about celibacy. And let's review a little bit what we did last time. We're following Roberts pretty continuously. And we started around page 50 where he's talking about the cultivation of chastity as a matter of integrating sexuality. And he talks about two phases. One is becoming aware of the person's sexuality and the other is ordering it into a kind of a greater, more comprehensive structure. Becoming aware and then gradual inner ordering of these levels of love so that all the life energy somehow fits into the gift which we're given in Christ. Then he goes on to talk about human sexuality and its various levels. Sexuality is a thing which permeates all the levels of our being, our nature. So he talks

[01:05]

about the physical level, chastity and sensuality. Then he talks about Eros. And he's going on to friendship and then finally to agape which is the gift, actually, which is the final product. Actually, he only talks about three of these because he's talking about agape in general, as he talks about the integration of the three. So these are considered to be the three levels of sexuality or of affectivity, we could say. The physical level, the Eros or erotic level, that word has a lot of ambiguity to it, if you remember. It means everything from pornography to romantic love. And then friendship. Now, different writers differ on the way that they use these words, so you have to be careful. Like Lewis, when he's writing about... C.S. Lewis, when he's writing about his four levels of love, doesn't speak of Eros and friendship in the same

[02:05]

way that Roberts does. For him, Eros is romantic love and he doesn't talk about his being in love and he doesn't talk about that dimension of self-fulfillment and he doesn't really talk about it as being the central level of the human psyche. Whereas Roberts is talking about the energy of Eros as being a kind of central level of human energy which then can go in different directions. So it becomes a very important concept for him. And likewise, friendship is different for Lewis and Roberts. For Lewis, it's a more empirical thing. When he talks about friendship, he's talking about the sharing of some third value between two people. He's talking more about the experience of friendship, whereas Roberts is talking about friendship as a superior level. He's got a very methodical scheme of putting one level above another. Physical, then Eros,

[03:06]

then friendship. And so, friendship for him is more a theoretical thing and it's a kind of altruistic love, which takes you beyond yourself in a way that is erotic love. It's not because erotic love is self-fulfillment. It's kind of complex, the interactions between them. So, if you understand the way Roberts is looking at it, that's the principal thing. This Eros business is very interesting because the way he treats it, it's the center of the personality. And this is where you find, as it were, the energy issuing into the human person, which may then go in different directions. Now, you find a lot of different ways of treating this matter as psychic energy, or libido, or sexual energy, or whatever you call it. And of course, the most familiar and commonly known one is the one of Freud. Freud's a reductionist. So,

[04:08]

what he tends to do is reduce all of human energy and all of human achievements and strivings to sexual energy. So, he reduces everything else to the level of sexual energy. He calls everything else a sublimation of that drive. And in a way, it's true. Only, it shouldn't be reduced in that way. It's all right to say that physical energy is somehow the base of all other levels of human life, but it's not right to reduce all other levels of human life to that physical energy. Somebody made... the way that comparison was... It can be like listening to a concert, you know, and thinking about the... As somebody compared the Freudian view of culture, for instance, as a sublimation simply

[05:19]

of physical, sexual energy. So, listening to a concert and thinking about the catgut, whatever it is to make the violin strings out, you just don't get the richness. You just don't get the peculiar value and meaning and being of the other levels of human life if you reduce it all obviously to that sexual energy. And so, this has been a very misleading track for our contemporary culture and contemporary psychology, despite the critical truth that there is in it. And it's a form of materialism which is comparable to Marxism. You see, the Marxist reduction is a reduction of all things to... of all of human striving to just as striving after, you know, consumables and so on, material things. And so is Freudianism on the interior level, not on the social level, the psychological. About this matter of this energy and the way

[06:20]

that it gets sublimated and so on, a couple of references. One is this book Psychosynthesis by Asa Jodha, where towards the end in an appendix... No, it's just before the end. Chapter 8, Transmutation and Sublimation of Sexual Energies. So he calls them sexual energies also, not psychic energies. But then he tells about how they get moved up the scale, as it were, onto the other levels. He talks about a vertical sublimation and a horizontal sublimation. Vertical or inward sublimation is into the spiritual life, into the mystical life, as he says, whereas the horizontal sublimation is towards other... or external sublimation or transmutation, as that would be, is into other human activities. The second direction of the transmutation process is horizontal or external, as I'm pleased to turn you to. Here we find three

[07:22]

kinds of transmutation corresponding to the three aspects. He's already distinguished three aspects of the nature of sexuality, a sensual, a physical, an emotional and a creative. Not quite parallel to what Harvitz is saying. The first kind, rather than being actual transmutation, consists of a substitution of other pleasures of the senses for sexual pleasure, from simple enjoyment of food to the enjoyment of contact with nature into aesthetic pleasures by the cultivation of the appreciation of beauty through sight and hearing. The second consists of an enlargement or extension of look so as to include a growing number of individuals. The third produces or fosters artistic and intellectual activities. And he goes on to talk about this in more detail. Then he's got certain guidelines towards the end for the transmutation or sublimation of his energy, which may well be practical. Another person who writes about this is Joyce and Joyce in this book, New Dynamics in

