The Infinite Dance of Ultimate Reality

Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Episode 3 with Cynthia Bourgeault

The Infinite Dance of Ultimate Reality

“For Thomas, the whole thing– the dance of the Manifest and the Unmanifest– is what the sacred Secret Embrace is. And they're constantly flowing from one end to another. And the source of all reality, as Thomas is doing this, is veiled by the creator God, but he’s loving it and dancing. And the two are in a deep embrace.”

- Cynthia Bourgeault

We’re thrilled to share this conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest whose insights into spirituality have transformed our understanding of connecting with Ultimate Reality.

Cynthia is a modern-day mystic with a diverse background in contemplative spirituality, theology, and interspiritual dialogue. Known worldwide as a retreat leader and author, she divides her time between her home in Maine and teaching engagements around the globe, where she’s a passionate advocate for reviving Christian contemplative practices. Cynthia’s work builds bridges across spiritual traditions, and her new book, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic, explores Keating’s life and influence on modern spirituality. Her teaching incorporates her profound respect for Thomas Keating, Teilhard de Chardin, and other visionaries of contemplative theology, offering fresh insights into Christian nonduality and inner transformation.

 
In this episode we explore;
  • Cynthia discusses Ultimate Reality as a dynamic, all-encompassing “is-ness” that moves beyond traditional religious concepts of God. It’s a relational field where the finite and infinite interact in a continual, loving dance, which she describes as central to Christian contemplative practice.
  • She also shares her journey from a dualistic view of God to a more expansive, integrated understanding. She emphasizes that God includes both personal and impersonal aspects and that recognizing this reciprocal relationship leads to a fuller spiritual experience.
  • Thomas Keating, a key figure in non-dual Christian mysticism, is a significant influence on Cynthia. She reflects on his teachings, which emphasize moving beyond ego and embracing “unity consciousness” and “no-self,” key aspects of spiritual evolution and liberation from the “false self.”
  • Faith, as Cynthia describes it, is an openness to Ultimate Reality that transcends any specific belief system. For Keating and others in the Snowmass dialogues, faith is about direct, heart-centered experience rather than doctrinal adherence, creating common ground across spiritual traditions.
  • A theme central to both Cynthia’s and Keating’s understanding is the interplay between the manifest (the physical world) and the unmanifest (the transcendent or formless). This “dance” suggests that Ultimate Reality isn’t solely the vast, formless void but includes the joy of divine expression in the world.

“Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith, in this sense, precedes every belief system.”

- The Snowmass Agreements, point Number 4.

To learn more about the founding theological principles of Contemplative Outreach, visit www.contemplativeoutreach.org/vision

To connect with Cynthia Bourgeault:
To connect further with us:  

Season 3 of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts was made possible by donors like you and a grant from the Trust for the Meditation Process a charitable foundation encouraging meditation, mindfulness and contemplative prayer.

  This episode of Opening Minds, Opening Hearts is produced by Rachael Sanya 👉🏽 www.rachelsanya.com  
Listen to the Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast NOW for FREE on YouTube, Apple, Google, Amazon and more!
				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 3 Episode 3 with Cynthia Bourgeault
Episode Title: The Infinite Dance of Ultimate Reality

