Laying the Foundation for Interspiritual Dialogue

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 3 Episode 2 with Netanel Miles-Yépez

Episode Title: Laying the Foundation for Interspiritual Dialogue

Colleen: Welcome back, Mark.

Mark: It's good to be back with you, Colleen.

Colleen: I know

Mark: It's been too long. It feels like it's been about five years since we did this last, but it was only last year, wasn't it? Season two.

Colleen: It was, and a year is a long time we're learning between podcast seasons. We've been encouraged to do more. But when we're in it, it feels like we get to spend a lot of time together, which I love.

Mark: Which is always good. 

Colleen: Especially since you're not technically on staff with Contemplative Outreach anymore.

What have you been doing to fill up your time?

Mark: I don't know where I am anymore, which is probably good. I don't know where I am and who I am.

Colleen: Well, that's good. That's on theme for this season actually. You're nowhere, maybe.

Mark: No, I'm nowhere, man. I've actually put all my eggs in the mindfulness center of Atlanta basket, so that's what I'm happily doing. Now retreats and courses and spiritual direction and psychotherapy. So it's been fun, but I do miss Contemplative Outreach and all the folks there so, I'm glad we get to do this. 

Colleen: You're missed. I was trying to get a hold of you all summer and your phone was always on Do not disturb.

Mark: You get to do that in this kind of business. You can get away with that. 

Colleen: I just went to Los Angeles where I used to live for many years and saw a bunch of friends and, I was telling her about another retreat I have coming up and she said, you're always so calm. What do you even need to go on retreat for? I'm like that's the point.

And maybe that's what gets us here to this place of, contemplation is learning how to step away even if it's not stepping away. It's like I have my phone on do not disturb a lot. Even when I'm home.

Mark: You got to keep at it. And sometimes transformation doesn't happen so easily. My wife used to say sometimes when I would get a little snippy she'd say, shouldn't you be meditating now? I'm like well, it it doesn't exactly work that way but, I'm excited about this season and especially this episode especially.

Colleen: Me too. Yes, we are excited to welcome you all to our first episode of our third season of the Opening Minds, Opening Hearts podcast, and if you listen to the first episode, Mark and I were chatting a bit about where we're headed in this season and so our first guest for this season is really going to give us a lot of insight into this movement that I think we're all aware of towards an interspiritual understanding of our relationship to God, especially for the Contemplative Outreach community, and let me introduce him and then we will get into our conversation. We're excited to have you with us today, Netanel Miles-Yépez 

He is an artist, a philosopher, a religion scholar, and a spiritual teacher. He's currently the head of the Inayati Maimuni lineage of Sufism and is considered a leading thinker in the interspiritual and new monasticism movements. He studied History of Religions at Michigan State University and Contemplative Religion at the Naropa Institute before pursuing traditional studies with spiritual luminaries who, in addition to Father Thomas Keating include Rabbi Zalman Shakta Shalomi. Rabbi Shalomi is the founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement. He actually has a foundation now, the Shalomi-Keating Foundation.

Netanel lives outside of Boulder, Colorado, where he is the chair of Religious Studies and the director of the Keating Chapter Center at Naropa, and the co-founder of Charis Foundation for New Monasticism and interspirituality. He's also written many books. The most recent one, came out last year and it's titled The End of Religion and other writings. Welcome Netanel. 

Mark: Thank you, it's good to be here. 

So welcome Netanel. I'd love to start by just asking you, where you come from in terms of your spiritual understanding. Spiritual life and experience, just a brief description of that and how you came to be where you are today.

Netanel: I don't know that there's any brief answer to that. Mine is especially complex and maybe that's why I'm involved in interspirituality is because there's a complexity to it. But maybe suffice it to say that I'm from a hyphenated background growing up both evangelical Christian and then at a certain point, learning that my Mexican family were crypto Jews. Forced converts in Spain, who then had to hide that Jewish identity and that led me into a broader exploration of religion that landed me here.