[08:31]

Sexual Love. This is a very good book from a philosophical point of view. I haven't found anything any deeper than this as far as trying to find the roots of the whole sexual thing and also the meaning of marriage and celibacy. In a philosophical context, more than a theological context, but there are theological aspects and consequences. Let's see what... This is in Chapter 3 on sublimation. Now, they've got a thesis which is radically opposed to that of Freud, because they sort of put the weight all on the higher level. So the higher is not really a product of the lower, but rather the higher energy is not a product of the lower, but rather the higher absorbs and assimilates the lower into itself, which is if the higher were there first, and then absorbs the animal energy into itself. And she argues this at length. This is by the way...

[09:38]

According to Freud, sublimation is the psychic process by which man civilizes his instinctual animal energy and harmonizes his behavior with the ideals of his society. He believed that sexual energy is an instinctual animal vitality that's sublimated by being directed from lower to more sublime goals. Higher activities are substituted for lower activities, as if it were natural and, in a way, more fitting for the lower expression to be there, but the other thing is sort of a dodge. That's exactly right. But it's as if the natural product, the natural outlet is on the lower level, and they're disputing this. Creative art, as an example, is substituted for sexual activity. The source of energy for all human behavior was thought by Freud to be a simple physiological vitality. Walking, speaking, thinking, and even praying are viewed as expressions of the same bodily energy. And this is what he speaks of as sublimation. In chemistry, there's a process by

[10:53]

which something gets transformed into another level, which is solid and becomes a vapor, becomes a gas. Excuse me, so are they proposing that prayer, for example, as you mentioned prayer, is actually a sublimation of sexual energy? That's what Freud would say. Is that what this person said? No. She's just relating Freud's viewpoint? Yeah, she's relating Freud's viewpoint, and she's going to try to refute it. Man is in a sublimating animal. I'm just skipping. In the Freudian perspective, man is an animal who is able to direct his organic urges into socially oriented activities or spiritually oriented. But at this point, a number of questions assert themselves. Is it true that the energy for all human actions is a simple animal energy? Is man basically an animal? Is man's real motivation unknown to his conscious mind? Perhaps the most central of these questions is whether or not man is basically an animal. The idea that man is an animal is one that's deeply ingrained in Western civilization and dates back to Aristotle, who defined man as a

[11:57]

rational animal. This definition, if it is a correct translation of the Greek, proclaims man to be basically an animal, but different from other animals by being rational. But animal, I don't think, meant the same thing to Aristotle as it means to us. It meant anything that's animated, anything that has a soul, whereas the English word animal necessarily means something else. Freud's theory emerges out of the ground in this definition. And then she goes on to talk about assimilation rather than sublimation. I'd like to find a concise passage where she sums up her argument for endowment. The basic idea is that each level of life has its own distinctive level of energy, and that this absorbs the lower energies into itself. And animals walking, crawling, running, climbing, flying, seeing, etc., are not expressions of a plant energy,

[12:58]

but of a new energy. This new energy assimilates or draws into itself the energy of vegetative life. The same thing is true on the human level. The same thing would be true on the spiritual level. So what actually is dominant is not that lower energy, but the higher energy, which is absorbing the lower energy into itself. Later it will be shown that assimilation of the lower into the higher, or of the periphery into the center, the exterior into the interior, deeply modifies the Freudian view of human energy and sublimation. And she goes on with some other arguments, practical arguments. In the area of human sexuality, it is especially repressive to think of sexual energy as a physiological, instinctive, basically animal force. By interpreting

[13:59]

sexual energy in this way, Freud himself was unaware of the massive repression he was causing, while seeking to alleviate repression. In man, the sex energy is a complex reality that is basically mental and spiritual in nature. So that's her basic thesis. Sexual energy, when we say sexual, we think of physical immediately, but she says, no, sexual energy is basically mental, or on the level of the soul, or on the level of the ego, we could say also perhaps, she doesn't say that, and spiritual in nature. But when the mental and spiritual energy of human sexuality is repressed by the naive yet deep-seated notion that human sex is basically an animal vitality, all manners of perversion must erupt in the world. So there's a repression of the spiritual when you believe that sexuality is basically physical, whereas Freud was pointing to a repression of the physical, and then the emergence of these energies, in other words, of sublimation. So

[15:01]

she inverts his thesis. And then she refers to Teilhard, who's got a kind of theory of this assimilation of lower energies into higher energies. He wrote quite a bit about energy, and also here and there on sexual energy. He's got a book called Human Energy, which we have in the library, pretty interesting. It's a collection of essays, but he gets into this question, and about how gradually the lower energies are assimilated into the higher, the more concrete, short-range energies, like physical sexual energy, are gathered into more comprehensive energies of love. So the whole planet sort of draws together in that one organism of energy. His theory is kind of oversimplified, so it's bound to body, nevertheless he expresses a kind of obvious truth. And, of course, it's a Christian point of view. It's a merging of Christian theology with empirical science, though, which doesn't