Mark: Okay, so we want to introduce you to our guest today, and I can speak for Colleen here we're both very excited to have Cynthia Bourgeault here, who is a modern-day mystic, an Episcopal priest, a writer, an internationally known retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude and sailing the waters around the seaside hermitage, her seaside hermitage in Maine and traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and wisdom paths.
Her new book, Thomas Keating, The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic will be released in November. So definitely want to look for that. Cynthia was also a guest in season two with us when she spoke about a shared oneness and a whole number of things. And you can find that recording on the Contemplative Outreach website, contemplativeoutreach.org. But we're delighted to have her back. Welcome, Cynthia.
Cynthia: Thank you.
Colleen: Welcome we're so glad to have you and we just want to jump right in because we know when we're talking with you that we could spend a whole day with you and yet we only have about 45 minutes. So, just to kick things off Cynthia, we are focusing this season on the Points of Agreement that emerged from the Snowmass conferences and they found this common language for God that emerged in these interspiritual dialogues and that language they settled on was Ultimate Reality.
So we're curious with all of our guests and you today, how might you describe Ultimate Reality?
Cynthia: Well, that's a nice starting place. I think that Ultimate Reality as certainly as Thomas came to use it and know it, which is largely how I came to know and use it, it certainly incorporates and includes warmly the whole swath of what Christians would call, God. It does include very warmly and richly the personal and the capacity of God to be in relationship with every human being, every animal, every quark, every little leaf on a personal level, which is a really important dimension.
But Ultimate Reality, suggests very strongly that even God is a concept, is a perspective, is a point of vision. And Ultimate Reality is really what begins to emerge when you move beyond needing concepts to orient yourself and can just directly perceive. It has not so much to do with a bigger reality or a more real reality hiding behind the less real realities.
It has to do with the final sort of suspension and transcendence of a mechanism in ourselves, that's always setting things up within us on the inside and the world on the outside. So we experience everything, even including God, as outside ourselves. And when something shifts, in the quality of our awareness and the operating system of our brain heart, we learn not to do that anymore. And there's a direct perception of just an is-ness that you don't even have to language and it's infinitely shareable. It's one of the things that made this Snowmass conference work so well because it's equally accessible in any tradition or none once consciousness is looking at things in this kind of way.
It may sound on the outside like it's a bigger and more impersonal way of talking about God, but it's really that which is Source and Ground of everything emerging out of nothingness and including the nothingness with us. It's like anything you can fathom, anything you can imagine. All, is Ultimate Reality.
Thomas added an interesting twist to it along the way, that he came to feel very directly that it's three-dimensional in a two-dimensional world or four-dimensional in a three-dimensional world that what you can pick up as you really are totally aware and transparent to Ultimate Reality is form manifesting out of infiteness and infinite latency in every microsecond of existence.
So the Ultimate Reality for Thomas also included this dimension of ultimate latency and possibility moving into actualization in the moment of its perception. It's a dynamic relationship with a field that includes both the Manifest and the Un-manifest, and the wonderful sort of secret embrace between the two of them.
Very dynamic, very relational not, betrayed by the concept of God but not captured in what people traditionally mean by God.
Colleen: We've heard your journey before but just in case there are people tuning in that have not heard a bit about your own personal journey, I'm curious because you're an Episcopal priest and can you share with us a little bit about your own evolution to understanding God in this way, as opposed to more of the linear, more dualistic way we come to understand God through traditional church.
Cynthia: I was part of the great mix at Snowmass that began to take shape in the early 1990s. When Father Thomas was on the one hand very busily developing the whole contemplative outreach delivery system, the retreats the teachings, he was about that. But he was also beginning to attract around him, this lively gang of people who were just inner spiritual and perspective.
And he was also, quite a lifelong friend and colleague of Ken Wilber, who was doing quite a bit just over the hills in Denver with Integral evolutionary consciousness, and Thomas was quite a part of that conversation. We had a lot of buzz and hype going on there as I lived alongside St. Benedict's monastery for a few years on and off throughout the 90s and I was part of the very, very heady mix of that group, that basically lived within the popular kind of cliche that we evolve…we move beyond a personal, trapped, theistic concept of God, the old man with the beard into this broader, spacious non-dual, boundary-less perception, which is Ultimate Reality.
I was all into that for a while and never disavowed it. But I began to see toward the end of it that's just half the picture. Because the first half of the picture, which is human beings evolving in a direction that's loosely called non-dual, that towards a bigger and more spacious and less boundaried kind of consciousness that can comprehend this.