Mark: So yeah, you have a broad spiritual background and it seems that most of your professional life and the work that you've done has engaged, this kind of interspiritual. One of the terms that came up, we'll talk more about the Snowmass Dialogues gathering of people from different traditions, but one of the terms that came up there was in talking about whatever concept or idea of God, What would be an agreeable term across different traditions? And I think that the group came up with the term Ultimate Reality. Is that right? 

Netanel: Oh, the Snowmass conference yeah. They came up with Ultimate Reality. 

 It's not a term that I use that much but when I was training to become a religion scholar, a history of religion scholar that was used a lot. It was preferred by scholars like Ninian Smart and so on to, cover ultimacy because, say between Buddhism and Christianity, there wasn't a lot of shared language around, God was, Buddhism famously had the emphasis on God. It's not that there's not an acknowledgment of God in Buddhism, they just say it's not a relevant question for what is trying to be taught right here. But because there was that divide in language, people started to come up with language like Ultimate Reality.

And I think in those years Father Thomas preferred that term. In some ways, Ultimate Reality, ultimate is the qualifier, but from another perspective, you just say, there's reality. Reality as it is as you might say in Buddhism, and there is only reality, and whether we're in accord with reality or not is the question for us.

So, the Qualifier ultimate is put on there because we think we know reality. Every one of us, all the billions of us on this planet have all these competing realities. What we see and hear and think is the truth. And so ultimate puts it beyond that relative sense of, I know reality, and there's a reality to break through to and that's the ultimate one.

But today I would like to say there's just reality and reality would be co-equal with God from a non-dual sense. There's only reality. It's just whether we know it or not.

Colleen: Okay so, you had a mixed religious heritage, then you went on to study religions and how did your mixed religious heritage and then your study of religions all come to shape this view that you hold now of, reality?

Netanel: I was having a discussion with another scholar a while back about multiculturalism and how that is informing interspirituality today. And we were using the example of the great thinker, Raimundo Panikkar. And Raimundo Panikar had an Indian father and a Spanish Catholic mother. And so, just multiculturally, belonging to two cultures being of mixed race as they said in that time, forced a confrontation in his life. Where most people ask you to choose. So since he's growing up in Spain, the dominant culture is trying to assert that he's Christian. And in many ways, he's happy to be Christian. 

He went on to become a Catholic priest, but then there's always the niggling question. And what about dad? And what about my heritage from India? Do I not factor that? Am I forced to not factor that? And over time, Panikar was a genius. Ultimately achieved four PhDs in physics and many different things. But he also became a great scholar of Hindu traditions and ultimately, interreligious dialogue. 

The interesting thing was that of how he was born and from whom he was born. And so, it's interesting that it's not this theoretical question about people today are picking and choosing from among religions with a grocery store mentality, that does happen, but more and more as we're living on one planet together and, have complex identities, those identities are forcing the questions of how are we going to be spiritual?

How are we going to identify? And it was similar for me. I thought I was one thing and then I discovered that I'm more than one thing, and I'm trying to work it out and, me trying to work out my questions, creates the search for more complex answers. I think it's a pretty natural phenomenon today especially, people with mixed cultural heritages. And some of us trying to reclaim heritages, which forces a confrontation with the local culture and then our inherited cultures, which we want to create a relationship to, and so a lot of this is just coming out of, what the planet is doing to us, pushing us together forcing questions.

Did I come around to the right thing?

Colleen: Well, you did and you opened up other things and I'm going to skip ahead a little bit Mark because I'm curious, is this phenomenon that you are describing, which rings very true like reality, is this changing or reshaping the way religion scholars and spiritual teachers are defining interspiritual or interfaith?

And a second part of that question, which might be helpful if you answer first is, How do you define Interspiritual and Interfaith? Those terms are being used a lot and I'm not sure that we all have a real solid understanding of its meaning.

Netanel: Yes, I'll start with the second and the newest of those terms is interspiritual. It has achieved some currency. It's being used more and more, but it's being used in the way we use spirituality. Which is a vaguely undefined thing. We use it and we nod our heads but, we don't really know what anybody else means.

