of waking up from its counter reformation false self and a certain way and not exaggerated but when the church gets into a battle and it got into a life and death struggle and i'm not catholic church in particular at the time of the protestant reformation it tends to
have to create a self which is not quite itself okay when it's embattled it tends to get rigid it tends to tighten up and to begin to assume an exterior identity which is not quite the same not quite coherent with it's genuine
interior mysterious identity see it doesn't have the patience for mystery at that point it has to have answers and so it comes out with answers and it builds a structure of answers a church of answers which almost suppresses the question
almost suppresses the question
ah because if you asked the question here afraid that the other guys answer may prevail so you gotta get your answer in there before the other fellow does that sort of thing happens so what the church doses construct a kind of exterior silva kind of also vatican two as a waking up from that
particular problem which is four five hundred years old stems at least from the time of the counter reformation reformation and counter-reformation to the interior identity of the church you find this and for example in the images of the church the models of the church remember when every dulles rates as book models of the church and he says well we've been
living on one image which the is the institutional image now that's what would you call it the battle gear of the church the institutional image is like the the mobilized church church milling to church in a fight and therefore having to to have a hard clearly defined
impregnable image of itself like going out an armor to confront the phone okay receptor is that the true self and the church maybe it's us so from the church but as dulles points out were able to think up five or six other images which go much deeper into the triviality of the church so instead of be fixed on
one's self image the church moved into a plurality of images and beyond and within the plurality of the images the mystery of its own identity which dwells within that do you see the parallel with what martin is doing and talking about our movement from the false south to the patricia so no doubt is being moved also by the site
geist at that time by the spirit which is moving the church anteriorly and towards the interior and towards a deeper discovery of its own identity of the time of vatican two
i don't want to push the parallel to thought about the think it's true
also something about the masculine feminine spectrum is involved here and this movement from the a more exterior identity to the interior identity and or from a more would you say circumscribe and hard objective view to an acceptance of
mystery and an understanding of self and everything else some how can a participative way and in a holistic way rather than simply objective and and to otherwise i going talk more about that life
okay i'm in those hand out you have one of them had our to its age to their it has called feces about contemplation okay now this is something has started here would like to continue and is a more or less what would you gotta experiment with war
proviso it
just to put down some fundamental principles about to hear that were taken of contemplation of evidence friends

hundred or myself
and the first one is none of the to unit is a non dual knowledge okay i'm almost equating where contemplation with that expression the non dual an expression has a lot more affinity of course to eastern traditions to the asian spiritual traditions than it does two hours
and what i say that we have a tendency to want to define that the only trouble is it doesn't define very well because when we say unity we may non-dual in several different directions
this book non-duality by a good boy that are referred to from time to time
he starts out he's trying to find a common denominator between the asian tradition between taoism buddhism and hinduism and he finds it and the experience of the reality of non-duality but then he sets out on a tourist chapter to try to say what he means by an underwhelming because of the five different kind
which are as follows
first the negation of dualistic thinking that is thinking which differentiates and the to a close category like good and bad from were mine and yours are being and non-being success and failure things like that secondly the non clarity of the world that is somehow
how to world as is one as run think this is not in your notes though
yeah this is all with reference to that first thesis com contemplation with contemplation as disunity or non-dual knowledge could just gonna her a note to that if you're interested in this i can give you a copy of this to
thirdly it's a non difference of subject and object and that's the chief way in which he
boy talks about non-duality where unit of experience that is when you perceive something when you know something you know it through your unity with it
yeah not not objective way that is as a as an object of to yourself such as she clearly at a distance as it were and clearly from an exterior front as it work from a facade as we see one another's faces
my relationships are very complex from curious because we we see a face and that's an objective knowledge isn't as purely subject object and then at the same time we know that very face and a participative way because were made at the same stuff and shot you can't know him in person and a totally non participative where we try to by creating enemy