But at the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of the question of then why does God, for God's self in a manifest form? Why are individuals cared for anyway? Why the pervasive continuance of this personal? And I, began to get irked by this sort of arrogant assumption that Christianity was stuck in the personal and therefore could never attain to a mature or sublime level of consciousness because that level was non-personal.
And I took my cues from Teilhard de Chardin there, and certainly from, my particular monastic beloved and teacher, Brother Rainfield. And we both understood more and more intensely that it was a two-way street. We aspire toward the infinite, but the divide aspires to realize God's self-informed - for God so loved the world.
So there's a dance between the finite and the infinite that's always going on. Thomas languaged it as an embrace. Until you really catch the embrace, you don't catch the fullness or the sublimity of the Christian contribution to non-duality to ultimate consciousness, which is the really reciprocally caring two-way street.
A lot of my insights to that came from the work that's also attracted me for about 30 years. I met at more or less the same time as Centering Prayer with Gurdjieff, G. I. Gurdjieff's wonderful maps and works and pictures of the cosmos using the Great Chain of Being model and Ken Wilber uses that too.
Basically, it's an evolutionary model. But Gurdjieff was the first one to point out that there was a reciprocal exchange. It wasn't just evolving upward and upward and upward until we dissolved into the oneness. It was allowing the oneness to pour through us and fill every, corner of our being.
So we radiate the stuff of God in finite form, which seems to give particular pleasure and joy to the Infinite. God knows why, but Thomas and I were both in deep agreement with that. That God got a kick out of it. So it's a two-way street, and there seemed to be so much still sort of neo-Gnosticism running around at the edges of the evolutionary movement. We got to get beyond the illusion of our physical bodies. We got to get beyond the illusion of being trapped in our small self and we've got to regain our identity in formless reality. It's not quite that simple. That gets you to the head of God, but it doesn't get you to the heart of God.
Mark: Can you say more about that? Because as you're speaking, I have this sense of all this movement and this reciprocal back and forth. It's not just, “What is my image of God”, as you were saying, God is there out there somewhere or somewhere, as an idea, a concept, or a thing and then I'm here still, but it's about engagement and movement.
And so is that the movement towards the heart of God?
Cynthia: I think so. There's a beautiful quote by a fellow by the name of Evan Thompson, who is a younger philosopher who worked very deeply with the best of the non-dual movement. And he says, “all illusions are constructions, but not all constructions are illusions.” In other words, if you're working out of plain illusion, you're working out of a construction, something that your mind has given you.
But some things that the mind gives you, constructions, cannot be illusions, but they can be very useful orientation points and metaphors for reality. And, I think God is a construction that has its place. It has its place because it carries the weight of wonderful, warm qualities that it draws out.
And it was interesting that toward the very end of his life, this was basically after he had, just before he was sent back to Spencer from Snowmass for his final basically hospice care. Just before then, and all through that time, he who had reached the outer stratospheres of non dual, imageless, formless mysticism, began to come back and pick up a lot of his practices that were his old prayers from childhood his earliest, prayers before the Blessed Sacrament. He fell in love with the Abandonment Prayer of Charles de Foucault, that he read and had read to him for the last seven months of his life that it makes no bones about the fact it's a Father-image, Father, I give myself to you.
And, it was almost like to really do kenosis well. To really entrust yourself and empty yourself. Sometimes the language of the personal works better. We know this within romantic relationships, we know it with our kids, that there are qualities of human devotion, of human goodness and character and generosity that are more drawn forward within this construction of the personal, that are touched within the greater spaciousness of the impersonal.
And Thomas himself was discovering very rapidly and deeply how to dance back and forth between them. It's part of the beauty of those videos that you see of him during the last year of his life and particularly the video that Comtemplative Outreach made, A Life Surrender to Love.
You'll watch in the one moment he's just beaming this sort of boundaryless infinite radiant truth and the next moment he's focusing right in on somebody's issue or tender care and giving them of a transition that almost electrifies them. He's talking about God in one moment as ultimate is-ness and in the next minute he's saying, so we might just call him Is-y. In other words he's just playing with it like a slinky, he's pushing him up and down and up and down and I love it. The whole thing is the dance.
The whole thing. And he was just enjoying the dance so much there toward the end. The infinite, the totally unboundaried, and yet, for God so delighted in the world that we can set up this construction of God and people and loving and worship and adoring, and there's nothing fake in it, and there's nothing immature in it. It is a vessel for some of the highest aspirations of the human soul. It's what creation is all about in its heart. So the only place we get into trouble is when anybody gets doctrinaire and dogmatic and insists that their construction of reality is better than anybody else's. There are plenty of non-dual people that do that pretty well, I'll tell you.