There are words that we use that just grease the wheels on any given conversation. Which they might bear some investigation and some defining but, we don't really need to for the most part. As interspirituality gains currency, it's a lot of that. It seems to make a certain sense, and enough sense, where people don't need to examine it too much.

However, it was coined, around not that long ago, probably around 1999 or 2000, by Brother Wayne Teasdale, and at least first published in his book, The Mystic Heart. Where he goes into an idea of an interspirituality. Today, I would say that it has four components to understanding what the basics of interspirituality are. The first is, that there seems to be a basic human need to explore ultimacy. To explore the sacred. To reach outside of the given day-to-day. In as much as that human need is human, it's prior to religions, it's prior to Christianity, it's prior to Islam, it's prior to Hinduism. The basic human need is interspiritual. It comes before. It is between those things.

Second, interspirituality is a recognition that religions today, have complex interrelationships. They live next to each other. In the past, you could have an idea that there was Christendom, broadly Christian Europe, and then the Muslim world, this broadly Muslim world. That doesn't exist so much anymore.

Now, there are pockets of religion different religions spread all throughout the world right next to each other. And so, in the past hearing about a foreigner with this foreign religion, wouldn't occupy much space in anyone's consciousness, but now when your neighbor is a Muslim from Pakistan and it's not so much a speculation about the evils of Islam. The habits of your neighbor and whether they mow their lawn or not.

And whether they're neighborly a person. Now we live in this world where religions are bumping up against each other, and one thing we've hardly factored in is that, because religions live next to each other now, they also define themselves by one another.

You could have had a time in which Christianity mostly defined itself by itself.

It defined itself a little bit in relationship to Judaism before, but mostly it only had itself to think about. Now, when you have other religions in your face as it were, the religions are now defining themselves against one another and by one another.

We're living in a complex world of complex interrelationships between religious traditions. Interspirituality is a word that covers that complexity.

The third thing it covers is complex spiritual identities. Today, just like the radio did this to us in the 70s, when we started to get a little more diversity in the music scene, you could grow up in one culture and hear the music of another culture and find yourself moving to it unexpectedly and moved by it and almost as if infected by it. 

I have a friend who became a famous musician and he was often described as a hip hop, Hasidic reggae star or something like that because he was a Jewish kid from, I don't know, maybe white Plains or something, who heard Bob Marley and connected with it and felt it in his bones and started to listen to only reggae music, and here we have to make some distinction between co-opting of a culture, which could happen. He's not representing himself as a Rastafarian, but the music has infected him. And so, that is not the co-opting of culture that is infecting that is not anyone's fault. We passively receive these things and then pretty soon they're in us and they create creative fusions. 

That's happening to us with religion and spirituality, like the pervasiveness of yoga classes and psychotherapy and The Dalai Lama being a major media figure. We're receiving all of this and now it's in our consciousness and meme culture where we pick things up very quickly. We're not responsible for what we get infected by, in terms of religion and spirituality, but then we do become responsible for how they interact in us and how we understand ourselves.

We now have these complex religious identities, especially in a culture like ours, and we have to figure it out. I have a yoga practice and boy, Rumi's poetry has been tremendously meaningful for me, but I'm basically a Christian. How do I understand all of that together? And then finally, I'd like to say and this has been a long explanation, I'm sorry that, simply knowing that you have an interspiritual identity does not exempt you from taking a spiritual journey and going on one.

It's not enough to define yourself as interspiritual. The next question is, how am I going to be interspiritual? How am I going to live out a spiritual practice with that identity? That's very long. Interfaith is a term that's not used as much anymore because there are people that object to being called a faith tradition. Buddhism does not define itself as a faith tradition. Prior to that or rather out of that, people began to talk about interreligious dialogue as a little more accurate, but that's still religions siloed in dialogue with one another. And that's not quite what interspirituality is. Interspirituality is adding another complex layer.