[16:08]

complete the job. And then the Jungians are especially good on this sort of thing. Psychic energy interpreted in a more general sense than just the Freudian sense of it. It's new dynamics and sexual love, Joyce and Joyce. The title really doesn't suggest the contents, because it's a philosophical view. This that I'm going to quote from is Psychic Energy by Esther Hardin, who is a Jungian. And, see, the Jungians depart from Freud in that they don't reduce everything to physical, animal, sexual energy, but they see this energy as being much more mobile, much more

[17:10]

versatile, and really they tend to put the weight on the upper expressions of the energy, the upper octaves of the scale, you might say, rather than on the lower ones, like Freud does. See, Freud is just kind of a skeptic, a cynic, a reductionist, whereas the Jungians are not that way. And so they open up this little bit of development. And it's interesting the way they open up the sexual thing, sort of in two ways. One way is this treatment of energy, and the other way is the animus anima, by which they integrate both calls of sexuality into the division. We'll say something about that later on. Ms. Hardin sees three basic drives, three basic instinctive drives. One is hunger, one is self-assertion, and one is the sexual one. And then she talks about three levels of development, or transformation of these instincts, and hence of the energy, which is sort of the central notion. From this brief outline, it will be realized that the gradual

[18:19]

transformation of the instinct of hunger takes place in three stages. These correspond to the three phases of development of the human being, that are elsewhere called the naive stage of consciousness, or completely self-centered stage of consciousness, where she calls it autistic stage of consciousness, or the stage of sort of purely physical preoccupation, preoccupation with physical needs and desires, with bodily comfort and so on. The ego stage, where a person becomes capable of thinking and planning, and then working towards a goal, self-fulfillment, in a broader sense. And then the stage of consciousness of the self, with a capital S, which is beyond the ego, and which corresponds, of course, to Martin's true self, is the spiritual level. So you've got the level, you call it the carnal level, a purely physical level, a purely instinct-dominated level, the ego level, and then a level of the self. She compares this with a Buddhist scheme, in which you have the three stages of human

[19:26]

consciousness, called the level of the man of little intellect. The consciousness of such a man is exceedingly narrow, being bounded by the limits of his own biological desirousness. Then there's the man in the ego stage of development, called the man of ordinary intellect. His attention is wholly directed to controlling his environment for his personal satisfaction and advantage. He has gained some control over his instinctive drives, and for him the ego is now king. He classifies everything in terms of his own wishes, taking the good and rejecting the evil, not realizing that what he has caused falls into the unconscious, and does not cease to exist. Now, this somehow, roughly parallels what Roberts is talking about as the eros level, but not completely, because she doesn't relate it that much to the emotion. And then the state of the individual whom the Buddhists call the man of superior intellect corresponds to the third stage of our psychological classification, the stage of the self. For us this would be the level of the spirit versus the level of the ego. And for St. Paul, the level of the ego and the level

[20:31]

of the autos, or the body itself, sort of can get lumped into the flesh, and the spirit is there for the moment. This corresponds to the third stage. In him the identification of the ego with the supreme value has been dissolved. He sees beyond his own little world. In consequence, he experiences the inner dynamic factors, something other than consciousness, or definitely within the psyche, and that's the self, that's the union self, which also you find parallels to in Eastern religion, of course, and even in scripture, even in Christianity. Another scale that's somewhat parallel is the kundalini thing, kundalini yoga. Remember where you had the movement of this energy of these channels in the spine from the bottom, which is the level of sexual, purely physical expression, up to a point where it becomes, manifests in some kind of mystical experience,

[21:32]

in some kind of transcendent consciousness. This is still quite a popular school. A fellow named Gopi Krishna will well go over a couple of books on his own experiences of the kundalini phenomena. They've been very widely read and watched. No, I've not read such things. Let's say I'm speaking about the feeling of Jesus Christ, for instance, bringing him from the world of bread, and rising from hell. It's interesting. I'm surprised. Thou, I would say, is meant as a sacrifice. Sacrifice? Yes. Because it's introduced by his spirit. There's this woman up at the Thomas Merton Center in Quebec, at Magar, Quebec. What's her name? Linda Sabbath. She's got this little book, The Radiant Heart, where she talks about the same kind of thing. It's a Christian kundalini thing, by the use of, I think, the Jesus prayer, breathing,

[22:35]

and also a kind of drawing, a symbolic drawing, which is supposed to orient this energy upwards. Well, this is a kind of basic approach to breathing, where you strike the energy up the spine to the highest center. And as it goes up the spine, these centers of energy change color. The lowest one is the red, and the highest is the white. Now, Kriya Yoga is, I know they use it in the Self-Realization Fellowship, which is a Kriyananda over here. I don't know the connection between them. But this whole chakra thing is pretty widespread in the East. Now, Christianity has never focused so much on the precise bodily scale,