and so on but it's very hard to do
and then two more the identity of phenomenon and the absolute that's kind of a mysterious one but it comes up residence one day a buddhist will say that samsara is the same as nirvana
another is that even non duality and duality are the same
so the idea of non-duality to the more subtle than one might check and then finally mr code unity between god and a human person were surprised to find that number five we could it number one probably going from a christian point of view and so it urban in his early works in his later works team
it
so those are just what i'm trying to do as illustrate that this notion of non-duality it is more than an ocean and an expansion on always dimension so really it's it's a an indefinable experience and innocence it to the experience okay the experience of experiences in which everything has transformed
and you are not separate from any of it and all of this in the one in the union unity and as witches go
yes just repeat the first to yeah the first one was the negation of dualistic thinking
merton gets to this in that section that we had for this time i cave where it talks about the kind of know what the lumberman's thinking vs the child and then and the forest that same page he was quite and quite a focus precise way about this the idea of a knowledge of good and evil this are christian equivalent okay
that after adam and eve ate from the tree their vision was changed in over their eyes were opened for what i mean that their eyes were opened it's ironic isn't it
their eyes were opened suddenly they were scared of god they were ashamed they cover themselves up and there were no longer worthy friends any longer either everything's on that was alienated from that point there were thinking from that point dualistic in sunlight and knowledge of guy evil is this non intuitive knowledge to fall into duality
erm non-duality merton will say that and also suzuki's is curious that is gonna it this dialogue with d t suzuki in and jan and verge of appetite and suzuki uses the very act from genesis he picks that up as is prefer damage from the christian tradition for this difference between dualistic take
king a non dualistic thinking that adam and eve fall into duality it's beautiful really is perfect coming from that particular angle is not a complete interpretation of that scripture text obviously but it's it's perfect in its way
it's hard to improve on it
so the first one was the negation of dualistic thinking that positive negative thinking
the second is that not a plurality of the world and other words we live in a universe which can seem to be what an aggregate of different things or can be perceived as being one thinks he does a great revolution in this direction and and right now the though
gaia movement for instance okay
which sees the the planet as one living be okay earth as one living the revival the notion of the world soul and r k
one living being from which you are not separate you don't look at it from outside you know from inside itself
so the world being one thing and when we say world we don't and this century we don't mean just apply to me to him in the universe time i mean everything everything we know from a christian perspective everything that's created
yes in some ways it seems paradoxical at our steam when it's about our new knowledge it is yeah that last really in britain stuff and that i texted booster sick workers the the did the racist all produces it for school or kind of proof
figure see preparations for feeling yeah i think from a christian perspective i think that's true from a buddhist perspective the first time my absorb all the other foot but i know you can come in either case which you say is true that is this you see the importance of this our because this sketches out new territory and shows you that
the way you're thinking of it now is probably along one of these dimensions okay because that's what we usually do so this is pushing out the various dimensions of a notion of non-duality after which you sort of collapsed those those members those beams again and just allow it to be itself as a total
reality which is and analyzable because it's completely ironic to analyze it in two dimensions and categories when it is the very experience of non what we say non partition ability or something like that you know organic yeah i just been through private
i think even a good hindu name and say a guy that created one k plans there's two things being wanting to say they are not to me yeah oh yeah for sure that even have dual is even more like more active than you to do not sure they're not too not sure not
the dutchman yeah the language i think all of our expressions are are going to fall short in some way so each one we use it and then we have to realize that what we're talking is is beyond it and some way and that we've abused what we're talking about and somebody with our word yeah
but the expression non dual has the advantage of starting from the side of non-duality rather than moving towards decided non-duality from are divided however noticed that the christian perspective in general a judeo christian perspective differs from the asian perspective because we moved from duality to inanity
this is joe even in our lives
there's certain the health and think of law and gospel oak and the movement from lot of gospel from old testament new testament believe can be seen as a woman from duality to manually okay so that's our pattern whereas in the asian traditions you're more likely to postulate on original non-duality
