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[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Amantial Inspirations podcast with me, David Lorimer, where I talked to my guests about experiences, people and books that have shaped their lives and work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Imagine yourselves play a key role in the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, which is also the Greek symbol for the soul.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These cells are dormant in the caterpillar, but at a critical point of development, they
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[SPEAKER_01]: My guest today is Jim Finley, PhD, who is a faculty member of the Center for Action and Contemplation, found it by Father Richard Raw.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Father Thomas Merlin was Jim's newest master and spiritual director while he was at monk at the trappist monastery at the Arby at Gessemony in Kentucky many moons go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he earned his PhD at Clinical Psychology primarily works with people suffering from
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[SPEAKER_01]: and how contemplative prayer got increased their quality of life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's written numerous books and currently hosts the podcast turning to the mystics.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well Jim, welcome to imaginal inspirations and we'll get straight into the first question which is a shaping moment in your choice of work.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you can give us two shaping moments.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One is the shaping moment, you know, when you became a monk and then the other when you became a clinical psychologist.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would say the first shaping moment is that I was born in a race as the oldest of six children and my father was a violent alcoholic and so there was ongoing physical and emotional trauma towards me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For the time I was three years old on really.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I also witnessed my five younger siblings being traumatized in my mother, so there's all that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My mother was a devout Catholic, and I could tell her faith sustained her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So even as a small child, I think I turned to God as to stain me in my faith.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when I was in the ninth grade, I was at a Catholic high school and in the ninth grade in Akronahile.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And an instructor in a religion class mentioned monasteries.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I never heard of monasteries before.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I recall you saw the most places where people go to seek and find and give themselves to God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who's wholly poured out and given to us in each passing moment of our life, on up to an including the moment of our death and beyond.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He spoke at those terms, and he mentioned Thomas Merton.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that day, I talked about Thomas Merton and the monastery as a young man.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When he entered the monastery, he wrote his out of his virtual autobiography, the seven story mountain, one of the New York Times best-sellers list, and how he's no writing and touching a lot.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I went to the school library that day,
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[SPEAKER_00]: and he had one book by Martin in the Library, the sign of Jonas, which is a journal he kept as a monk in the monastery, as 14 years old, and I opened it on the first page, he says, as for me, I have a one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear into the secret of God's face.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a 14 I didn't know what that meant, but the depth of his own sincerity touched me,
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[SPEAKER_00]: He named me, so I got my own copy, and for the remaining four years of high school, I read that book over and over the death and the beauty of God's presence in our life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought out of that that God was calling me to enter the monastery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when I graduated from high school, I entered 18 years old, and lived there as a monk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: for six years, and it had a very profound effect on me to closer to menace to life of seeking God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then, fortunately Thomas Burton, in his role as novice master, guided me in my search for God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he led me then into an end of study of the classical text of the Christian mystics.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then the mystics of all the world's great religions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, Tiknot Han came from Vietnam and he murdered his me to the Dharma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A yogi came from India to found at Ashram, the visit mern, and mern practice yogi introduced me to deep yoga namaste.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We spent a whole year on mystical Islam with Rumi and Hafiz and Ibn Arabi and Judaism, Torah and Kabbalah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I was deeply like immersed in these texts and experientially exploring them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when I left the monastery got married and I thought called to write a book, this would be the second decisive moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I guess, and it's called to write a book on Thomas Merden's insights into the spiritual life as a path in which we can be healed from but hinders us from realizing our ultimate identity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: hidden with Christ in God before the origins of the universe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it's in the ego, we're quickened and awakened to a transcendent identity, transcendent the ego.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So what is the path along which we can be ever more transformed in that?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, when I was with Thomas Merton in spiritual direction, one on one, I looked back and I realized there were always under the auspices of three questions, which I saw as the contemplative way of like, one who had asked how's it going?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what's it like, I was 18 years old, what's it like being you here, getting up at two, 30 in the morning to 10th the songs, is, do you feel you belong here?
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[SPEAKER_00]: You wanted to be real with him?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second question was, how is it going in your surrender to the mystery that has brought you to this place that might transform you into itself?
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[SPEAKER_00]: This divinization must go.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And third question was, how is it going?
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is covering the depth of the second question percolating up to the messy details of the first question.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's walk on the walk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote a bookmortence palace of nowhere.