You know When you're dismissed from the back of the hand because you're still stuck in the personal. If there's no arrogance in that, I'll eat my shoe.
Colleen: Yeah. In listening to you, I think it's important for me, but also feel like it is for the listeners if you could elaborate for us and maybe define or make some distinction between these terms that we're using. We're talking about non-duality. We hear these terms - unitive consciousness…Oneness. Are these synonymous? Are they one in the same? Did non-duality emerge from the Christian tradition or has it been borrowed from other traditions? Could you help us to understand these concepts better?
Cynthia: It's a lot of this is a language game, Colleen, and I certainly respect the apparent confusion because it's there. That basically what happened is that when the Christian tradition with its own sort of language structure and ways of, constructing their visions of higher reality came into strong concept of contact with the Asian traditions, it had a different model but the same sort of hierarchy. They began to match up pairs.
So non-duality, which is very much a loan word from the Asian traditions. You don't see it much in use in spiritual conversation before the very late 1980s. And it comes in through the back door of interspiritual dialogue. And everybody's scrambling to try to find out what it matches up with.
And the problem is it falls in the cracks, between the highest echelon on the Christian road map, which had traditionally been the Unitive, and something else. Something else that Bernadette Roberts first started exploring and called it no self. Thomas Keating and Bernadette Roberts were traveling along the same road in close sort of - I won't say dialogue because it adds too much weight to what actually happened much more informally but, he was following her research and she was actually writing those, at least one of her no self books was written right here in Snowmass while she was on retreat. So Thomas was really early exposed to what she called no self.
I think he gradually came to realize that what the Asian traditions call, non-duality is beyond what the Christian tradition calls unitive. And it lies in the direction of what she called no self. And for that space, I believe he invented, I haven't seen it other from him the term unity consciousness, which he began using more and more confidently in the last, particularly five years of his life.
And which for him would be the direct correspondent with what the Asian traditions call non-duality. It's a step beyond the traditional unitive, because the traditional unitive still preserve the sense of an individual soul in deep relationship with God and so that the unitive, it's often described in imagery of mystical marriage.
So that your soul and God's get even closer together. And Thomas says as long as there is still two-ness, there's me and God. And both he and Bernadette, in their own ways, were hot on the trail of the thing that erased the concept of two-ness in the first place.
Unity consciousness is essentially, 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.
In the early days, back when I was seeing Thomas in the 90s, he wasn't quite there with that yet. He sort of waffled back and forth and his teaching on the unitive was still a little old school. But by the last decade of his life, he was there. And in the very, very last teaching that he gave in any great length, which was the Snowmass, was the conference with the younger, as a gathered group of contemplatives in 2016, that became the book, That We May Be One. For the first time, he is then using non-duality, unabashedly and introducing people to the term, and he's using it in a way that's a direct match with what he's been gradually leading us toward in unity consciousness. But what he's actually done, and I love the term unity consciousness - if you follow his thought thinking very carefully in his end of his life, he does say it is a step beyond the unitive.
It says that very clearly in that we may be one and that it leads more in the direction and is matched by what he calls the Ultimate Self, which is actually no self at all or all self they joined at the deep end. So it's an active process and if you're confused, it's not because you're confused it's because the terms are still very fluid as people are still working with them.
Mark: I was going to say he seems a little fluid still. At least I don't know when this came in, but, the book, The Secret Embrace the poem Out of Stone. If I may, he says, as the false self diminishes, and the ego becomes a servant, which I love an ego being the servant, everything turns into poetry and everything becomes a movement of divine love, but then he adds, but the separate self lingers on.
Cynthia: And this is where you see him extending the taxonomy of selfhood. I talk about that in the book. In the end he winds up with two more notches beyond true self and false self and one more notch beyond the traditional unitive. So he's basically extended the Christian roadmap of the mystical world.
He's added a whole new tier to it and, interestingly, you could say that Bernadette Roberts may have done it first. But they took a really interesting different course turn at a critical place. That for Bernadette Roberts, the path into no self and the ultimate unity lay in the Unmanifest. In other words, you had to encounter God in pure transcendence.
For Thomas, it wasn't like that. For Thomas, the whole thing, the dance of the Manifest and the Unmanifest, is what the sacred Secret Embraces and they're constantly flowing from one end to another and, the source of all reality as Thomas is doing this is veiled, by the creator God but is loving it and dancing and the two are in a deep embrace.