[23:42]

the whole number of chakras. In Christianity, the tendency tends to be to talk about something like two levels, and the higher level being the level of the heart, the level of the realization of this energy in the heart, in the form of the chakras. But the heart's not the highest center. You go up above the central equimotor until you get to the top of the head. That's where you get the shower of the divine bliss. Okay, let's go on with Robert's. I have a couple of things from Martin here, but I don't think they're completely relevant. Just about that whole connection. See, Robert makes a mysterious connection of eros and self-fulfillment, and therefore eros with ego, and therefore eros and emotion and love on that level,

[24:43]

with aggressiveness, and just the whole dynamic of ego strength and so on. And that's not obvious, and that opens up a whole thing that he doesn't even talk about. But what's the connection between those things? Between emotion and that kind of emotion, which we call love, and aggressiveness? There's been a lot of theorizing about that. But here are a couple of things from Martin which are suggested. The sex instinct, he says, is self-assertive. But Martin's not talking about just that level. He's talking also about the physical level. And you need the context in these things really to understand it. Chastity deals with our desire for life, the continuance of life, survival. Therefore it deals with the force of life itself, and you are tangling with something pretty big. When we are dealing with this type of force and you decide to put it aside,

[25:45]

then something more powerful must take its place. This deep fundamental drive must be replaced by the Holy Spirit. So he's talking about the same thing Robert's is, but he's talking about it in a much more general way. You see, he's putting all of these levels together. The physical level, the emotional level, and even the level of friendship. And then talking about the Holy Spirit coming, so he's making a very great simplification. And yet he's equating the sexual thing with the desire for life, which also is going to be expressed in other ways, of course, in the way of progressiveness, in the way of ego force. Chastity and obedience are closely related. Anger and tension are also involved. I don't think he's got all of the words. Chastity and obedience are closely related. The connection between progressiveness, between will, between ego, and the other, the love dimension.

[26:49]

Aggressiveness violates humility and chastity. I don't know that he ever treated that subject, the connection between those two things systematically. Okay, let's go on with where we left off last time in Robert's. Maybe I spent too long on this one. We have gotten up to page 56. But how does chastity work on the emotions? Now, he's talking about this process of integration and how you're supposed to move the lower energies. He doesn't talk so much about sublimation or transmutation, but he talks about integration. It's a different concept, a different way of talking about the same thing. Integration means fitting something in, ordering something. Sublimation, transformation, transmutation means absolutely changing one kind of energy into another. It sounds more like a chemical process.

[27:51]

He's not using that language. Chastity usually works best in an atmosphere which combines the confidence of brotherly love with the austerity of the desert experience. Now, that's an interesting combination. Which is suggestive for our own life, which is supposed to work between the two poles of solitude and community, right? So he's talking about some kind of combination of austerity. Austerity of the desert experience, which suggests solitude, even though it's not the same thing. He's talking about physical austerity, right? Material detachment? Yeah. Together with the confidence of brotherly love. You find this already in the Desert Fathers, of course, even though they don't necessarily have communities, just a small circle of brothers. In the desert, our sensitive love is purified like a precious rub. When he says sensitive love, he doesn't just mean physical needs and stuff. He doesn't just mean hunger

[28:53]

and physical sexuality, but he means that kind of emotion which is expressed between people, interpersonal love also. So the desert does imply a measure of solitude. Well, excuse me, did it camouflage? You know, you think that you're in love and that something comes around your way. Oh, yeah. Sure. Did it put it to sleep? It can put your appetite to sleep because the occasion isn't there. Then, as soon as you are tempted or exposed to the occasion, you stop driving there. Sure. Well, that's a whole other question we probably shouldn't get into here. There has to be a kind of check, a kind of verification. And if you have these two things together, there probably will be. In other words, if you have a certain amount of community together with the desert thing, then one verifies the other.

[29:54]

You go back and forth a little bit between community and solitude. Now, here he's not saying solitude, he's saying austerity. The austerity incorporates a certain amount of solitude. But let me talk about sensitive love. And then he talks about this process. Now, we've been talking about the process, talking about transmutation, sublimation, transformation of these energies. Now, he's talking about the purification of our sensitive love, the lower form of love. It compares with the purification of love. That's an image that's often used. And then he uses two Christian scales for this. Now, these are practical, although not necessarily also experienced. The steps of humility and St. John of the Cross's dark nights. And he's talking about those as two alternative ways of expressing the path of purification. Offhand, at first sight, they don't seem to be the same thing, do they? The steps, the grades of humility, and the dark nights, the purification of John of the Cross.

[30:55]

But they are two ways of describing the road. We'd better not go into detail about that, but it's something you might be interested in thinking about. It almost seems that, excuse me, that the reason for humility would be more the conversatio, whereas the dark nights would enter into the conversio. Okay, there's a good deal of truth in that, but not entirely. I don't think you can separate it as neatly as that. Now, what are those dark nights? Those dark nights are the absence of satisfaction, the absence of pleasure, of attraction, and hence of light, because he calls desire light, practically, or calls light the relation that you have to something when you're attracted by it, when you're interested in it, when your consciousness is related to it. And when you don't have that, you're in the darkness. And those are passive purifications, largely, for the Dalai Lama because the important, the key parts are passive. He talks about an active mental.