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[SPEAKER_00]: on what is this path along which this is realized day by day and when that book came out a clinical cycle began to get invitation to lead a contemplative retreats from the United States and Canada and a clinical psychologist wrote to me and he read the book like that very much
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he said that he was a, he was parents of admissionaries in India, Methodist, and he was an evangelical Christian, but he would go to the Ausroms, and he was so struck by the depth of the yogis that they spoke.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when he read Martin's Palace, it was his first exposure to mystical Catholicism, to John of the Cross and Theresa and Eckhart and Julian.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so he had me come and give a retreat at its place for the Spatians and Former
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[SPEAKER_00]: he told me
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[SPEAKER_00]: that if I would commit myself to contributing to the contribution of the mystical traditions make to the science of psychology, he would give me a PhD to that I can have a four PhD scholarship for free with family support.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I moved with my wife and two young children to fourth theological seminary, and I so gave silent retreats every other weekend, but for five years I immersed myself in clinical
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what does it mean to be a contemplative clinician?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's been my, my providential opinion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: An contemplative clinician.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I love that Jim.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much for that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go back to Martin as a kind of spiritual advisor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe you could tell us a bit about advice and guidance that he gave you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he was, he enabled you to go and contemplate in a barn, I think, that was, isn't that one of the things I said?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and it's a tell us a bit more about how he, how he guided and advised you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I used to go to this abandoned sheep barn and Kentucky was in the summer, and spend time alone there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And why not with hot August to lie day and Kentucky?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was walking back and forth reading the Psalm, back and forth, and all of a sudden there was this vivid realization that we tend to think of as the air is God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was walking back and forth in God, breathing God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew that wherever I would try to flee from God, I'd be running away from God in God and wherever I ended up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That'd be waiting for me when I got there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But there was no need to run because this is the deepest part that God knew me through and through and through and through as compassion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: like it was Oishi Annie, a sovereign safety, and it was so vivid and real to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I told Merden that I was with him in spiritual direction, and he told me
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said, once in a while, you'll find somebody with whom you can talk about such things, but they're hard to find.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people don't even know it exists, or they'd put it off to a later, and he had to know that he was the person with whom I could talk about them, because I saw him as a realized mystic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: teacher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so he guided me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He guided me in the vulnerability of this kind of quiet divinization of myself and incarnate infinity and ultimately realized.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It really radicalized me and has such a deep effect on me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: really, and he embodied it, and he became a hermit, he had permission to build a hermitage for him on the grounds of the monastery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so he spent the last few years of his life living in solitude this week continued writing, and he was very much involved in the unity of all world religions at the missed level.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So he was invited to attend International Conference
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he went to the conference, they had a dialogue with it, it's holding us the Dalalama, they had this deep connection with each other.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And while he was on that conference, he was 53 years old, he was electrocuted in his room.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they think what happened, well, he was given a conference to the month, to the nuns, there are no monks.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there are 240 volts there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They think he went over, there was a fan on the windowsill.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think he went over to turn the fan towards his bed for his first.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a short in the fan, and he fell back at the fan on his chest and he died.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were rumors of the CIA killed him, because he was one of the Catholic intellectuals fueling the anti-Vietnam movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, the pro-doctor Martin with their king movement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so in 53 years old,
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[SPEAKER_00]: then he died, he never died after I left the monastery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I've read it in account for this, and I was put on to this, actually, by Matthew Fox, and Matthew said that he had met one of the agents involved, and the agents said to him, I hugely regret my role in this operation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: makes you think.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, well, 1968 was a year when many, when the Martin Luther King was fascinated, what was his accuracy fascinated, Malcolm X, I think, as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, let's go on to books.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The shape your life and thinking, you mentioned a few already, but I'm sure other ones will occur to you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would say, you know, this is podcasts that I do with Richard Rohr turning to the mystics podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in the podcast, I share reflection deep reflections on the mystics that formed me in the monastery, the Merton introduced me to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I would say those would be the work, so they would be Saint John of the Cross.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The work's the 16th century Spanish basically, the Dark Knight of the Soul, Saint Teresa of Avala
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[SPEAKER_00]: Myster, the German mystic, myster, Eckhart.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Doctor, totally.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Myster Eckhart.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said, the I, E, Y, E, the I, with which I see God is the I, with which God sees me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I know, I just love that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I apologize.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I apologize.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It says, what does it mean to be taught about blessed or the poor in spirit?
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said, to be poor, you have to become so poor that as long as you're still up place and you forgot to do well, you're not yet poor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: God has to be the place for God dwells in your pieces, things like he's stunning.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a master, Julianne of Norwich, Revelation of my love, and Francis and Clare, and these people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I just absorbed these, I thought what it was, is what they were doing was this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: First they give witnesses, the witness that they're in this stabilized state as a carism.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And really it's the foreshadowing of eternal life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the foreshadowing of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a unit of state in which we and God mutually disappear as dualistically other than each other in the concreteness of life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what they're doing is this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're writing to help us discern the signs that perhaps is starting to happen to us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were being lured and called to these unitive states.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin once said, the monastery is designed to cultivate these unitive realizations of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But there are people in the world that are being called to it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They have no one to help them understand what's happening to them.
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[SPEAKER_00]: because it's subtle, it's very, very subtle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I think the one that we're helping us to discern the signs of these unit of state, secondly, they were helping us understand what it means and thirdly how to cooperate with it, that it might have its way with us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I found them so helpful this way.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when I would leave silent, medical contemplative retreats, I would people would be on their retreats and they would come and you could tell they were very sincerely being touched by something.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was so delicate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How do I surrender to it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: How does this mean?