So for Thomas, the whole thing is God. Not just the unmanifest. He doesn't associate Ultimate Reality or ultimate consciousness with simply the classic emptiness or the classic unmanifest. He associates it with the unmanifest pouring into manifestingness particularly and also implicitly, the Manifested giving itself back up into the intimate. But the whole thing makes a circle and it's this circle, which I think, really unique contribution to non-dual mystical theology.
Colleen: And it is all very relational. Which when we're having these interspiritual conversations, as we are this season, one thing that's helping us is to look back on these Points of Agreement that emerged from the Snowmass conferences. I want to share a couple and just would love to hear your responses to these, and maybe even in the sense of a bit about Father Thomas's journey arriving to these Points of Agreement in these dialogues.
For example, number four says “Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.” What does this mean to you that faith precedes every belief system?
Cynthia: It's actually a wonderful teaching and a very liberating teaching. Because many Christians particularly of a more fundamentalist or evangelical nature will use faith as a synonym for agreement with a belief system. That's what the Nicene Creed is all about - “We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty.” In other words, faith for them is essentially indistinguishable from a set of beliefs that have been taught to them or formed in them in the religion. And as long as you hold it there, you're never going to get agreement amongst the religious traditions of the world because they all rightfully have slightly different belief systems.
Apples are not oranges, are not pears, or we would have a very dull fruit salad. But what they saw, and this is doubly interesting for me, that faith is more the capacity to be open to it to stay present, that which is beyond words, beyond belief systems, beyond containment - to stay open to it, by a quality of your heart and allow yourself to be transparent to it, so that it can grow in you, and act in you, and shape your own capacity to incarnate it to manifest it.
This is interesting because first of all, it immediately levels the playing field, amongst the interspiritual traditions because everybody in the room sitting with Thomas could share that direct experience. That faith lies in the opening itself. It doesn't lie in having the answers given that you then memorize and teach people. Everybody in the room would know that. It's like that in all the traditions. That the real infinite is beyond language and beyond concepting. But it's not beyond being known in the heart, in the open heart.
What's also interesting to me was that, I realized when I was practicing Centering Prayer, and actually pretty early on, is what Thomas has done in this has created a beautiful stepping stone bridge, because surrender, the consent, just in the basic, I consent to the presence and action of God. Consent builds trust, that as you learn to consent and you don't build it like a head game. If you practice Centering Prayer as a way of letting go, every time you do this gesture of letting go, you're practicing the moving from a more constricted space neurologically will slightly more open space. So you're creating a device within you, you're rewiring your response pattern in the direction of openness or trust.
And trust, i. e. openness, builds faith, which in its full grown-up sense, is the capacity not only to believe, but to actually perceive subtly the reality of realms, of forms of manifestation, of ways the divine makes connections that are not visible to the naked senses or the self-protective ego. So there's a direct stepping stone from sitting there and centering prayer twice a day, twenty minutes a day, letting go of thoughts, and an increasingly stabilized capacity to access this openness and to allow it to become trust that builds you to a greater receptivity to faith, as a belief system in any of the religions.
So you can begin to embrace them and you watch people in Christianity doing that. Some people come back to Centering Prayer, because it's the only way they can stand to be anywhere near the Christian tradition which they've run away from because they can't stand all the doctrine and dogma and ridiculous things you have to believe.
And gradually, in the prayer practice, this gradual sort of mellowing and opening, and builds this disposability - transparency to God. And in that, they're finally able to come back to their relationship between faith and belief and embrace things that they formerly would have rejected because there's a deeper capacity, understanding, and holding and trust. So it's a wonderful bonding unit just within our own traditions and between the traditions.
Mark: The bonding too sounds like less fragmentation. One of the other terms that was used in the Points of Agreement - they talked about the “potential for human wholeness, or in other frames of reference enlightenment, salvation, transcendence, transformation, blessedness, is present in every human being.” Is that another term for that? Maybe not exactly like Ultimate Reality, but this idea of human wholeness that it all starts to connect. We're connected - that unity.
Cynthia: Yeah. I think myself as I read that paragraph which is very packed. I think that it's primary meaning is he would say that in our Western tradition where we are right now, that the word wholeness most closely approximates like a Buddhist master might call enlightenment.
Like in Christian tradition, we have no experience base for what enlightenment means. It's not a term we use. It's not a value we tend to apply to things. So when the Buddhists come walking in talking about enlightenment and enlightened beings, we don't quite know where to put that. And so I think that what Thomas is doing is offering wholeness, as a launch pad from which we can begin to talk about what a human being who has moved to a higher and deeper state of integration and compassion looks like.