[31:58]

It's deprivation of sensual stimuli. So it's a whole different way of looking at it, and yet obviously related to it. There's no point in trying to analyze the comparison between the two. The dark night reveals yourself to yourself, making you humble. That's right. In poverty, the dark night is much more like poverty, and poverty humbles you, of course. But Saint Benedict focuses on the humility itself, and, say, obedience, right? And the way that you regard yourself, thinking of yourself as being worthless, as being the lowest of all, whereas for John of the Cross he's talking about deprivation of something else. Saint Benedict focuses back on the self, and Saint John of the Cross focuses on deprivation of relation to something else. But when you get into the spiritual, the night of the spirit, that's when it really feeds into the self as well.

[32:59]

It's like your ground is taken up. We'd have to read into a lot of Saint John of the Cross to illustrate that, to study it. There are two very different approaches. It's funny that John of the Cross does unite this whole desire thing, and this whole detachment thing, to humility. In one very precious passage, it's in, I think, chapter 13 of the first book of the Assent, where he says, when the soul desires nothing, then it's not lifted up when it has something, it's not cast down, when it's deprived, but it's at peace, since it's in the center of its humility. So he unites humility, he unites desire and attachment to humility. And there we see the link to this. A reorganization of our inner life energy. Now, that's a fascinating thing, that whole process of transformation. And a lot of people are studying it from different angles today, you know, because all these Eastern spiritual

[34:01]

currents, each one has got its own way of looking at that. And the transpersonal psychology movement is looking at it also. Remember that article that we had from the journal Transpersonal Psychology, where I had about a dozen different metaphors for that transformation process. So it's being taken from the angle of psychology, also from the angle of non-Christian spiritual traditions right now. So that our old familiar ways of looking at it from the Christian tradition now have a whole set of other scales to compare themselves with. Okay. Now, Martin's scale is, once again, from the false self to the true self, which is basically Benedictine. That's a question of humility, but also obviously a question of movement of energies. And a question of reorganization of desires. Benedictine, Cistercian spirituality gives you a whole life program. So he's thinking of

[35:03]

the monastic life as a whole context which is designed to help you do this, to help this energy move, by providing you with a kind of a desert, by providing you with community, but also providing you with a number of other things. For instance, the liturgy, what does that give you? It gives you a whole symbolic context. And Jung says that the symbols are like the keys, the catalysts to the transmutation of energy. It's through symbols that these energies move up the scale. That's a complex thing that I'm just mentioning here. So, the liturgy helps us, gives us a way of directing the energy towards an object which will help to move it, which will help it to, as it were, climb and be transformed. And so it is that the symbols that appear in dreams are said to be the signs of the movement of this energy. a person can have a critical dream with some very central, basic symbol being manifested, and that means that

[36:03]

something's happened to that energy. There's a process going on. Okay. These different elements are meant to take hold of our senses and feelings. You see, the liturgy does that, the scriptures do that, the Word of God does that. But when we talk about this, we always have to be careful because it's not just a natural process. We're slipping into the language of natural processes, but the Word of God doesn't just enter into a natural process, but it picks the whole thing up somehow and brings it into a new context. So we have to be careful that we don't begin to talk about the whole thing mechanically, in a kind of technological way, like a spiritual technology. Then he talks about the way that consecrated virginity and celibacy intensifies the monastic drive, and how there

[37:04]

are different emphases on the two sides, for man and for woman, and both of these become stronger as time goes on. Men are oriented to things, ideas, women are more to persons. Men more to abstinent courts, women more direct, and it's unintelligible. We're stuck on the notion. In this erotic search for power, there again we see this surprising synthesis that he's making between eros and ego strength, or power, or the drive for fulfillment, which we just have to set aside because we can't study it now. If we wanted to see how a man takes, that would be very important for us. Monastic life only offers a frustratingly limited scope for achievement, because in the end, pretty quickly you run into a blank wall with any of these drives, whether on the power side or on the desire side, emotional side. Yet

[38:06]

thanks to this frustration of self-will, our more aggressive impulses and self-centered ideas are educated and dominated by the spirit of Jesus, who makes use of both joy and sorrow to accomplish his work. Both the joy of the experiences of grace and of godliness gives us, and the sorrow accompanying the death of these other drives. Chastity and friendship, that's his third and final level of natural love. Brotherly love, true interpersonal love, in Greek philia. You find it in the New Testament. Adds to physical love and sensitive love the spiritual qualities of altruism, generosity and loyalty. So this is a love that takes you beyond yourself. It's not the same as what C.S. Lewis talks about as friendship, even though obviously it's very much related and overlaps with it. Forget self. Eros is more an inner drive towards self-fulfillment. Friendship forgets self in its emphasis on the