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[SPEAKER_00]: How can I like this?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So there's been a big part of my life and a big thing for me, really, is it?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What I was being in a therapist working with trauma, Monday through Thursday from noon till 9 at night, and every other weekend, I would fly and give a silent retreat someone in the United States or Canada.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The retreat was in silence and meals were in silence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were three sits during the day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was speaking from the depth of the mystics applying it to their life at home.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting is that people in trauma and the people on the retreat often were the same people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was one of those, I was, I was a, I was a, I was a mischief, a waken trauma survivor, and that the bitter sweet alchemy where these two realms touch each other, it's been a big part of a kind of substantive for me in my own life and helping other people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, and I feel that what Erkart was getting up was this kind of reciprocity of the, and sometimes I wonder whether it's the divine awakening within us, not the ego awakening, because I don't think the ego can awaken.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's good.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what I think the ego at guard is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He begins with, there's a lovely book by Reiner Sherman on the thought of Mystrakart, and this is the first step for Mystrakart, because he lived in the midst of the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The first step for Mystrakart is detachment, and he says, what detachment is, is to have a virgin mind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And a virgin mind is not to have closure in any thought or belief about yourself, about God,
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[SPEAKER_00]: You just know the very fact you're capable of thinking it, it's not adequate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's almost like a liberation from the ideology of conceptual understanding.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's just going on that way, it starts to happen, it calls it the birth of the word in the soul.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you start to then recognize the divinity, pouring itself out, and giving itself away in a immediacy of life itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Which we are, which we are, we are there exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And Jim, can I go sort of build on that and ask about a, you know, he moments of insight in your work in relation to the nature of consciousness, which I imagine is, you know, your own mystical insights.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll share for me what was a big one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There was a number of them really, it was very significant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When I was in the midst of my doctoral work, and I was seeing people with supervision and therapy, I was able to see this mystical, the step-dimension shining out in their work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In most, I call the axial moments, these turnings.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But for my dissertation, I didn't know how to say it, and I had to articulate it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when I was in my last year, I was at a VA hospital.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was inpatient alcohol treatment unit, mainly from vets coming back from Vietnam.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So they had dual diagnosis, they had PTSD from the war, and then drugs are alcohol to drink, so they had dual diagnosis.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was a 30-day inpatient program.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I found out that my first day on the unit, that some years earlier, the members of the unit had an initiation right, an initiation right, and the person, and these people coming in, there's a waiting list to get in, and these are people, Galinal wine a day and sleeping under the, they're literally dying of alcohol.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had this initiation, right, and the morning I arrived, they were going to have one of these initiation, so it was a big room, maybe there were a hundred chairs around the four walls of the room, and all the men on the unit were sitting in these chairs, and in the middle of the room were two chairs facing each other.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the recovering alcoholics who was going to leave the initiation, right, brought in this person coming into the unit, kind of nervous because he didn't know what was going on with the bees.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he had him sit down, he sat down, and the person asked the person, and by the way, when he came in, they were all looking down at the Granoi contact, that's why, because it's a serious his death, which it is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he asked the person, what do you love the most?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I was stunned by it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that, in fact, the configuration of the rumor, the people said, remind me of a Zen meditation hall.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the person would say, my wife, at which point, everyone in the room would yell as that as they could, bullshit, real, and he would jump.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, what do you say, my children, finally, he would say alcohol.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when he said alcohol, they had him stand up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They also had to give him a standing ovation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And they came up one at a time in silence and held him and he started crying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was off to the side and I'd tear it up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the voice inside said, this is just like at the monastery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now I found a way to say it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would use him to mentor me because in that moment, in that moment, he was vulnerable.
20:24.373 --> 20:28.761
[SPEAKER_00]: The true invincibility was manifested in the world.
20:30.164 --> 20:36.516
[SPEAKER_00]: In that moment was solitude, he was unto himself, but he was bearing witness unto how we're all alone together.
20:37.475 --> 20:47.354
[SPEAKER_00]: In that moment, he was very childlike, meaning not child-ish, but disarmingly transparent, and true maturity was being manifested in the horror.
20:48.335 --> 20:48.997
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a moment.
20:49.237 --> 20:55.028
[SPEAKER_00]: I also saw this, when they came up to hug him, it's like they were walking him into their midst.
20:55.008 --> 21:01.278
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also saw, you were coming up for another dose of the golden glow, like someone just newly arriving.
21:01.518 --> 21:02.059
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes.
21:02.299 --> 21:02.680
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
21:03.020 --> 21:07.026
[SPEAKER_00]: It's mainly heal, broken people, and I was so touched by that.
21:07.067 --> 21:12.014
[SPEAKER_00]: There's sometimes when we see something dramatic, we can see it in subtle ways.
21:12.054 --> 21:14.518
[SPEAKER_00]: So then when I was sitting with people in therapy,
21:14.498 --> 21:19.525
[SPEAKER_00]: And in much more subtle way, I could see it shining out this way.
21:19.886 --> 21:29.960
[SPEAKER_00]: So I saw that the, I worked with trauma that the foundations of trauma are not the traumatizing things that can, and sometimes, and do occur as terrible as they are.
21:30.882 --> 21:38.633
[SPEAKER_00]: The foundations of trauma is not how they get internalized as a post-traumatic stress disorder, as hard as that can be.
21:38.613 --> 21:49.370
[SPEAKER_00]: The foundation of trauma is the traumatized capacity to experientially abide in the infinite presence as pouring itself out and giving itself to us breath by breath.
21:50.191 --> 22:01.870
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in therapy, I worked on a horizontal level with symptom reduction, like working through, working through in such a way that the depth dimension could come shining out.
22:02.018 --> 22:02.761
[SPEAKER_00]: from the work.
22:02.781 --> 22:03.143
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
22:03.424 --> 22:04.549
[SPEAKER_01]: They got so bored.
22:05.051 --> 22:08.788
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and if you want, I can show one striking example of that.
22:08.853 --> 22:09.534
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, do.
22:09.574 --> 22:11.496
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we'll go on to the next question.
22:12.037 --> 22:13.058
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, it's very subtle.
22:13.899 --> 22:15.100
[SPEAKER_00]: Just one example.
22:15.120 --> 22:15.941
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a woman.
22:16.302 --> 22:18.164
[SPEAKER_00]: She wasn't seen me in therapy.
22:18.605 --> 22:19.666
[SPEAKER_00]: She was never as a child.
22:19.706 --> 22:21.388
[SPEAKER_00]: She was never physically abused.
22:22.449 --> 22:24.472
[SPEAKER_00]: And she wasn't sexually abused.
22:24.492 --> 22:28.456
[SPEAKER_00]: But her parents had these horrendous intense screaming fights with each other.
22:28.476 --> 22:29.878
[SPEAKER_00]: There was scared of death.
22:30.419 --> 22:32.041
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were so enraged at each other.
22:32.061 --> 22:33.763
[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't see what it was doing to her.
22:33.823 --> 22:37.527
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said she felt invisible.
22:37.507 --> 22:39.454
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why she was in therapy, became it.
22:39.535 --> 22:40.820
[SPEAKER_00]: She still fell into the book.
22:41.763 --> 22:42.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's what happens.
22:42.747 --> 22:44.072
[SPEAKER_00]: We take an intense moment.
22:44.393 --> 22:46.200
[SPEAKER_00]: It gets internalized.
22:46.467 --> 22:48.930
[SPEAKER_00]: as kind of an interior traumatized state.
22:49.812 --> 22:52.255
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we were talking about this.
22:52.335 --> 22:55.319
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she told me, this is the axial moment, the turning.