Mark: There's a lot going on there, and you've been involved in these conversations across traditions. As you were talking, I was thinking about part of your introduction as well, your own background, there's this thing about identity, where we come from, who we are, how we identify, and then how porous is that or how fortified is that, when it comes to, being exposed to or being infected by or even being willing to have, a conversation across culture, across faith, tradition, whatever it might be. And as you were speaking, I was thinking also about the idea of identity and self, and how spiritual practices tend to challenge the self, being over-identified with that, so how do you strike that balance?

Especially when you're in the company of different traditions and people from different traditions or cultures and you maintain a certain identity but you also hold it loosely or something. I'm not sure but, I just wonder if you've bumped into that. The idea of losing the self as much as we're connecting with it and identifying with it.

Netanel: I bumped into it a lot more as a university professor, especially today when we're having a lot of discussions around identity, whether it's a queer identity or, whatever it might be. An interesting part of that discussion to me which I think is relevant to what we're talking about, is that as a society and socially, we're having to do a lot of work of validating those marginalized identities. And that is powerful and important work. But in the discussion with these same students who are in religion classes with me, the spiritual path you're trying to deconstruct identities. It gives us two things, and I think this is important that, socially, and individually, it's very important for us to validate marginalized identities that are true and real for us.

And as a society, we must do this, in order to move forward together. Then, on a personal spiritual path, you have to make those identities porous in some sense relative, so that we don't become locked in them. They become a trap on your spiritual path. And ultimately you have to shake all that off and get underneath those identities to get to the ultimate reality, which is just wearing a mask of a particular identity.

That particular identity might be good as a practical place holder much like a name tag, helps you identify somebody in a crowd, but once you meet them, once you’ve found the person with the name tag Mark, then I don't need the name tag anymore. I don't interface with the name tag.

Then I try to learn about the world that is you. The person standing behind me, who is more like a hinterland. A point behind which, is an infinite landscape. And so those two things in religion are the same too like, we're in a place of recognizing, marginalized hyphenated identities or interspiritual identities.

But that can't become the ultimate point. The ultimate point will still be the personal path unfolding to infinity.

Colleen: This might be a good place to because as you're talking about, bringing together our identities. We do want to have people learn a bit about the Snowmass conferences and how they came to be. It seems as though this may have been a reality for those gathering at the conferences and just to start us into this conversation. First, how did it come to be that you were present for this gathering? It was the summer of 2004, and for those of you who don't know, Netanel edited a book called The Common Heart and Experience of Interreligious Dialogue, which we now understand might have been titled Interspiritual Dialogue if it was today, but how did you come to this?

Because we've already discussed that Father Thomas started hosting these gatherings in 1984. So 20 years after the first gathering and 20 years ago, actually you were there. So how did you find yourself there? What drew you to that community? How were you invited?

Netanel: I wasn't actually there. It seems like I was there. 

Colleen: You got the transcripts. It seems like it. So you had the transcripts from these conversations?

Netanel: There's a little bit of magic to that book, so I'll explain.

I had met Father Thomas in 1999. He came to the Naropa Institute. I don't know why he was there that day, but one of my professors said, if you want to meet somebody really special, we were just at the end of a class, one of my graduate classes, she said, go over to the performing arts center.

And in there is somebody worth meeting, and I, and maybe 10 other students went over there and had a private talk with Father Thomas. He gave us a talk on the Gospel of Matthew and related it to Centering Prayer. So I had this connection to Father Thomas. I was also, in those years, a very close personal student of one of the pioneers in inter-religious dialogue, Rabbi Zalman Schechter Shalomi, who was a friend of Father Thomas. And both of them, in 2002, maybe around then, were being courted to be spiritual elders for an organization called the Spiritual Paths Foundation, which was wanting to put on dialogues that brought spiritual teachers together in a retreat format. Where they would teach together, but they would also live together for that week or weekend.

And so I got brought into the Spiritual Paths Foundation as the editor of their books and picking speakers. And, the man who ran it, his name was Dr. Edward Bastian, and he was a member of the Snowmass Conference. Come a couple of years later when they're hitting their 20th anniversary, and thinking that maybe they've done their work and they were going to close shop. They decided something needs to come out of this 20th gathering that will close us.