[39:08]

person alone. I think this is a little bit theoretical here, the kind of distinction you make. Not as easy as it sounds. Is it good to examine the progress in this or at all? A certain amount of reflection is necessary, also as a matter of knowledge. But not to become too preoccupied, not to expect to see good signs of progress, otherwise one is in for a disappointment. It's a very slow process with some breakthroughs. Long periods where you seem to be not getting anywhere. Also it's difficult to see your progress because there's a way in which God conceals your progress from you. You're not supposed to see it. So it depends very much on

[40:12]

conditions around you. The conditions around you, the situation may be such that no matter how generous you are, you're not going to be able to see it. You're going to seem to be failing. Depending on the other people and how receptive they are, your own view of it is likely to be pretty inaccurate. What we need to reflect on is at least to move ourselves in the right direction and to reflect on to what degree selfishness is in our affections. To be able to feel part of it. I think you can easily get the idea of what I mean by friendship. You find this notion of close monastic rapport also in St. Rodney. Even though there's a lot of affectivity, there's a lot of self-forgetting, self-transcending monasticism.

[41:12]

The level of eros is surprising. Even if a man acquires the virtue of God, God does not grant him grace for himself alone. That's very true. I hope you get my value. You fall into two extremes here. One by allowing this love of friendship to become corrupted, to become impure and fall back down the scale. Degenerate into the sentimentality of eros through the carnal tension of physical love. Or you can be too cold. You can be too abstracted from your brother to isolate him. Particular friendships. This is a bad word in any traditional religious life. An exclusive kind of friendship whereby you become somebody's buddy at the expense

[42:15]

of your relationship with others. A friendship which gradually becomes a kind of undercover thing, where you develop a strong emotional bond which becomes resistant to the principles of the monastic life. Becomes resistant to obedience, becomes resistant to the demands of paternal charity with your other brothers. Being that I've been with a psychologist, I'm thinking differently from that angle a little bit. Everyone seems to have a psychological makeup that differs. Some people are more dependent on relationships than other people. And we think that we have to take that into consideration. Some people are volunteering, some people aren't. They might need relationships. But for everybody there are certain directions in which they should move and certain directions in which they should avoid.

[43:17]

So if a person is dependent he should be trying at least to become more independent. If he needs a lot of affection and he aspires to be a monk, he should be trying to diminish that addiction and that need for the support of others. We do need the support of one another. We're always going to need it, but there can be an excessive need, which is not good for me or for the other fellow either. A particular friendship thing often in the past the fear of a particular friendship was exaggerated. And also even the language, even the expression of particular friendship, I think Robert says it that that's not the best language to use because every friendship in the monastic life as anywhere else is going to be a particular one. Every relationship is a unique relationship. It's not like you can have, love everybody in the same degree in the same way and kind of generalize distribution. It doesn't work that way.

[44:18]

It seems so unnatural that particular friendships will be closer and deeper that the person has to discern for himself whether or not it's taking up all his time and taking in more of your prayer. That's right. So purification has to be gone through, but I think it's something that will always be there. Oh yeah. And it should be there too. Simply because of the uniqueness of human relationships. There's nothing wrong with a deep friendship and a strong friendship, but every friendship has to have kind of an ascetical dimension to it, so it's constantly the friendship is trying to purify itself. And that keeps it out of these dangers. There should be an awareness that in every relationship this thing can go wrong, so it'll have to be honest. The thing in itself is not wrong. Even though that expression of particular friendship in the old days wasn't in the 19th century. But

[45:22]

consider your call, I wish both of us a treatment of this on page 185 if anybody's interested. Would you find something on this in any textbook on religious life? Even a relationship which stops short from genital expression, he's talking about overt homosexuality. It's surprising how easily that ended the discussion. It was destructive and that was, the particular friendship in the old days would be suspect, you know, of a homosexual tendency. That kind of suspicion is a horrible thing because it tends to promote that which it suspects almost. It tends to promote a kind of underground kind of negative relationship. So that connotation, that suspicion doesn't have to be there at all.

[46:23]

There was a queer atmosphere of repressed sexuality which would lead to suspicions of homosexuality sometimes when it wasn't. When it wasn't. But sometimes because of the repression nothing would happen. You see? That kind of explosive. Even a relationship which stops short of genital expression is destructive if it becomes a psychological appropriation of the other person. Exclusive, possessive, and irrelevant, that kind of thing. That doesn't happen so often in our kind of climate, in our kind of domestic life. I think many of our Benedictine communities have got a lot of trouble with it. This is fundamentally selfish in that it fails to respect the other's freedom and is an immical to the general friendship of the community. This is the real evil of particular friendships in the pejorative sense of that famous phrase. Anybody who's trying to lead a sincere life of prayer is going to find that that kind of thing appears to be a pleasure as well. And so that would be the first indicator.