and then sort of tried to return to it okay to enter into it through interiority
instead of a historically speed as to do with our historical
quality you know the western tradition where historical people it's a historical tradition and that means dualism we start there we moved from history to the point to the infinite point of the knob dual
which is encouraged to and baptism function
the resurrection of on
i think i understand what you're saying but you can push a little worm but you might be having our schools
the reality of the to value for laws close to okay so sure can get pushed the law says it's also easier to do this and not to do that okay
the law says if you do this you are good and were approved by god if you do not do this or if you do that you are not you have inside the longer outside the low as a forces at one point he voters while statement because of the law center arose because there was no send me photos of work that is using her to
rhetorical way he said something like that okay so the the fact of the law creates the possibility of transgression
okay
and the fact of the law divide your life so that you're acting from an exterior principal the principal exterior to your stuff by distinguishing that which is lawful from that which is an okay i suppose there's another principle that comes from within yourself an interior principle which does not
work by distinctions but somehow my inclusion okay
which is what the holy spirit doesn't got him killed in a testament the spirit which knows all sanders is privileged to have embraces everything the principle known as to remain within the do not do to remain within the unity of the actual ultimate adds to the infinite unity rather than
and stepping outside of it into the darkness and the illusion of duality once again paul says of the law is percentage of i was not different adjust okay because it's the people who are outside in the world of dualism in the world of fragmentation the land about unlikeness on likenesses of others
card who must make these distinctions but if you have the law within you that law of the spirit is a non do a lot
that is not something i think that we grab right away it but if you if you stay whether the next president's while most of the church is still in this is simply notes line is yeah of of other cause for such sandwich tern people love from the church and drove
however the church will always have to have i suppose that aspect and exterior as clinton of law and a prescription and of you can do this you can do that and shown we don't like it but it's it's sort of the lola run up the whole thing and it's got to be there because we were in that kind of world
for let him take practicing catholics are still yeah it changed him a child for when it takes over one a predominates and when that's the image which the church to communicate them weren't true my problem went the church believes that that's what it is and learn trope
yes
at talking and sticking r tolkien and i wanted to ask you to be put the boundary between the notion of the unit to non dualistic you know pod putting on masks christ yeah notion of the inner southern mom and then the current position where we said there's an identity between and vanity
and and the human you know were well
i'm not sure that i entirely understand your question but that martin is going to talk about those we go on here but
people have argued over that and worried over that for centuries and centuries you know and the definition which merton will always go back to when necessary is to the god and the human person are ontologically distinct and are united gratuitously in
the contemplative experience to say but also already in baptism okay
but the experience which you hear about
and which he writes about is continually more or less ignoring that because it as a celebration as it were of the overcoming of that dollars that duality okay so there is an obviously an ontological duality but the the trick and at the secret and that the mystery and that is
is that together with that there's a basic unity of some kind which we can't even put into language without transgressing in some way and that's what we mean i said it removed from duality to non-duality and the judeo christian tradition the secret of non-duality a nice all of this is a mystery which
we cannot penetrate and so we approach it as it were linearly historically by moving towards it from duality okay but that secret we're not we're not able to quit so we talk about ontological distinction but what does that mean you know because the very core of our of are being the very core of our existences is
a and domestic like i guard dog about a divine spark innocent john okay but whenever we try to put that in hard theological language we going into trouble it doesn't permit itself to be expressed in our abstract language and is satisfactory way because we're putting it into dualistic language and and demand another language if it can be spoken
i'm a human language at all
i think sometimes i think that a principal like sophia like the divine wisdom is a better solution to this and are almost entirely and monolithically masculine theological tradition yes you see the west we begin to perceive the added
it is true and not logically couldn't you say at the pass your some situation begins the garden doesn't became law simon and consulting paper begins in shooting situation most of the new testament it against with grace just games with this initiative and common establishes