22:57.522 --> 23:00.467
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, one summer night her parents are screaming at each other.
23:00.507 --> 23:09.419
[SPEAKER_00]: And she went to the back screen door, went out into the dark in the yard, climbed up in the low branches of a tree in the yard.
23:10.280 --> 23:15.107
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said, she closed one eye and lined up
23:15.492 --> 23:21.100
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said to God, if you know I'm here, make that star move to the other side of that twig.
23:22.162 --> 23:23.684
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, the star didn't move.
23:24.866 --> 23:34.521
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, but there's something about the remembrance of myself as a little girl sitting alone in the dark waiting for God to move was star that moves me.
23:35.642 --> 23:39.108
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, yes, and when you shared it, I was moved.
23:39.448 --> 23:41.331
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how God works in our life.
23:42.020 --> 23:45.530
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it's a such a touching storage in fact.
23:45.670 --> 23:57.362
[SPEAKER_00]: It is touching and notice so so that in that moment See so so that in that moment she was vulnerable she was childlike she was this so then I say to her
23:58.135 --> 24:06.866
[SPEAKER_00]: you know what we can do here together is how to be more habitually stabilized in this sensitivity because you're not in this civil you're so present.
24:08.148 --> 24:23.166
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be like one example of the tonal quality of the work that I'm sure that will speak to people and then Jim thank you and how does your understanding of mystical consciousness influence the way you live your life?
24:23.627 --> 24:24.548
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure it does.
24:26.418 --> 24:30.786
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I made it to my wife died four years ago of Alzheimer's.
24:30.806 --> 24:34.112
[SPEAKER_00]: She died right here in the living room and her ashes are right there.
24:34.152 --> 24:35.054
[SPEAKER_00]: I sit every morning.
24:35.074 --> 24:37.418
[SPEAKER_00]: I do all my writing, sitting next to her ashes.
24:38.019 --> 24:41.546
[SPEAKER_00]: The oceans right outside the window like this.
24:41.566 --> 24:44.070
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't drive anymore.
24:44.090 --> 24:45.012
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm kind of fragile.
24:45.392 --> 24:49.540
[SPEAKER_00]: Like my daughters call me every day and they take me to the doctor.
24:49.520 --> 25:00.733
[SPEAKER_00]: So how I feel with me is that I feel I feel old and delicate, amazed and grateful.
25:02.214 --> 25:09.663
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say that my spiritual vision influences my life and that it is my life.
25:09.683 --> 25:13.367
[SPEAKER_00]: I think of the disease and the disease that you are marrying us.
25:14.647 --> 25:21.157
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my master, Martin Heidegger has this understanding of an of a rice and looking out at the ocean, not.
25:21.177 --> 25:25.083
[SPEAKER_00]: He said one way, the rise in is the point, the over which we can't see.
25:25.664 --> 25:27.607
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, there's another way of looking at the rise.
25:28.889 --> 25:35.759
[SPEAKER_00]: The horizon is the place where the unmanifested is manifest, so the poems of your own hands are gods or rye.
25:37.422 --> 25:39.625
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I've been kind of an atmospheric
25:40.904 --> 25:45.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And an explainer, just kind of an habitual sensitivity.
25:45.948 --> 25:46.889
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel I've been blessed.
25:46.909 --> 25:47.510
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
25:47.930 --> 25:48.811
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little grateful.
25:50.932 --> 25:56.697
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's what you sort of stabilized condition in that way.
25:57.198 --> 25:57.558
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
25:57.958 --> 25:59.720
[SPEAKER_01]: But it takes a lot of work to get there.
26:00.441 --> 26:01.001
[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
26:01.822 --> 26:05.985
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jim, do you have a proverb you live by or a favorite quote?
26:07.707 --> 26:10.489
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a phrase.
26:11.482 --> 26:17.138
[SPEAKER_00]: The phrase that speaks to me is incarnate and thinnity intimately realized.
26:18.232 --> 26:21.435
[SPEAKER_01]: and we call it infancy, infinitely realises.
26:21.455 --> 26:27.441
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I see to it is, I think that's what the tradition says, is that ultimately speaking, just one thing is happening.
26:28.523 --> 26:36.110
[SPEAKER_00]: The infinite presence of God is holy pouring itself out and giving itself away, whole and complete.
26:36.931 --> 26:47.462
[SPEAKER_00]: In and as the intimate immediacy of our very presence, the presence of others and all things
26:49.282 --> 26:56.649
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think all of us from time to time we get intimations of that, like the sacredness of everything.
26:57.210 --> 27:02.075
[SPEAKER_00]: So the path is the path talk is a longing to abide in that.
27:03.816 --> 27:06.079
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, it's a gift not everybody.
27:07.059 --> 27:08.541
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is the way of the artist.
27:09.041 --> 27:10.102
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the way of the poet.
27:11.043 --> 27:13.486
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the way of some musicians and how we're moved.
27:14.126 --> 27:17.770
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it's in self-donating service for the community.
27:17.750 --> 27:20.614
[SPEAKER_00]: It can be in silence or solitude.
27:20.654 --> 27:24.520
[SPEAKER_00]: Another quote by Roka, they must quote letters to a young poet.
27:25.422 --> 27:27.966
[SPEAKER_00]: A young poet sends his poems to Roka.
27:28.326 --> 27:30.530
[SPEAKER_00]: It says, I want you to tell me my poems are any good.
27:31.812 --> 27:32.974
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, you're looking outward.
27:33.014 --> 27:34.155
[SPEAKER_00]: You must stop doing that.
27:34.536 --> 27:40.365
[SPEAKER_00]: You must ask yourself, in the stillest hour of your darkest night, must I write poetry.
27:40.345 --> 27:47.918
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the answer is clear and simple, yes, you must build the life-most incidental moments and fidelity to that.