[47:27]

The first danger. Intimate friendship presupposes a certain maturity of spirit. A certain freedom. It's a delicate flower of brotherly love that should not be striven after, as though it were necessary. In other words, you don't go out hunting for sincere love. Generally better for the monk to experience more solitude than fraternal intimacy. The balance between the desert and the communal, the brotherly dimension that we were talking about before is on the side of the desert. That's the Trappist tradition. Benedictine tradition is on the other side, the desert. The other extreme is to shy away from fraternal intimacy when a brother is sincerely looking for help. Also, William Johnston, in that book

[48:29]

The Silent Music, has a couple of chapters on spiritual friendship in which he also quotes an already extensive one. We don't come to the monastery to seek friends, however, we do find them. Albert has a very strong statement that God is friendship. And here, love and friendship, love and God. If that's true, then we have to be very careful about what we mean by friendship. For him, was friendship meant more than love? Or was it deeper than love? Well, it was a form of love, which he was interested in, which is quite natural in that type of community. But he said you could have love without friendship, but you couldn't have friendship without love. So almost, in his terminology, friendship is more powerful or deeper than love. So to say God is friendship is really making a stronger statement than God is love.

[49:31]

But it rests upon the ambiguity of both of those words, the different meanings you give to both those words, to love and friendship, because obviously there are kinds of love, using the word the way everybody uses it, which are much inferior to friendship, and certainly much inferior to that. Remember that when St. John says that God is love, he says God is agape. And that's our highest level of love. It's not Eros, and it's not the world of love. And they always bring friendship on that level. And you have to also take into account a certain literary, certain rhetoric there, even though I was talking about literary license. True Christian friendship is aesthetically demanding, deeply detached, and emotionally free. It's asking a lot of particular conviction. The relation between anger and lust, paternal meekness and chastity, and that mysterious line that runs right across the human personality, which I talked about before,

[50:31]

when Martin said that the sex drive is self-assertion, and so on. The relation between obedience and chastity, and so on. Healthy monastic friendship tends to express itself in a double spirit of sacrifice and solitude, both of which are austerity, both of which are ways of self-renunciation. Without openness to brotherly love, there's real danger that this form of human love and sexuality will go underground and appear in a multitude of unhealthy and obscure ways, such as the old particular friendship thing, or simply some kind of a sexual problem or improper relationship, also outside the monastery, also heterosexual. The counsel for Victor Caratatus. Chastity has stronger safeguards in the community when true fraternal love thrives among its members. It sort of roots

[51:33]

that affectivity where it belongs. Okay, now he sums up the practical points. First, acceptance of one's sexuality. That's a thing we don't at first understand, that the word always strikes you strangely when you first hear it, except for sexuality, we don't do that. But one only learns what it means when he has to deal with it, and knows what it means not to accept your sexuality, or to be sort of either thrusting it out in front of you, or to be handling it in the wrong way. With optimism, because there can be a kind of negativity there that just chills life. Control, simple physical things, productive work, healthy visuals, simple yoga postures, etc. But above all, this sublimation of transmutation, orientation to higher forms of self-healing. As a section member on

[52:34]

the sublimation and transmutation of sexual energies, he ends up with some practical guidelines. I'll just run through them very quickly. This is on page 274 and 276. First of all, affirm conscious control of the drive to be transmitted, avoiding condemnation or fear, which can cause repression. Secondly, the active release, development, and expression of various aspects of personal and spiritual life. Now this is chiefly expressed here in Love for One's Brothers, where he's been talking about his friendship, but also in prayer. Thirdly, deliberate prediction of one's interest, aspiration, and enthusiasm towards some creative work, into which all one's entities can be poured. That's very fine to aspire to creative work, but in the monastery it's not always possible to have the work that we choose, something we consider creative. So sometimes our creativity has to be in finding the right approach to what we have to do. Our creativity has to be

[53:37]

often in a kind of receptive way rather than an active way. Finding a way to be creative in the work that we have to do. People like to take the example of a housewife who was a creative housewife. You can have life thrust upon you, and they can't find a creative way to handle it. Each of us has this freedom. Fourthly, the use of symbols. These exercise a strong attractive power on all our energies, conscious and unconscious, and specifically foster the process of transmutation. And, of course, Jung. Jung went so far as to state the psychological machinery which transmutes energy is the symbol. That's the quotation I was fishing for. The psychological machinery which transmutes energy is the symbol. So, this opens us up to the reason why the imagery in the scriptures and in the liturgy is so powerful. In fact, the Bible doesn't just talk in abstract terms or in concepts but in images, in symbols. And so if we really get into that, it

[54:37]

begins to do something to us. It not only begins to change our inner world, that is, our world of images, but it begins to move all of our energies at the same time, you see. It begins to work this process. And so you see what the Fathers meant when they were talking about the way that the scriptures change you or as you grow, the scriptures grow with you and so on. The Word of God works a change in you. Now, he's talking about a natural process but the Word of God has this added dimension. I shouldn't just say added dimension because that's an entirely different thing which comes in the Holy Spirit. Which, after all, if we talk about images and we talk about energy, we could talk about in a sense also the image of God which is Christ and the dynamism of God which is the Holy Spirit. Now these dimensions working through the symbolism of scripture and of the liturgy are what really do the work on us. And the icon. Yep.