so he were getting back to have primordial the death of our judeo-christian will see it and push got a lot of stick with maybe head start the judeo christian it's best yeah what what i'm trying
say i think it deserves what you say about see the theological vision the best theologians sedate whether maximus the confessor or whoever it they will find a non dual at the source you have to do that okay another as we can't start with a we can have a metaphysics of dualism obviously okay
however the surpass that we walk and our tradition has this pattern woven into a very deeply of moving from a lotta grace gonna say when you say that the new testament start with grace yes but this is with the president of law that is on their face cover art is this mysterious people are
economy and grace recovered so recovery hi you and that's what process and ramen she says before the law was we have this movie i praise okay but our experience okay i think the new testament judeo-christian tradition takes us where we are in a world of dualism and fragmentation with in a fallen condition
when was the fallen condition is it is it a condition of what would you go to extreme dualism aggravated dualism so it takes us there and moves us toward the beginning and what you have for instance in john's gospel is that the beginning a non dual beginning comes into the dualistic world okay the words the logos is the non as
get out of the whole thing of the creation comes into the middle of the world and that somehow transforms the world from this non dualistic shutter within a starting from america that the prologue to one case he was the workers we're gonna group was nuts right from their that's the what to go that's the
nom nom du credo the credo of non dualism of christianity right turn them in the prologue of job but it comes to worse and our situation or dualism and that's what i mean our journey our walk begins with dualism
and it's a practical tradition in that sense i think you'd find that in any of the great traditions that there's an implicit dualism in a way that they operate no matter what the philosophy is you know no matter what the ultimate experience as buddhism judaism starts out i'm sure with law and the practical life with the of the dish
i phone use com opening closing doors and things like there's dualism
okay
let's see
a question of how to spend our time because of credit
don't think we're going to have much time for that merton section today on to presume that sort of
digested that let's just run through these species about contemplation the first time had taken as half an hour to talk about it that's because if somehow contains everything
the second one is martin's principle which i'm adopting here contemplation is a direct experience or realization of the self okay
and will be seen had again and again
three therefore it's not limited to a person's have any particular phrase where religion is not a particularly peculiar the christian experience okay now we'd have to qualify this out from another site as well by saying aye yes but everybody's on anonymous christian and i believe that's true and every nanda will experience i is in the word
it is in the logos and i believe that too but we're not approaching it from that angle
okay and from our point of view we want to say that this is something and shared by all the great spiritual traditions and is central to the asian spiritual traditions
yes q america to just for a second actually that there was something i have an airline the murder thing and an and asking them that page near kay said he says
the kinda for a way of saying that are being somehow communicate directly
who is in us
directly into the and i mean that they can immediately and you're saying they're kind of patients direct experience immediate i'm thinking of as unmediated nothing between us and guy what part of the oh heritage tried to after the kitchen happened a christian
ah
all of this other resource fair amount of work here are being somehow communicate directly with the paying of god which helps works that were directly and so i use a direct experience bouncing and the immediate i seem to card in there is a
i think what images immediate not in a sense of time on instantly but without mediation well that's what i'm jeff is there not some debate among the
emergency grace and whether there can be and in an unmediated experience of god in his life and the know people some yeah they do i think
very often when they do i think they're not really taking the this experience into consideration okay the principle does nothing in the intellect her that hasn't come through a sense and shine on this battle it up to a certain point but this is the point she this exp
variances is the one that somehow relativise is all the boundary lines that somehow says yes but to all of those qualifications
this experience of immediacy
a lot of theologians are very determined on one line like well maybe a liturgical theologians to say nothing is nothing that has immediate to assembles or something like that are you know it's ritual or something like that yes but there is something else
this is the point at which analytical theology and the theology that that makes hard rules just isn't able quite to do it is make able quite to reach this point
and the better the allergen to recognize that and this prefer them
yeah the home the whole thesis of what we're talking about the whole faces or what we're talking about is that there is an immediate experience of good as a unit of experience who got in which the union as the knowledge and the knowledge is the union