In our old Christian tradition, we had a perfectly good word for it. The word is theosis or divinization. But that word dropped out of favor early on, particularly in the Christian West, where when we had Saint Augustine and the doctrine of original sin clamped down on us like iron chains in the sixth century, people sort of lost their heart. For the vision of theosis, but it's implicit right in the teachings of Jesus. If you would be whole, if you would be perfect, says Jesus. Sell all you have, give it to the poor and come and follow me. And what Jesus means by perfection, what the Buddhists mean by enlightenment, what some traditions mean by spiritual beings, the classic sense of theosis, they all hover around that same thing. That normally in our fractured consciousness we always experience the world through separated fragments and bits and pieces. We talked about that already, the inside and the outside.
Becoming whole, becoming enlightened, becoming perfected, becoming divinized they all speak about something that heals that fragmentation. And again, it's one of these things that was one of the geniuses of the Snowmass conference. That if you immediately try and grab that in language and talk about the Buddhist position on it versus the Hindu position versus the capitalistic tradition, you begin to lose it in quibbling, it splits into fragmentation itself.
But if you stay with what does that experience feel like to you? How does it live itself out in your tradition? You find people nodding your heads and say, oh, yeah, that's what you mean by it. That's what you mean by it. And, it's like shared experience banks, will mingle and interpenetrate, whereas theologies never can, they have too many sharp edges.
Colleen: Yeah. And also what we gained from the Snowmass dialogues and the relational aspect of those gatherings was people were able to bring their personal experience of their tradition to the dialogue. And when we see the person we really do understand the process behind enlightenment or salvation or wholeness.
The Dalai Lama doesn't arrive at this level of awakening (and Father Thomas actually uses that word in Reflections on the Unknowable - awakening) overnight. Also listening to you was flashback to my systematic theology classes and that deaf understanding of salvation systematically as a process of healing and wholeness and maybe to introduce too, to look at reflections on the unknowable.
Father Thomas talks about spiritual evolution as a process. He says “a process of liberation.” And he says this - “that it completes biological evolution, which has brought us to the relative freedom of rational consciousness. Beyond rational consciousness, the path to interior freedom expands to become a union of wills with that which is freedom itself. Spiritual evolution is the path of liberation from the false self, the ego, and the separate self-sense.”
Cynthia: Yeah. Because the false self, the ego, and the separate self, what they have in common is they're all generated by what I call the egoic operating system. It's just like on a computer. It's an operating system like Mojave or something. But it delivers this program, perception through differentiation. And so when we're running that program, which is what all human beings do, Thomas basically calls that rational consciousness, although he doesn't plunge deeply ever into the whole sort of phenomenology of consciousness or how does consciousness work? How is it put together? But that's what keeps them all in common and beyond that, in this enlightened or this evolutionary liberation we upgrade the operating system so we see through direct perception rather than through this constantly bouncing it off this sort of small self-actor in the middle who steals all the goodies and still worries.
So that's what he's increasingly experiencing and talking about. One of his great teachings at the end was shared with his beautiful, Jewish friend, Rabbi Rami Shapiro. And Rami came to visit him one of those days when he was still living in Snowmass and holding court in the infirmary library with its magnificent views of the Mount Cypress behind it, and Rami asked him about his practice those days, and he says when Thomas shows up, I just put him down again, and when he pops up, I put him back down again, and when he pops up, I put him back again.
It's like he knew that he was gonna continue to be his old beloved, neurotic, over-managing Thomas and that would pop up, but that he was increasingly having more space where he could just put it back down again. That was Thomas at the work of making this final passage into the evolutionary liberation he talks about. When Thomas finally stays down all the time you're basically there in unity consciousness. There's nothing blotting, no finger on the camera lens anymore.
But it's a process to get there. It's a process because you've got to rewire not only your attitudes, but your whole system by which your finite and physical body draws energy to live. Because we use our ego consciousness and our quest for affirmation, to actually give us life force and energy. And for a while, for all people who don't do that anymore, there's this great period of depletion which is called the dark night of the spirit. You don't know what end is up. How do I keep my body intact when there's no, no me, but I gotta have a me to run me, don't I? And, it's a time of painful deliver.
Colleen: Yeah. Then your book then is aptly titled, The Making of a Modern Day Mystic and then in a way we're all in the making. I wonder maybe getting close to time here what surprised you in this deep dive into this later teachings? You were very close with him but did you discover anything new or what will surprise us maybe even is the question as we read your book and learn more about him through this lens.
Cynthia: What surprised me most was just the beautiful simple humanness of the final process of radiance. That he became steadily more luminescent. He never put on any fake things. I visited him a few times at his bedside at St. Joseph's in the inn. He was in pain. He was unhappy. He was fretful a lot of the time. He would occasionally, obsess neurotically on something, but then he'd boost forward through it.