[55:38]

And also the way the way the Symbol of Nature talks about going to God through nature and seeing all the details of what's going on. Right. He doesn't talk about nature but I think he does in other places. So there are natural symbols so I think that all things are symbolic. All things are sacramental. Even though we can't say that this represents something aside from itself but in some way it represents God in some way it communicates God. In some way it's able to raise our energies. Nature doesn't talk about it. It's poor nature. And then like the Tibetans they use these mandalas precisely for moving their energies, for transmuting their energies. And so in some way for us they are icons. There's a great variety of symbols having an anagogic. Anagogic, see that's an old that's a patristic word. Remember the anagogic sense of the scriptures? It means to lift up, to lead up.

[56:42]

It can be made to serve this process of which ideal human figures or models constitute an important class. Then he goes on to talk about male and female ideal figures as Christ. Dante's Beatrice and Madonna. And of course Christ and Mary are the most primitive individuals of time. Five. Close psychological communing with individuals or groups who have realized or are striving to realize the same name. And of course this is a lot of the meaning of a monastic life. A monastic community is a group of people who have the same name and get together to do the same thing. St. Basil talks about it plenty. The usefulness of having around you people who are aiming for the same thing or doing the same thing. Obvious enough a lot of people are looking for it and don't have it. As there are chemical catalysts, so there are human catalysts whose influence, radiation

[57:45]

and the atmosphere they create greatly facilitates psychological transformation. So if you look back in our tradition of course in the tradition of the Desert Fathers you'll find the spiritual father as really playing that role of helping the person in his transportation. Or looking at it from the other point of view as somehow helping him to receive the Holy Spirit. That's the other Christian theological idea. We were talking about those means of simple physical things. Self-gift through work and service also healthy interpersonal relationship. Look on your brother in his deepest self not as though he were something to be used for your personal advantage or gratification. That's a good point for self-examination. Develop brotherly love, spiritual friendship, putting more emphasis on what you give than on what you receive. Loyalty and peace

[58:46]

are more important than what you feel. Sentimental search for intimacy. Intimacy is a precious thing. It's easily blocked by seeking for it. In relations with the opposite sex, now he hasn't said much about this, you'll find that other people say a lot more about it. In here there's a good section on heterosexual friendships. Phase 185, 186. Kind of a broad-minded view. More positive than most writings. Robert's theory is cautious but positive. Be your true self. That's asking a lot. Both excessive fear and excessive enthusiasm spring from immature jealousy. Excessive fear withdraws from awkwardness and bashfulness and shyness and avoiding them as if they were dragons. Or excessive enthusiasm. I got it.

[59:49]

It's a good test when you have to work on this aspect. Also a good practice to be able to measure or put forward if you work on it. If your sexual center of gravity is more mature, based on paternal love and the love of Christ, in other words, this is not something to be recognized right in the beginning stages of domesticism. Then relations with the other sex can help integrate certain aspects of your personality. Presumably the feminine dimensions of your personality, but not all men. You see, there are certain things I spoke to you about that the male artist can relate to the male employees, you know, from the attitude of the male employee. You know, because it's all on such a deep level that the advantage of being a woman is that you can enjoy it.

[60:51]

So that means that the other aspects of masculinity are not really necessary. You mean art might play the same role? Yes. To some degree. This thing is very relative to the stage of the person. In community, avoid manifestation of special affection and special favors for certain brothers and not for others. Don't seek out the company of those who only have a special liking for you. Well, that's eschatological. You can't be completely equal in this respect. A lot of this, the point here is to tend in a certain direction, tend away from the other direction, to be aware of the dangers that lie in one direction, to move oneself in the other direction,

[61:54]

even though one is not perfectly able to descend on that middle line. Krishna, the direction in which we're moving. When a difficulty comes up, with interference in your life of prayer or peace of mind, that's the first sign. Discussion in spiritual direction probably applies to you. He's good on this. What he says, not just because of the value of humility or the grace that you receive directly through this revelation or through the counsel of the other person, but because this itself is an opening up of your life and therefore of those energies to another level. You see, you're orienting them, you're getting them beyond the private and into another kind of relationship, which is healthy. Instead of closing it off, say closing it off into the sexual and closing it off into the emotional or something like that, you're somehow letting the thing flow through your whole personality and out beyond

[62:55]

yourself. A mysterious thing, but it seems to be true. And so this helps a person a lot to mature and to get balanced and to integrate, you see, with his whole personality, simply by letting the reality, the experience, flow through his personality into another relationship, a relationship of spiritual direction and spirit. Divine love itself in the person of the Holy Spirit enters into such a relationship. Another factor. It purifies the heart in a way which no other human being can do. Okay, and then he ends up with a quote. So next time, let's try to finish this chapter and see if there's anything else we want to bring up. This is a subject we won't be able to round off completely far from it. In fact, we're just nearest to the surface.

[63:56]

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