and if you say well as still mediated by your psyche this somehow you have to distinguish psyche and spirit and suppose we a the spirit is relative that there is a unit of faculty and which is not recognized by most most western theology are already as a level to feel say that human prayer
person can have an experience of god without the nail yes he is that possible and well when a difference i would just said avail this because i think john and encroachments that even and the most greatest challenge of expansion it's like they're still available for what do we mean by the bell at that point i don't know
somehow more talented as some kind of veil still between the human person and the divinity but the veil experientially nearly disappeared at that point and we're talking about things that we really at that point can't talk yeah i have tickets that nearly and that
and i remember some talking at length about that one is insisting that human person will always have you dislike below is and now i think i think john account and immediacy because of that yeah but i think there's a medium in spite of that another as i don't think the veil as a mediation exactly develop some kind of limitation on the experience with union
and when i say that i'm not understanding very little what i'm saying but trying to make some kind of distinction but i think genetic was doesn't insist on the fail and as five the jinn one of his is a spiritual canticle where as breaks avail
now is the time to break the the below the chest of loving and i think he says in the commentary rather than the veil remains in this book it has to do with mortality that we're not just freed into the godhead and this mortal life yes
i'm sure the question how can you have in a sound of a true on second fun yes that's the main topic of vertices a yes and in presents it in a rather lose you pay and as i think you reality unesco i've asked and then you can
not figures and objects in he's opened but in in are in essence can he say that the a sell on a true savic of each button is the south funny and beside him up when the the secret name given to each fun when it is
recognized in the depths of our being and response to that because getting so we can certainly say that and i'm uncertain at merton says nearly nearly that at some point and yeah he says and his various books regions either and siege of contemplation and dosage of contemplation and nearly susan
yeah is that the he says we are a word of god okay and he also gets into the language of name i believe
so
it is that and it is also emitted in the sense that key to the words as one without which it comes from somewhat okay that is the boundary line between his true self and god himself and the divinity is very of not only permeable but even in some way relative even questionable even such as
the grace of god

okay let's call i just want to show sort of the coherence with these principles not all of which in our our infallibly
number four notice this is not just an isolated experience because there's one problem with this whole right a person can go through the whole of his life even as a religious person that of our first a spiritual person and a monk without ever experiencing this in its pure form so what's the good to talking them
if it's a rare experience if it's a rare birth
but is it only that is it only that if what we've said it's true that has that relation to the inner self because aren't we always relating to the inner self aren't we always and between the old man and the new man isn't that christ self will always trying to break through the show as it were isn't it always expressing itself doesn't
in some way influence of permeate all of our life all of our response now that's true then in some way the contemplative experience that contemplative reality is related to all of our life as well right
now notice that in a number three were expanding this to all of humanity along the line of people okay other people or people and here we're expanding us into the fullness of humanity as you might say in the individual person in the fullness of the realization that
the individual person or the ordinary life while the dimensions of the life of the ordinary person okay so we're trying to bring this contemplative reality and experience into every part of the human world both the world of all humanity of people's
and also all of my humanity all of your humanity okay yes
he said
there i think it would be it's it's a difficult question is it it really a difficult question or does our common sense century okay and other which what does our common sense say about that that somehow
sin is a slap in the face of the true self so it involves the tourism okay something like
it's a renunciation it's which it's defying the pressure of the true self and our life it's defying the pressure and delight of the inner selves christ self and ourselves in order to create little pocket of darkness okay so it certainly is in touch with a true self
an inverse or ironically okay
now i have two modes of being present you know the presence of by and environmental activists the person yes you have this mode of communication of absence of incursions from yes and no i think i certainly true
there's in every sphere of activity because consciousness is involved in freedom as involved in every sphere of activity or should be either by either by its presence or by it's exclusion because if we think of the to self is something that is pressing upon our life trying to push itself out into our life trying to realize itself so