27:49.500 --> 27:50.001
[SPEAKER_00]: Beautiful.
27:50.482 --> 27:55.110
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the line we just speaks to me, and I think we do it in ordinaryness.
27:55.931 --> 28:02.522
[SPEAKER_00]: We do it in humility of the ordinaryness of our sincerity, as holy as you know.
28:03.667 --> 28:04.769
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very much so.
28:05.551 --> 28:06.794
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm more just sort of devotion.
28:06.874 --> 28:08.998
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to put a little extra question in here.
28:10.041 --> 28:13.969
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm reading a short text by Simon V at the moment.
28:14.550 --> 28:21.625
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a French philosopher mystic and one of the things that really struck me was that she at the certain point she
28:22.195 --> 28:26.021
[SPEAKER_01]: she had this exercise of saying the Lord's prayer in Greek.
28:27.304 --> 28:29.908
[SPEAKER_01]: And with total attention.
28:31.110 --> 28:33.854
[SPEAKER_01]: And if a tension wavered, then she'd start again.
28:33.874 --> 28:43.631
[SPEAKER_01]: And she went into such ecstasy that even when she was working in a factory, which I think she was at the time, you know, she would repeat the Lord's prayer in Greek.
28:43.731 --> 28:46.195
[SPEAKER_01]: I just loved that idea.
28:46.175 --> 28:47.318
[SPEAKER_00]: I lost someone for you.
28:47.338 --> 28:48.841
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to do her in the podcast.
28:48.861 --> 28:49.403
[SPEAKER_00]: Such a mess.
28:49.423 --> 28:50.485
[SPEAKER_00]: She's stunning woman.
28:51.307 --> 28:51.628
[SPEAKER_00]: Really?
28:51.668 --> 28:56.119
[SPEAKER_00]: See what she's on to here when you look at these traditions.
28:57.402 --> 29:00.268
[SPEAKER_00]: What it really is is it's kind of like this.
29:00.790 --> 29:02.614
[SPEAKER_00]: There are there are moments.
29:02.594 --> 29:09.344
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a kind of a grace flow where we step into the divinity of the immediacy.
29:10.085 --> 29:16.315
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes it's a prayer, like a mantra or a vizuals, and as a mandala can help us.
29:16.935 --> 29:22.003
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we realize that like a flame that flickers in the wind, it wavers.
29:21.983 --> 29:23.024
[SPEAKER_00]: It wavering up.
29:23.044 --> 29:23.865
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing.
29:23.905 --> 29:25.507
[SPEAKER_00]: See, here's the thing.
29:25.947 --> 29:35.078
[SPEAKER_00]: Although it keeps wavering from our end, it never wavers from God's end, because the infinite love of God is infinitely and love with us in the midst of our wavered ways.
29:35.718 --> 29:40.043
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that's a very, very broad way to be reinstated again.
29:40.083 --> 29:43.207
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why she could be reinstated working in the factory.
29:43.948 --> 29:46.090
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like the holiness of those people.
29:46.691 --> 29:47.412
[SPEAKER_00]: She was right there.
29:47.732 --> 29:48.733
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a saint.
29:48.713 --> 29:51.617
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is the worst, absolutely stunning.
29:51.737 --> 29:56.905
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, my last question is, do you have any advice you'd give to your younger self?
30:00.350 --> 30:03.114
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say this.
30:06.138 --> 30:10.384
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to make my younger self to be when the trauma was going on in the high and high school.
30:10.865 --> 30:11.846
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was hearing him right now.
30:11.866 --> 30:17.775
[SPEAKER_00]: Or even when I was in the monastery, 1819 years old, I would say this, keep going.
30:19.240 --> 30:20.502
[SPEAKER_00]: keep you doing well.
30:21.504 --> 30:21.724
[SPEAKER_00]: Really.
30:22.085 --> 30:31.861
[SPEAKER_00]: And just as you can't explain how you got to this point, you don't see the unforeseeable transitions that lie ahead because you're on a path not of your own making.
30:32.502 --> 30:34.566
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the holiness of your own unfolding life.
30:34.586 --> 30:38.312
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't push the river and you don't need to.
30:38.292 --> 30:42.836
[SPEAKER_00]: and stay calm, be patient, go on and on and on.
30:43.257 --> 30:49.222
[SPEAKER_00]: And sure enough, that young person is the person that is now 82 years old.
30:49.763 --> 30:51.504
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm living at the rim of eternity.
30:51.544 --> 30:52.305
[SPEAKER_00]: It must be true.
30:54.047 --> 30:58.991
[SPEAKER_01]: Jim, thank you so much for your wise insights during our conversation.
30:59.011 --> 31:05.397
[SPEAKER_01]: I really appreciate having you all the
00:17.699 --> 00:27.869
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Amantial Inspirations podcast with me, David Lorimer, where I talked to my guests about experiences, people and books that have shaped their lives and work.
00:29.450 --> 00:37.137
[SPEAKER_01]: Imagine yourselves play a key role in the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly, which is also the Greek symbol for the soul.
00:38.599 --> 00:47.487
[SPEAKER_01]: These cells are dormant in the caterpillar, but at a critical point of development, they
00:53.997 --> 01:02.428
[SPEAKER_01]: My guest today is Jim Finley, PhD, who is a faculty member of the Center for Action and Contemplation, found it by Father Richard Raw.
01:03.870 --> 01:15.424
[SPEAKER_01]: Father Thomas Merlin was Jim's newest master and spiritual director while he was at monk at the trappist monastery at the Arby at Gessemony in Kentucky many moons go.
01:15.464 --> 01:23.835
[SPEAKER_01]: And he earned his PhD at Clinical Psychology primarily works with people suffering from
01:24.457 --> 01:28.067
[SPEAKER_01]: and how contemplative prayer got increased their quality of life.
