Season 3 Trailer

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 3 Trailer
Trailer Title: Welcome to Season 3 of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts!

Season 3 of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts was made possible by a grant from the Trust for the Meditation Process, a charitable foundation encouraging meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative prayer. To find out more about the foundation, go to trustformeditation.org. If you are a grateful listener and would like to support this podcast, go to contemplativeoutreach.org/podcast to make a donation of any amount. And thank you for your support.

Colleen Thomas: Welcome back, Mark. We are doing it, season three of our podcast.
Mark Dannenfelser: So glad to be back. It's been too long.
Colleen Thomas: Yeah. There's a fair amount of preparation that goes into getting ready to have conversations with folks, but also for our own way of digging into Thomas Keating's teachings. And we're really taking a plunge in this season into some, I think, deeper waters.
(Music swells)
This is the podcast of Contemplate Outreach and it's about the transformative practice of Centering Prayer, but we're gonna shift the dialogue a little bit in Season 3. Away from the method of Centering Prayer and Centering Prayer as a practice that leads us to a form of personal transformation into where Father Thomas went in his later years and his teachings into the impact of Centering Prayer on our relationships.
In particular, our relationship with others inside and outside of the Christian tradition. So much of Father Thomas' work from the very beginning was to engage in interspiritual dialogue and interreligious dialogue.
Mark Dannenfelser: Yeah. And when you hear the origin stories around Thomas Keating and Centering Prayer and how that kind of developed, he was there all the way in the beginning in terms of opening up that contemplative tradition.
I never realized until I went back on all that. How much he saw that relationship between contemplative practice and what he eventually started calling dialogue within the tradition and then across traditions.
Colleen Thomas: I'm really excited because I feel like this is a practice in expanding consciousness, like actually giving ourselves the space and our listeners, hopefully, to experience other perspectives from other spiritual traditions.
Mark Dannenfelser: In nonduality, the separate self-sense is greatly reduced and even disappears. Everything that happens is the direct experience of reality. And it's being able to lead ordinary life Without thinking of oneself, when you look at a tree, it is a tree, and not you looking at a tree.
Netanel Miles-Yépez: Nonduality 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 nonduality makes that all work.
Colleen Thomas: And that's some of where we want to explore this season too is that. In this deepening understanding of Father Thomas Keating's theology and how it evolved, maybe not so much in his own experience, but in his teaching, maybe a little bit of both. He taught where we were in some contexts, but towards the later years of his life, his writings begin to reflect some of this non-dual nature in terms of our experience of God and this movement from the self-made self that relates to a personal God to A suspension of that self that enables us to open to an experience of God that's beyond personal. He's inviting us into what he called unity consciousness.
Cynthia Bourgeault: Unity consciousness is a state beyond what most of us would normally call my soul proclaims the glory of the Lord. It's just the glory of the Lord. And it's the removal of the last vestiges of trueness from the perceptual field.
Mark Dannenfelser: Keating has a poem that was published in The Secret Embrace, 'Out of Nothing'. I won't read the whole thing, but he just has this line, To be nothing is to consent to being a simple creature. This is the place of encounter with I am, that I am. When there is no more me, myself, or mine, only ‘I am’ remains.
Mirabai Starr: When John of the Cross talks about Nada, N A D A, Nada in Espanol, nothing, it's kind of like shunyata in Buddhism, that the nature of reality is empty. And that when John of the Cross talks about being nothing, I am nothing, before God. It's not about low self-esteem. ‘I am nothing’ is the highest affirmation of love. Because it's saying that I am stripped of all my illusions of separation. The mystical journey is a journey of love; of love returning to love.
James Finley: I will not abandon my awakened heart in my most childlike hour. In my hour of love, my hour of loss. The quiet hour at day's end. The quiet afternoon in an art museum, sitting between two lines of a poem that touches me, I was quickened. And having tasted the oneness, I will not play the cynic. I will not doubt it. Having tasted the oneness, It's a God-given desire to abide in the oneness, and that's the path.
Mark Dannenfelser: I think that's why so much talk about our work of letting go, if we are to recognize that oneness, that isness of God, it requires that, at least for me, I know it does, that I kind of get out of the way a little bit with my ego.
Otherwise, it's just still this separate thing. It's me, my fortified ego and self. And then this entity that's somewhere outside of me. Keating's got a quote about that non-dual. He says, "In nonduality, the separate self-sense is greatly reduced, and it even disappears. Everything that happens is the direct experience of reality. It is being able to lead ordinary life without thinking of oneself all the time." Ugh, that's hard. I'm always referring it back to me. What's this going to do for me, you know? Right, right.
Colleen Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, what a relief to be separated from the separate self-sense.
Mark Dannenfelser: Yeah, even if I go kicking and screaming, but yeah.
Colleen Thomas: We've got to find a way to find commonality across cultures, too, because the body of Christ is multicultural.
Mark Dannenfelser: And our guests this season are– I mean, we haven't talked to all of them yet. We're still meeting, but I know they're going to help us do that because they're all walking this path and going to the deeper places and where that connectivity starts to show up more.
And so I'm very excited about the guests that we have and having these conversations and taking the time to pause around this. That's the part that brings me joy.
(Music interlude)
I think you've said this, "I see my work as a continuation of the engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh," as well as the work of your parents that inspired you. So I wonder if you could say more about that kind of engaged Buddhism and how that comes out of our practice.
Kaira Jewel: Yeah. Yeah, so what I mentioned earlier about Nirvana being this absence of self and not being driven by greed, hatred, and delusion, and that basically translates into boundless compassion, because if you see your interconnectedness, then all you want to do is protect and love and provide the best conditions for each being to flourish.
Colleen Thomas: I'm looking forward to learning. I'm looking forward to really learning.
Mark Dannenfelser: Me too. And I'm happy to be sitting with you or across from you, in this whole process and learning together. It's a great joy. So I'm looking forward to the season. A lot.
Colleen Thomas: Me too.
Mark Dannenfelser: And we're looking forward to all of you joining us, even though we said that thing about, we're not doing this in front of an audience. That wasn't us. That was the Snowmass people. We want an audience.
(music fades out.)