in all of our life and everything that we do you know so that we will become actually conscious you become actually free so think of freedom and and consciousness think of light and fire as pushing into our life but every point of every moment that kind of
okay no number five is one interpretation where one perspective for was explaining that are developing a little further that is contemplation is a direct experience with the ground of consciousness and i refer to broader here to call
radha because that's his epistemology and basically even if universe quite says it are very rarely quite snazzy
the experience of the transcendent by the presence of the transcendent is in every act of cognition and mean and everything that we know we know god and a reasonably lovely love god implicitly and perhaps even inversely of perversely in some way you know but it's in all of our inner life
so in some way that the light of the contemplative experience just just as the as the light of head the light of of the sun as in everything that we do outdoors and all of our activities and it's even permeates us because that's where we get our energy
so this this contemplative experience is not a separate is not unrelated to any part of our conscious player now as the ground of consciousness what does that mean it's like the light in which we see like delight in which we are conscious it's like the basic
pure light of which consciousness is a reduced form something like that
our ordinary conscious on the ground consciousness is that objective for subjects and gently that is using its the ground consciousness have industry experience seeing it's a drink experience
no i made it to direct experience of that which is the ground as ordinary consciousness to could even capital cities
which were ground yes yes you could yeah that's an accordion on a grunt isn't
granted or ground as that
who is experienced
pope use
human subjectivity experience with the scrum yes a visit to humans
well if you say the human subject disappears you have it with you know when i don't think we need to be pushed around by our language and that way we're we're free to talk app
particularly central are not only talking of the viewer experience but we're talking of it's it's reduced form general or lesser forms
which are partial experiences of the ground of consciousness you can say that every conscious experiences and expansion of ground of consciousness but it's filtered diminished refracted you know every way a lesson lesser and participations in the grotto consciousness but to the extent to dig contemplative experiences pure but we're saying is that
it is a direct and full expansion the ground of consciousness of the light as it were which is the the ground or light of all of our consciousness
and i think special
contribution of brown eyes
these experience and as something concomitant to l human needs exactly exactly back reliant and iv see all the objects are true and d the families are s nuts we can see that erect it's images about the way our get attention is paid to the opposite
which was reflected just as the light out of the sky is reflected from the objects that we see so it's a walk for five min you just seen it at the beach and profound and satire unnecessary care you and he doesn't often talk about the direct experience of transcendence does he think he does where it talks about a discernment
and the exercises as manic nature's remember we had a famous article on the discernment of spirits there and what happened and he talks about what is it that experience which is on as a spanish expression for that and prepared experienced direct experience of spirit
this the constellation your previous cause you're at it as console or tian seen cows or something like hasn't managed via so that isn't whether the flesh of have direct experience with the ground of consciousness which were kid of we're talking which is a for him as a criterion of discernment
if if that way as clear as it were to that light of consciousness it means somehow that we are moving in the right way as you would say we have not crowded our consciousness by a lot of decision by wrong movement
okay the next one six we move into an expert and ken wilber by the way as the one who wrote the spectrum of consciousness and who reduces everything as it were to one spectrum and one principal seeing the ultimate reality is being consciousness and everything else as it were built up on the ground of
an infinite consciousness so i don't want to take a side track into him right now
and he's coming from her better good
you'd call it a buddhist metaphysics know that we can accept everything that usage
faith is a dark unity of knowledge that beginning of got patient
face as a unit of knowledge face christian trade i'm think particularly christian for your face and jesus the face of the first
the leaving person and some way contains all this wisdom within him within her at kind of thing okay and then face may become gradually illumined so that and filled in as it were
so so that this becomes an explicit in a to knowledge but i think it's because it's a gonna to acknowledge that it reaches her deepen as consider the importance of faith in the new testament and faces some kind of knowledge there's no way out of faith your faith is annoying but consider this role and and investment i'm going to call everything absolutely everything depends upon and
urgent by a the one thing that makes a difference in our life is faith and then love of course which is somehow inseparable from faith the to and somehow somehow or one thing i like to side of one thing two phases of one thing to motor one thing that everything turns it on faith faces the basic