01:29.090 --> 01:34.264
[SPEAKER_01]: He's written numerous books and currently hosts the podcast turning to the mystics.
01:34.733 --> 01:45.773
[SPEAKER_01]: Well Jim, welcome to imaginal inspirations and we'll get straight into the first question which is a shaping moment in your choice of work.
01:45.933 --> 01:48.738
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you can give us two shaping moments.
01:48.979 --> 01:57.153
[SPEAKER_01]: One is the shaping moment, you know, when you became a monk and then the other when you became a clinical psychologist.
01:57.554 --> 01:58.075
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
01:58.392 --> 02:13.199
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say the first shaping moment is that I was born in a race as the oldest of six children and my father was a violent alcoholic and so there was ongoing physical and emotional trauma towards me.
02:13.279 --> 02:15.844
[SPEAKER_00]: For the time I was three years old on really.
02:15.824 --> 02:21.074
[SPEAKER_00]: I also witnessed my five younger siblings being traumatized in my mother, so there's all that.
02:21.114 --> 02:26.163
[SPEAKER_00]: My mother was a devout Catholic, and I could tell her faith sustained her.
02:27.185 --> 02:33.276
[SPEAKER_00]: So even as a small child, I think I turned to God as to stain me in my faith.
02:33.256 --> 02:39.129
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I was in the ninth grade, I was at a Catholic high school and in the ninth grade in Akronahile.
02:39.830 --> 02:42.957
[SPEAKER_00]: And an instructor in a religion class mentioned monasteries.
02:44.199 --> 02:45.743
[SPEAKER_00]: I never heard of monasteries before.
02:46.264 --> 02:52.918
[SPEAKER_00]: And I recall you saw the most places where people go to seek and find and give themselves to God.
02:53.742 --> 03:00.931
[SPEAKER_00]: who's wholly poured out and given to us in each passing moment of our life, on up to an including the moment of our death and beyond.
03:01.211 --> 03:04.075
[SPEAKER_00]: He spoke at those terms, and he mentioned Thomas Merton.
03:05.236 --> 03:09.501
[SPEAKER_00]: So that day, I talked about Thomas Merton and the monastery as a young man.
03:10.242 --> 03:19.674
[SPEAKER_00]: When he entered the monastery, he wrote his out of his virtual autobiography, the seven story mountain, one of the New York Times best-sellers list, and how he's no writing and touching a lot.
03:19.694 --> 03:22.197
[SPEAKER_00]: So I went to the school library that day,
03:22.177 --> 03:41.537
[SPEAKER_00]: and he had one book by Martin in the Library, the sign of Jonas, which is a journal he kept as a monk in the monastery, as 14 years old, and I opened it on the first page, he says, as for me, I have a one desire, the desire for solitude, to disappear into the secret of God's face.
03:42.658 --> 03:50.226
[SPEAKER_00]: And a 14 I didn't know what that meant, but the depth of his own sincerity touched me,
03:50.206 --> 04:01.005
[SPEAKER_00]: He named me, so I got my own copy, and for the remaining four years of high school, I read that book over and over the death and the beauty of God's presence in our life.
04:01.586 --> 04:04.611
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought out of that that God was calling me to enter the monastery.
04:05.292 --> 04:10.341
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I graduated from high school, I entered 18 years old, and lived there as a monk.
04:10.321 --> 04:17.991
[SPEAKER_00]: for six years, and it had a very profound effect on me to closer to menace to life of seeking God.
04:18.392 --> 04:23.499
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, fortunately Thomas Burton, in his role as novice master, guided me in my search for God.
04:24.140 --> 04:29.607
[SPEAKER_00]: And he led me then into an end of study of the classical text of the Christian mystics.
04:30.068 --> 04:32.371
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the mystics of all the world's great religions.
04:32.771 --> 04:37.678
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Tiknot Han came from Vietnam and he murdered his me to the Dharma.
04:37.658 --> 04:46.814
[SPEAKER_00]: A yogi came from India to found at Ashram, the visit mern, and mern practice yogi introduced me to deep yoga namaste.
04:47.475 --> 04:56.710
[SPEAKER_00]: We spent a whole year on mystical Islam with Rumi and Hafiz and Ibn Arabi and Judaism, Torah and Kabbalah.
04:57.151 --> 05:02.400
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was deeply like immersed in these texts and experientially exploring them.
05:02.380 --> 05:11.073
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I left the monastery got married and I thought called to write a book, this would be the second decisive moment.
05:11.093 --> 05:24.473
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess, and it's called to write a book on Thomas Merden's insights into the spiritual life as a path in which we can be healed from but hinders us from realizing our ultimate identity.
05:24.453 --> 05:28.181
[SPEAKER_00]: hidden with Christ in God before the origins of the universe.
05:28.742 --> 05:36.839
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's in the ego, we're quickened and awakened to a transcendent identity, transcendent the ego.
05:36.859 --> 05:43.693
[SPEAKER_00]: So what is the path along which we can be ever more transformed in that?
05:45.175 --> 05:58.330
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, when I was with Thomas Merton in spiritual direction, one on one, I looked back and I realized there were always under the auspices of three questions, which I saw as the contemplative way of like, one who had asked how's it going?
06:00.032 --> 06:07.821
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what's it like, I was 18 years old, what's it like being you here, getting up at two, 30 in the morning to 10th the songs, is, do you feel you belong here?
06:08.202 --> 06:10.204
[SPEAKER_00]: You wanted to be real with him?
06:10.184 --> 06:19.213
[SPEAKER_00]: The second question was, how is it going in your surrender to the mystery that has brought you to this place that might transform you into itself?
06:19.894 --> 06:22.196
[SPEAKER_00]: This divinization must go.
06:23.257 --> 06:25.540
[SPEAKER_00]: And third question was, how is it going?
06:25.940 --> 06:31.646
[SPEAKER_00]: It is covering the depth of the second question percolating up to the messy details of the first question.