And so they had the idea of making a little pamphlet about what their work was. And because I was a young editor, with a good education and spirituality and working for Ed Bastian he suggested that I make the pamphlet. And so they made the proposal to me and I said, no, I will not make a pamphlet, but I will make a book.

And I will interview all of you. And so the little bit of magic that is in a common heart was that those were all separate interviews, that I layered together to make it feel like A dialogue between all of us. That's the particular success of that book, that it sounds like a conversation, but I had individual conversations with all of the members. That's how I came to be there. It was a little bit virtually being there. I got to meet them all and have these wonderful dialogues that I put together and understood, synthetically over time. So that's what that book is.

Mark: Wow. I know I never would have guessed that, reading it. It sounds like a conversation. It sounds like you're all sitting in a circle, maybe even with a campfire in the middle, and you're just talking and reflecting on these years of them gathering. 

Netanel: That was the goal. To make a book that felt like their conversation. And I think by the end they all felt that and everybody had an opportunity to edit what they said and it got better and better.

Colleen: Mission accomplished and I know you mentioned you don't have the book in front of you, which is good because I'm curious about just, your memory and what would you say you learned and maybe what was most resonant for you at that time in your life of compiling the book? What did you learn from those conversations and from editing the book that's relative to, your understanding of interspirituality and the work you're doing today?

Netanel: I think the testimony of that group and that book, in relationship to what we're talking about, is that. Dialogues of that sort, and maybe even that particular dialogue lineage, let's call it, in some sense gave birth to interspirituality. I made a joke at a dialogue a few years ago, talking with some teachers who still represent religions as more siloed things, more exclusive, but who are very committed to dialogue with one another.

And I made a joke, I said, What did you expect to happen when people of different religions got together? They made babies, and those babies had dual identities. There's a by-product, of your spiritual intimacy with one another. When people from different religions came together in the same room, they gave birth to something that was more complex. 

And I think that's true of this dialogue, is that when they really learned about one another, they fell in love with one another. And it gave birth to new forms of spirituality. I don't think they intended that at all. But that's the case. The other thing that they learned, which is the bedrock for interspirituality today is that dialogues up until that time were largely like panel discussions, with labels in front of people and they're all wearing the outfits and specific hats and by the way, they were all men in those days. Those were all male panels. So it was very patriarchal, very representational.

I am, the archbishop of this and I represent all of this and Snowmass was born of the Buddhist Christian dialogues that happened at the Naropa Institute. From 1981 to 1987, in 1983, Father Thomas was there, and these were great dialogues. They had real serious mystics representing the traditions. But Father Thomas said, Hey, the best stuff happened off the stage, when we were having lunch together and taking walks and when we took the hats off and his insight was, What would happen if we all went in retreat together outside of the public eye?

It's not gonna be a public performance, but we'll go and retreat together and get to know one another. And I think one of the things they learned was that you can't represent a religion. No one person can represent a religion. All you can do is represent yourself and your relationship to your religion or tradition. That's already interspiritual. It's like, yeah, I'm telling you about me. I can give you facts and figures about religion, but I can't really represent it. But I can represent how I feel about my practice, or about this or that. And then they became humans, sitting in a circle, around a fire, Perhaps the oldest technology there is the oldest spiritual technology is us sitting around a fire, giving or making offerings of our own understanding to one another.

That was an interspiritual environment. And in some sense, they rediscovered it. So that's how I see that today. These dialogues in some sense gave birth to interspirituality.

Mark: The conversations, the dialogues that went on, the friendships that developed were also rooted in some common practice. Was it not? That they found a way to also not just talk about where they were kind of experience being together inside of some practice. Maybe silence was, the whole thing but what was your sense about that in terms of shared practice?