cognition a basic connection and jonathan across as the same thing so faith has to be has to be arriving at the same point we're talking about when we talk about this unit of knowledge and we talked about this sell does this core of our personality and his core of our being has got to be the same center the say
same pivot
there were talking about when we talk about contemplation janitor out
so we introduce this this thesis and we can martin will
go on at length about faith when he's coming from a stranger on a grocer's you frequently does
okay seven will get to this next time and we talk about christian kind of patient and martin says and siege of contemplation and a new stage that the siege of contemplation are planted in the christian at baptism okay and then they developed later on through a life of faith in a life of asceticism
like of detachment and of prick
can we say more if you read the early christian tradition you get the idea that it was in the experience at baptism remember they were baptized as adults that this actually happened to them and it wasn't only a seed it was somehow an experience of fullness
they looked back to the baptismal experience as having been like the not only the rising of the sun with the sun and it's full splendor and some way the fullness of the baptismal experience the fullness of the grace of christ and our experienced and baptism
this has got to be what we're talking about
i believe it is decoded illumination and our photos much
now we don't try to word contemplation and an adjustment as martin pointed out but it's hidden and all of these other expressions for unity of experience one of which is the baptismal experienced of light and the other particularly is the experience of communion of kind of a good a blood or gotta pay those two

eight is something we've already covered here at i'm attempting to put it in a christian perspective and christian tradition you find much talk of union but little talk of community
much talk of union with god especially in the carmelite tradition
but not much talked about the unity of the person or simply unity without any adjective
nine contemplation is an experience both as and as darkness often you find the expression array of darkness or dark light and martin and jonathan the and i think it starts with gregory pusha
of course you'll find that same kind of thing and dionysius and throughout the apathetic tradition
but the idea of positive to positive presence in light of god being able to be experienced as darkness i can be very important to to have that idea when you go through a certain tank
okay ten is related to
for it just the other side of it has it were
we can talk about a pure contemplative experience and then we can talk about a lot of other partially contemplative experiences we can do about a few unity of experience a non dual experience and then we can talk about a a whole bunch of participative experiences which are not dualistic and yet are not pure either
now i'm working will distinguish later i think it is when we get to the fourth section i think are you talking about kinds of of patients he'll talk about cure or mystical content contemplation
you're going to have experience in its purity and fullness and then he'll talk about active contemplation more natural contemplation of sponsor will get into those fine distinctions later on
eleven
i put down here just a few qualities of this pure contemplative experiences is very poultry it
you could say a lot more about it who will go into that later we can expand the list to tip time
connected with this is the next hand out here first age three
which is all taken from his book of cloudy on around hope neuron our lives a chilean psychologists transpersonal psychology go to one quest the books about twenty years old analogy
he's talking about the convergences and he comes from a transpersonal psychology which itself is developing the boundary line between psychology and spiritual and between psyche of spirit basically
so it's got a naturally conversion or synthetic approach
and he says that these three pairs come together here education are human development human growth could be philosophy in the classic sense you know idea or whatever the greek ship
psychotherapy as it gets beyond just pathology and moves them to the personal growth realm with maslowian on the dakota third wave or whatever good
and humanistic psychology and and transpersonal psychology begins to be good thing not just as therapy sure to healing but of development
and thirdly religion or spirituality as we might shake
and then he talked about these four different ways which in hindu isn't my believe recall the for marcus remember the way a pure contemplation would be mindfulness the fourth one there or the way of knowledge that way of learning the way of feeling the way of action about the and karma dollars
i always makes up the problem gianna something else
and then what i'm getting to isn't see these qualities or aspects of the development okay now notice you are not just talking about contemplation we're talking about the whole human pay what happens when a person with maturity what happened to my president becomes actualized i realized why
the true self as it were
it begins to appear and begins to take over so these are the qualities which he finds and trans person on humanistic psychology don't want to work on this kind of a muslim worked a lot of this kind of i'm trying to identify that that beast that's emerging there's a human person launched towards the realization you