06:32.067 --> 06:33.128
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's walk on the walk.
06:33.788 --> 06:36.411
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wrote a bookmortence palace of nowhere.
06:36.391 --> 06:58.703
[SPEAKER_00]: on what is this path along which this is realized day by day and when that book came out a clinical cycle began to get invitation to lead a contemplative retreats from the United States and Canada and a clinical psychologist wrote to me and he read the book like that very much
06:58.683 --> 07:11.535
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said that he was a, he was parents of admissionaries in India, Methodist, and he was an evangelical Christian, but he would go to the Ausroms, and he was so struck by the depth of the yogis that they spoke.
07:12.155 --> 07:19.942
[SPEAKER_00]: So when he read Martin's Palace, it was his first exposure to mystical Catholicism, to John of the Cross and Theresa and Eckhart and Julian.
07:20.603 --> 07:28.690
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he had me come and give a retreat at its place for the Spatians and Former
07:28.670 --> 07:30.546
[SPEAKER_00]: he told me
07:31.015 --> 07:43.251
[SPEAKER_00]: that if I would commit myself to contributing to the contribution of the mystical traditions make to the science of psychology, he would give me a PhD to that I can have a four PhD scholarship for free with family support.
07:44.613 --> 08:00.735
[SPEAKER_00]: So I moved with my wife and two young children to fourth theological seminary, and I so gave silent retreats every other weekend, but for five years I immersed myself in clinical
08:00.715 --> 08:03.379
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what does it mean to be a contemplative clinician?
08:03.960 --> 08:06.624
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's been my, my providential opinion.
08:06.644 --> 08:07.825
[SPEAKER_01]: An contemplative clinician.
08:07.966 --> 08:08.927
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that Jim.
08:08.947 --> 08:09.548
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
08:09.568 --> 08:10.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much for that.
08:10.910 --> 08:16.078
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go back to Martin as a kind of spiritual advisor.
08:16.118 --> 08:21.846
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe you could tell us a bit about advice and guidance that he gave you.
08:21.826 --> 08:28.852
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was, he enabled you to go and contemplate in a barn, I think, that was, isn't that one of the things I said?
08:28.872 --> 08:33.356
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and it's a tell us a bit more about how he, how he guided and advised you.
08:34.257 --> 08:34.658
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
08:35.478 --> 08:42.585
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to go to this abandoned sheep barn and Kentucky was in the summer, and spend time alone there.
08:42.645 --> 08:51.833
[SPEAKER_00]: And why not with hot August to lie day and Kentucky?
08:51.813 --> 09:02.317
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was walking back and forth reading the Psalm, back and forth, and all of a sudden there was this vivid realization that we tend to think of as the air is God.
09:03.158 --> 09:06.987
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was walking back and forth in God, breathing God.
09:06.967 --> 09:15.481
[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew that wherever I would try to flee from God, I'd be running away from God in God and wherever I ended up.
09:15.801 --> 09:17.744
[SPEAKER_00]: That'd be waiting for me when I got there.
09:18.485 --> 09:27.760
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was no need to run because this is the deepest part that God knew me through and through and through and through as compassion.
09:27.740 --> 09:35.080
[SPEAKER_00]: like it was Oishi Annie, a sovereign safety, and it was so vivid and real to me.
09:35.581 --> 09:41.277
[SPEAKER_00]: So I told Merden that I was with him in spiritual direction, and he told me
09:42.809 --> 09:49.103
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, once in a while, you'll find somebody with whom you can talk about such things, but they're hard to find.
09:49.123 --> 10:01.189
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people don't even know it exists, or they'd put it off to a later, and he had to know that he was the person with whom I could talk about them, because I saw him as a realized mystic.
10:01.169 --> 10:01.850
[SPEAKER_00]: teacher.
10:02.431 --> 10:03.493
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he guided me.
10:04.454 --> 10:13.810
[SPEAKER_00]: He guided me in the vulnerability of this kind of quiet divinization of myself and incarnate infinity and ultimately realized.
10:13.950 --> 10:18.317
[SPEAKER_00]: It really radicalized me and has such a deep effect on me.
10:18.297 --> 10:25.806
[SPEAKER_00]: really, and he embodied it, and he became a hermit, he had permission to build a hermitage for him on the grounds of the monastery.
10:25.826 --> 10:37.619
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he spent the last few years of his life living in solitude this week continued writing, and he was very much involved in the unity of all world religions at the missed level.
10:38.220 --> 10:42.685
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was invited to attend International Conference
10:42.665 --> 10:49.634
[SPEAKER_00]: And he went to the conference, they had a dialogue with it, it's holding us the Dalalama, they had this deep connection with each other.
10:49.654 --> 10:56.622
[SPEAKER_00]: And while he was on that conference, he was 53 years old, he was electrocuted in his room.
10:57.363 --> 11:04.492
[SPEAKER_00]: And they think what happened, well, he was given a conference to the month, to the nuns, there are no monks.
11:05.233 --> 11:08.757
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are 240 volts there.
11:08.737 --> 11:11.380
[SPEAKER_00]: They think he went over, there was a fan on the windowsill.
11:11.400 --> 11:15.304
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he went over to turn the fan towards his bed for his first.
11:16.145 --> 11:21.331
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a short in the fan, and he fell back at the fan on his chest and he died.
11:21.751 --> 11:33.003
[SPEAKER_00]: There were rumors of the CIA killed him, because he was one of the Catholic intellectuals fueling the anti-Vietnam movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, the pro-doctor Martin with their king movement.
11:33.584 --> 11:35.706
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in 53 years old,
11:35.686 --> 11:38.812
[SPEAKER_00]: then he died, he never died after I left the monastery.
