TRINITY: The Soul of Creation Sessions 1-9 Unedited Transcript Session 1: Pre-Conference with Richard Rohr and Panel Session 2: Conversation with Rohr, Bourgeault, and Young Session 3: Wm Paul Young Session 4: Richard Rohr Session 5: Cynthia Bourgeault Session 6: Cynthia Bourgeault Session 7: Wm Paul Young Session 8: Q&R with Rohr, Bourgeault, and Young Session 9: Contemplative Practice with Cynthia Bourgeault and Darlene Franz Session 1: Pre-Conference with Richard Rohr and Panel Richard Rohr: I'm going to read a poem from Mary Oliver. As you know and the students know in the school, she's one my favorites. This is from her book Evidence, and I'm only going to read a part of a longer poem. It’s called “To Begin with the Sweet Grass.” “For one thing leads to another. Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot. Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in. “And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate, and you'll be both heart-shaken and respectful. And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper: oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two beautiful bodies of your lungs. “The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings. All I can tell you is what I know. “Look and look again. This world is not just a thrill for the eyes. “. It's praising. It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life—just imagine that You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.” She never disappoints, does she? I use her a lot for years in trying to teach contemplation, and I thank the planners who suggested this idea of a preconference because as you know we say it in many ways at the Center that without the contemplative mind, all the rest of each doesn't go to any depth, doesn't transform, doesn't enlighten, and I think this is the immense disappointment in the doctrinal history of so much of Christianity, and it’s not to be overly critical, but it's just to recognize the pattern that all of our attempts at reformation really didn't resolve, because we find that every reform usually began with what we call dualistic thinking, an argumentative mind that needed to prove its new understanding of Jesus or the gospel was the right one and the previous group was 100% wrong. That's never been true, and it left us all in a great big ocean of confusion. You see, it's not so important to tell people what to see. What our job is as I think Jesus does beautifully, teach people how to see, and the human way of thinking is we think we need to know something before we can possibly lend ourselves to loving it. The divine way of thinking is that you must love at first and then you know it. Did you hear what I just said? That’s a complete turnaround, and if I had to describe the contemplative mind in a few words, that's granting the moment, granting the situation a kind of compassion, respect, reverence where you don't try to understand it in parts or explain it in parts, but you allow it to be what it is in its wholeness. It's a long loving look at the real. It’s a silent steady gaze of acceptance toward anything, and when you can look at it in that way, it opens up, and it opens you up which is the great surprise I think, and we don't realize until that moment that so much of our life has been beginning with analysis, beginning with calculation, beginning with a self- referential way of looking at the person, the event, the object, what's in it for me, will this make me money, will this make me look good, will this get me a new girlfriend. It’s just it’s too small. It’s not the way God sees things, and so the contemplative mind approaches insofar as humans can the mind of Christ, the mind of God to see things in their completeness, not simply in how they refer to me and when you allow that what emerges is always sweet grass as Mary Oliver would say, a sweetness, a goodness inside of things, even people that you couldn't see goodness in before. I didn’t read this book in its completion or in its completeness. Maybe some of you picked it up. It's rather daunting book as you can see written by one of those English smart people Iain McGilchrist, and it’s called The Master and his Emissary. The divided brain, he is a neuroscientist, the divided brain and the making of the Western world, and he goes through every century a bit as a historian and different cultures to recognize what half of the brain formed that century or what half of the brain formed that culture and then the implications of that. This quote that was often attributed to— Is the sound gone? No, okay—was his inspiration. Apparently, it's not an exact quote from Einstein, but people who have studied him say it is an honest description. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is only its faithful servant.” We have begun to worship the servant and defile the sacred gift. He ends this whole book again leading you through daunting science and neuroscience. I'm going to read a bit if you don't mind from the very concluding paragraphs. We need to show definitively that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but two major ways of being in the world are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres. If we did that, I would be surprised but not unhappy. Ultimately, what I've tried to point to is that the apparently separate functions—I know this sounds scientific but stay with it—in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent unity. There are not just occurrence here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, and they are fundamentally opposed though complementary too in what they reveal to us and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen at the very least as a metaphor. So, what he is saying is don’t just say left brain, right brain. We’ve talked that in the last maybe 20 years or so. He says that is probably oversimplified. It surely is. But he says, nevertheless it is a physical metaphor that we do have in our brains two independently operating hemispheres; a metaphor for the two—points out again and again how people have represented those two different minds, a poet like Mary Oliver would, of course, represent what we call the right brain as our musicians will, but we have got to know that Western TRINITY: The Soul of Creation Copyright © 2017 Center for Action and Contemplation Page 2 of 90 civilization in the last several hundred years has been almost entirely formed and that's the case he makes by the left brain which is rational, engineering, calculative, mathematical, good, necessary. It is obsessed with being right, and I think we have seen that in our country in the last 18 months. It's about the only mind we have left. It doesn't have much concern for truth. It's simply and I am not making this as an overstatement, it's simply concerned about winning, that’s all. The meaning of life is winning, not truth. That’s what happens when the intuitive mind as he has called it here is completely suppressed because the intuitive mind is able to know things at a much deeper level The divided nature of our reality has been a consistent observation since humanity has been sufficiently self-conscious to reflect upon it. That most classical representative of the modern self-conscious spirit, Goethe, the German poet, he declared that there were two souls in the human breast, Schopenhauer described two completely distinct forms of experience. Bergson, the Frenchman, referred to two different orders of reality. Schleiermacher described the human being as a citizen of two worlds and said that all great European philosophers like Kant who use the same formulation had seen the same. Remember, of course, I had to study scholastic philosophy, Aquinas and Scotus and Bonaventure, and they all three agreed there was a rational mind and an intuitive mind and that they were needed like the two hemispheres to balance and regulate one another. I can't emphasize enough because no one is always telling us this although McGilchrist makes the case here that the emissary has become the master. The mind which was supposed to help has taken over, because there is nothing wrong with rational thinking. We wouldn’t have the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution. You wouldn’t be sitting here right now if we wouldn't have enjoyed the fruits of rational thinking. He says what all this point to is the fundamentally divided nature of mental experience. Now see, that's what people who speak of meditation and contemplation in all of the world religions, they recognize that early on and that somehow you had to find a way to relativize this overly linear calculating rational mind, or it would take over.