notice a lot of this resonates with martin with what morons been saying about the to so it's a more systematic and easier to grasp
it gives you because is often being poetic about him speaking about it at length
the shift and identity okay that's what martin start a movement from the false healthy exteriors enough to the interior so
increased contact with reality and you'll talk about that notice in the second section which he wrote for this crash
as you move you withdraw from the world and some way you make a new contract with reality with the world and a different way in which you're really close to it and you were before okay
so the simultaneous increase in both participation and detachment i have been heavy to find that word participation they're particularly
that somehow as this wall of the of the false self breaks down your both more free from the things that you relate to and you relate to them more deeply as paradox
for simultaneous increase in freedom and the ability to surrender a paradox which is parallel to the other one isn't it
on a slightly different frontier
five unification interpersonal intrapersonal between body and mind subject and object man i gotta he's getting to our core as new is getting to what we're talking about and what martin talked about in the beginning remember not only did he talk about the true self but he talked about the shelf which is a unity he started out by saying you've gotta get it together
either this whole issue is about the unity of the person
the the sandwich chief a qualifies the true self is a and it yourself
six increase self acceptance martin has been taught me much about that he sort of presupposes it i think you'll talk about it at an angle when he talks about the problems of the contemporary person coming in a monastic like and he he does at it linked and other books it's connected with that question of a
city and never want has meant the shift and identity and the increase self acceptance
are almost two sides of the same thing
as the current harnesses together with the cell search for glory the idealized self the false self as a deep self hatred
and as one gets in touch with the true so those two things that no longer is no overstretched on a rack of those two poles but somehow they come together the interiors of the true so doesn't have a problem of acceptance it's almost self terrifying in a sense you know
you get that central new read the gospel of jesus as partner he doesn't have a self acceptance
seven increasing consciousness okay and said we're talking about contemplation of course that seems obvious but we've been talking about kind of patients on was soaking into every part of life so that an increase of consciousness in all departments of way we made it return to this list later on when we're talking about one or
another of these categories
that
handout that follows there a better explain those things a little bit i think it's a number four
h for those are three texts on non dual experience in the west that is a pretty full acceptance and expression of the non dual experience and this is rare and our western tradition that's why it seemed worthwhile to take three points where we find it now notice patina is not christian
but his view and his unit to has been absorbed by so much of our christian traditions documents and augusta
and i think some of the greek runners to
checking me meister eckhart a thirteenth century and then thomas merton it would be very interesting to talk about how these to be point to be late historically and what the fact of these three breakthroughs let us say may say to us today and the position of christianity and was a world religions foot
we can do that now
let me give you the dates for those three just for
just for the record
martin was nineteen fifteen the nineteen sixty eight

for tyneside believers or something like two or five to two seventy with the question mark that's run the oxford dictionary the christian church but to five to seventy
heck heard
died and twelve seventy four to me
same year as in thomas aquinas no one what what i'm think upon a measure that it was thirteen twenty seven
i wrote it down in austin

as

my first
now i wrote it down somewhere along this rating

where are given to you on a planet

i know that's where the start

how here we go play tennis is about to or five to two seventy eckhart is about twelve sixty i think it's only the first status and out and thirteen twenty seven
merton nineteen fifteen to nineteen sixty eight
and of course murder or echoed has influenced by pettiness and mechanism plunged by both plotinus and eckart of the dinesh throwback car
but they're also each one is talking i think about personal experience as well as conveying a tradition now
now the other pages that you have there are a bunch of texts from thomas merton on contemplation and okay that's h five starting with that earliest major right now and contemplation called what is contemplation and through the other works which are listed by shannon
the end of his book with their dates you're interested
i just a selection of quotes on this subject from each one of them if you look through them it's very interest in the development and the various influences also that you can detect there and maybe i'm confusing at first but were referred to vote who come back to these crooks
especially when we talk i think about each of the pure contemplation and the limited experience
okay captured to learn for traditional i could
very to the father to the sun chemical for
has it was in the name is
issue and haven't worked out of hand