Netanel: There was a question for them. What can we do together? And I think that's still the question today for interspirituality. What are we going to do together that doesn't wash out our uniqueness? Meaning we come from different places and we have these complex backgrounds, and we don't want to wash out the diversity or replace it by one person's practice, and they had this issue that was like they did a few experiments if they had a Zen Buddhist.

They were like, Oh well, let's try that on. And then if we have a Native American elder, there might be something drumming which leads to meditation. But ultimately you could never get deep. Because you only had these five days, so they were always just introductions. How were they going to be deep together? Eventually, they settled on silence, because in that 30 minutes to an hour of silence that they shared together, within the silence were the complexity of their individual practices being done, meaning they were still doing what they did from their tradition, but they were doing it together in the silence.

Kept it from being a cacophony. The silence held it all, but the silence also respected all of their individuality. And it got to mix in a metaphysical soup. cook together as they sat there. And ultimately they discovered that was best. And when my foundation took over the dialogues, we maintained the practice of before dialoguing, just as they did, they would sit in silence for 20 to 30 minutes. And it changed the nature of what came next. Your words after silence are better than they are before silence.

Colleen: And that's the Keras Foundation referencing. 

Netanel: Yeah, we now do the Keres Snowmass dialogues. We took them over in 2016 with Father Thomas's permission.

Colleen: I'm curious a bit about your own practice because, in seasons past, we talk about Centering Prayer with everyone in this season we're shifting a bit because understandably, not everyone practices Centering Prayer, but we are curious about the practice that leads one towards this deepening understanding of what is. For you, how is that expressed?

Netanel: Meaning in my relationship to Centering Prayer.

Colleen: No, your relationship to practice and that practice that brings you, to a deeper awareness of what is. From what we understand now, you most identify with the Sufi tradition, you're a teacher in that lineage, and honestly, I'm drawn to Sufism, but don't know much about it. I would love it if you could talk a bit about, what practices are inherent in the Sufi tradition that may serve you in your path and deepening awareness, anything in that space that might enlighten us. That's a lot.

Netanel: It is a lot. 

Colleen: It's hard to talk about many faiths. I must say, there are so many places to go.

Netanel: Let me say so, I'm the head of a Sufi lineage. That Sufi lineage is Universalist Sufi. So it's not confessionally bound to Islam anymore. That was not my doing. In 1911, the first Sufi master to come into the West, Hazrat Anay Khan, did that. He said I didn't come to make Muslims out of you. You're already Christians and Jews and whatever and, Sufism for him was a thing. A spiritual technology and way of being that you could apply to your Christianity, to your Judaism, or you could take on as a spiritual practice in itself. And so my lineage branches off of him. And so it's already, in some ways interspiritual, it's not isolated within Islam, though it's worth saying that most Sufis around the world are Muslim Sufis.

I certainly think that is a rich and powerful Sufi practice. So everything I say about Sufism is not definitive, doesn't mean I'm right. But that's one hat that I wear, but because I wear it and because I'm the head of a lineage, I have a higher, by which I mean more burdensome, responsibility than maybe an everyday Sufi marid or seeker. As the head of a lineage, I have to know all the practices, be able to explain them, have practiced them, and make sure that they go on being practiced by others.

So there's a duty to pass on, the material of the lineage and the transmission of it. But, that does mean that I feel a certain way about spiritual practices and I think this is the same for me as an interspiritual person. Whether as a Sufi teacher or as an interspiritual practitioner, I look at practice as a tool for spiritual development. And the tools do different things. They work on consciousness in different ways, and sometimes you need a flathead screwdriver, and sometimes you need a Phillips screwdriver, and sometimes you need an Allen wrench.

They're all to get at different things, to turn things a different way. To reveal things in your life, because we're just so effective at burying all this rich material, and there's always something more to work on. And our practices give us access to those things. I don't believe that there's one silver bullet practice. But I do believe that you can go deep and have an awakening experience with nearly every practice. It's not that the practice is so, perfect. We can, as human beings take deep approaches to nearly anything. You can have a powerful and sophisticated spiritual relationship with the Lord of the Rings. Various other books because the way you're approaching them is deep. Same with the practice, you can stay on the surface with a practice or you can deepen in a practice. And so today, I think of practices for myself in terms of there are my good basics, that I'm with most of the time. And then there are things that I have to take out of the toolkit and brush off every once in a while to keep them sharp, to get at different aspects of my spiritual life. And also as a prescriber of practices, I have to know a number to suit the spiritual styles of the people in front of me. They're not all equally good for all people. Having said that, I'll say Centering Prayer is pretty good for all people.