When he was with people, I think the thing that most amazed me, was his quality with his growing capacity to transmit what in the classic traditions would be called baraka or spiritual grace. He was charismatic from the start and people loved his teachings, but in the end it was like touching a radiant orb that there was something that was so present and congealed and luminous and loving in his being.
You know, he could just brush his teeth and it would still be there. And yet it was completely human. It didn't pull against it's human. It just flowed into his humanness and lit up every tooth that was being brushed. So basically he collapsed for me the contradiction and taught me, just be yourself in the world as you march on, and keep your face facing forward towards what you yearn for, and the rest will catch up with you in a kind of funny way, Ultimate Reality is running the show.
Colleen: Such freedom.
Mark: Beautiful.
Colleen: Yeah. Be yourself in the world. It's a beautiful parting blessing. Mark, what do you think? Any thoughts there.
Mark: No, just taking it all in, Cynthia. It's such deep teaching and I love the inclusiveness that you don't totally give up, the individual self, but you're also completely immersed in the unitive, in the oneness and that was in clear evidence with Thomas right to the very end.
Cynthia: Yeah, it was play. It was art. It was dance that delighted him, toward the end, and it was these, astonishing new growth on the sturdy root of his being. He would never think of himself writing poetry, but the delight to meet God as the creative artist playing with the world. It's just lovely. It's just so filled with joy. That for me is always the greatest reward when I think of the time with Thomas- the good times and the bad times. But, to see him burst through into that joy and that deep willingness and to sense him now very much, holding some sort of post.
Beyond the physical flesh and beyond the physical realm, but still very much engaged with the world, helping to tend and steward and shape and the sense of that care pouring through even though we can't see it. The sense of excitement to take this to a new place and to really take these instructions that he's given us discreetly at the end, really work on them and chew on them.
Like we've just been doing this hour. We haven't figured it all out yet but it's been a good chew. As groups of people in Contemplative Outreach and beyond do that, just staying with this material, chewing on it, integrating it into their lives is the teaching, is the Eucharist that he's left us, of his own life's teaching.
Colleen: It really is.
Mark: I remember one line of one of the poems in the Secret Embrace, I am one turned inside out. It's just like he's willing to do that, right? It's still an I there, he's also willing from total.
I'm excited about your book coming out. I can't wait for that to be released. Which will be released in November. Thomas Keating, the making of a modern Christian mystic. Also Colleen, you want to say more about the Garrison Institute?
Colleen: Also yes, In March of 2025, in honor of Father Thomas's 102nd birthday, Cynthia will be teaming up with the Garrison Institute, to host an inaugural Thomas Keating symposium. And that will lead directly into a five-day silent teaching retreat, focused on the material in your new book. Are there any updates for us about that or, how can we find out more if people are interested in going?
Cynthia: The committee right now, the steering committee, is just getting things ready to start, cranking out the save-the-date information. But what's going to be fun in all this is that we are bringing together under one roof some of the people who were Thomas's closest friends and companions in these last 30 years of his life. People who don't all know each other, because he kept his inner spiritual arm and his Contemplative Outreach arm, a little bit separate for a lot of the ways, but you'll be meeting the whole gang.
It'll be Adam Bucko and Will Keepen, Rory McKinney, Nathaniel, Miles Yepez, and some wonderful monastic teachers like Father Cyprian, who was the prior at Big Sur for many years and, has just taken over on the Vatican for the Minister of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. He's coming. So we've got some marvelous movers and shakers that were Thomas's deep friends, along with some of the wise people in the Contemplative Outreach network, the stalwarts like MaryAnne Best and some of the new voices, like you, Colleen, and Keith Christick, which Thomas invested so much on in the final days. So my hope is that it's going to be a meeting of the water.
The other really good thing, and knock on wood and fingers crossed, is that David Frenette is going to be there too and is going to co-lead the retreat. It's the first time that David and I have all co lead a retreat together. He's going to be teaching a lot in his teaching part of it on unity consciousness and contemplative service.
And so I, find it like it could be a stirring of the water of all these pieces that were a little bit fragmented even as his life, to come together, to love on each other and really creating a new force of energy to move forward with this wonderful mission and vision that he's given us.
Mark: Wonderful.
Colleen: Wonderful. It's on my calendar.
Cynthia: Save the day. We will let you know.
Colleen: Yes. Cynthia, thank you so much. You are one of our wisdom teachers and it's just a real gift anytime we get to share presence with you. So thank you for carving out time and we will be back everyone with another guest…
And Cynthia, we're gonna just wish you all the best in your book release and encourage everyone to go out and pick it up and get to know Thomas Keating on a deeper level.