It Is still a staple of my spiritual life. Since 1999, I've been a Centering Prayer practitioner. And I would say I have three basics, Centering Prayer, Sufi Zikr, actually pronounced something a little more like Zikr but Americans can't say that so well, but Sufi Zikr, which is a mantric practice. And then I do an adapted Sufi meditation practice, which when taught to non-Sufis is called heart rhythm meditation. And in Sufi terms, we'd call it morocca. Meditation of the heart. I tend to go back and forth between those three most of the time. Boy, I've got a lot to say. Whenever you ask a question, a lot comes out. I feel apologetic about it.

Mark: No, don't please. It's so rich. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but we're at our time. we could go on, but we'll have to have you back. 

At least for now.

Netanel: I'd be happy to come back.

Mark: This Has been wonderful and rich and informative and for me grounding as well, to explore inner spirituality. We're just imparting, we want to remind you that Netanel is a professor and director of the Keating Schachter Center at Naropa University, and he has his own podcast. It's called The New Monastics and your co-host, are you not with Daniel Jami is it?

Netanel: Jami, yes.

Mark: Yeah, Jami. Check him out there on The New Monastics podcast.

Colleen: Yes and we always see Netanel around the Contemplative Outreach Community too. You're often invited to, facilitate workshops and be with us at conferences. And so it's good always to be in dialogue with you and thank you. There is so much, I'm just looking at my notes. We could have talked to you for another hour.

 Yeah, I'm just going to let it go right here. But thank you so much. I feel like this was so important and foundational for the start of this season because the understanding that you offered with regards to interspirituality and the coming together of different traditions, what happens In our identity and identifying with traditions, identifying in relation to one another, and in particular, how you spoke about the snow mass conferences really birthing in many ways, interspirituality, as we understand the take. This is what, I believe Spirit wanted us to share with the listeners for this start of this season. And so we're really grateful that you were able to be with us.

Netanel: It's a joy and thank you for inviting me to do it. And, just as you were talking brings to mind that, non-duality is the foundation for interspirituality, because once you get to that level of ultimacy, that ground of all being, no religion can stand in the face of that as an exclusive truth.

They all get relativized by it, and then it makes interspirituality the thing that we must do next. And that is not to say that it washes out the historical religions, but it gives them a different basis. Now, I can be an interspiritual Christian. I can be an interspiritual Muslim. I can be an interspiritual Hindu, and I can appreciate my brothers and sisters that are different.

That non-duality makes that all work. Yes, this has been a good conversation for establishing a relativism which actually helps us. But it's a relativism with an absolute base underneath it, which is that ultimate reality. So, thank you.

Colleen: Yeah, I must share this, you guys, before we go, because I really want to be intentional about hearkening people back to Father Thomas's words in our episodes. And what you just said, makes me just wanna share this. So this is from Reflections on the Unknowable, the chapter, titled Christ The Center of the Soul.

And Father Thomas says this, God is present. In everything, but not limited by anything. Being is relationship with everything that exists and everything that exists is in relationship with God. The word of God named Jesus savior by divine command was active before the incarnation. The word and its activity are not limited by the historical reality of the man, Jesus. Whose humanity it possessed. The eternal word may have manifested in other persons, such as Krishna, Laozi, Buddha, Muhammad, and in the teaching of the absolute in Buddhism, the Upanishads, Advaita Vedanta, and other experiences of the divine. These were channels of divine love into the world. 

Netanel: He was so good. 

Colleen: Yeah. Well, thank you for continuing his work and in his legacy. And thank you all for listening.