11:39.533 --> 11:57.829
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I've read it in account for this, and I was put on to this, actually, by Matthew Fox, and Matthew said that he had met one of the agents involved, and the agents said to him, I hugely regret my role in this operation.
11:58.602 --> 12:00.004
[SPEAKER_01]: makes you think.
12:00.726 --> 12:11.925
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, well, 1968 was a year when many, when the Martin Luther King was fascinated, what was his accuracy fascinated, Malcolm X, I think, as well.
12:12.325 --> 12:13.748
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, let's go on to books.
12:14.629 --> 12:14.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
12:15.311 --> 12:20.880
[SPEAKER_01]: The shape your life and thinking, you mentioned a few already, but I'm sure other ones will occur to you.
12:21.451 --> 12:27.598
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say, you know, this is podcasts that I do with Richard Rohr turning to the mystics podcast.
12:28.338 --> 12:35.926
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the podcast, I share reflection deep reflections on the mystics that formed me in the monastery, the Merton introduced me to.
12:36.527 --> 12:41.052
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would say those would be the work, so they would be Saint John of the Cross.
12:41.212 --> 12:48.640
[SPEAKER_00]: The work's the 16th century Spanish basically, the Dark Knight of the Soul, Saint Teresa of Avala
12:48.620 --> 12:52.245
[SPEAKER_00]: Myster, the German mystic, myster, Eckhart.
12:52.325 --> 12:53.326
[SPEAKER_01]: Doctor, totally.
12:53.346 --> 12:53.807
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
12:53.907 --> 12:54.708
[SPEAKER_00]: Myster Eckhart.
12:55.069 --> 13:01.277
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, the I, E, Y, E, the I, with which I see God is the I, with which God sees me.
13:01.297 --> 13:02.939
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, I just love that.
13:03.040 --> 13:03.981
[SPEAKER_01]: I apologize.
13:04.001 --> 13:04.461
[SPEAKER_00]: I apologize.
13:04.482 --> 13:04.762
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
13:05.102 --> 13:08.227
[SPEAKER_00]: It says, what does it mean to be taught about blessed or the poor in spirit?
13:08.667 --> 13:18.120
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, to be poor, you have to become so poor that as long as you're still up place and you forgot to do well, you're not yet poor.
13:18.100 --> 13:22.707
[SPEAKER_00]: God has to be the place for God dwells in your pieces, things like he's stunning.
13:23.387 --> 13:31.719
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a master, Julianne of Norwich, Revelation of my love, and Francis and Clare, and these people.
13:31.960 --> 13:37.788
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just absorbed these, I thought what it was, is what they were doing was this.
13:38.929 --> 13:44.277
[SPEAKER_00]: First they give witnesses, the witness that they're in this stabilized state as a carism.
13:44.257 --> 13:45.641
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
13:47.024 --> 13:49.270
[SPEAKER_00]: And really it's the foreshadowing of eternal life.
13:49.851 --> 13:51.215
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the foreshadowing of it.
13:51.255 --> 13:58.172
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a unit of state in which we and God mutually disappear as dualistically other than each other in the concreteness of life.
13:58.473 --> 14:00.358
[SPEAKER_00]: And what they're doing is this.
14:00.338 --> 14:05.206
[SPEAKER_00]: They're writing to help us discern the signs that perhaps is starting to happen to us.
14:06.288 --> 14:09.133
[SPEAKER_00]: They were being lured and called to these unitive states.
14:09.434 --> 14:16.165
[SPEAKER_00]: Martin once said, the monastery is designed to cultivate these unitive realizations of God.
14:16.225 --> 14:17.327
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
14:17.347 --> 14:19.811
[SPEAKER_00]: But there are people in the world that are being called to it.
14:19.831 --> 14:23.157
[SPEAKER_00]: They have no one to help them understand what's happening to them.
14:23.137 --> 14:26.882
[SPEAKER_00]: because it's subtle, it's very, very subtle.
14:26.902 --> 14:39.560
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think the one that we're helping us to discern the signs of these unit of state, secondly, they were helping us understand what it means and thirdly how to cooperate with it, that it might have its way with us.
14:40.121 --> 14:42.584
[SPEAKER_00]: I found them so helpful this way.
14:42.604 --> 14:52.738
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I would leave silent, medical contemplative retreats, I would people would be on their retreats and they would come and you could tell they were very sincerely being touched by something.
14:52.718 --> 14:54.280
[SPEAKER_00]: It was so delicate.
14:54.300 --> 14:55.743
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I surrender to it?
14:55.763 --> 14:56.984
[SPEAKER_00]: How does this mean?
14:57.045 --> 14:58.507
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I like this?
14:58.567 --> 15:03.735
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's been a big part of my life and a big thing for me, really, is it?
15:04.436 --> 15:17.916
[SPEAKER_00]: What I was being in a therapist working with trauma, Monday through Thursday from noon till 9 at night, and every other weekend, I would fly and give a silent retreat someone in the United States or Canada.
15:17.896 --> 15:20.883
[SPEAKER_00]: The retreat was in silence and meals were in silence.
15:20.903 --> 15:22.627
[SPEAKER_00]: There were three sits during the day.
15:23.329 --> 15:27.278
[SPEAKER_00]: I was speaking from the depth of the mystics applying it to their life at home.
15:27.318 --> 15:34.555
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting is that people in trauma and the people on the retreat often were the same people.
15:34.535 --> 15:50.805
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was one of those, I was, I was a, I was a, I was a mischief, a waken trauma survivor, and that the bitter sweet alchemy where these two realms touch each other, it's been a big part of a kind of substantive for me in my own life and helping other people.
15:51.562 --> 16:07.430
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, and I feel that what Erkart was getting up was this kind of reciprocity of the, and sometimes I wonder whether it's the divine awakening within us, not the ego awakening, because I don't think the ego can awaken.
16:07.470 --> 16:08.572
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, exactly.
16:09.013 --> 16:10.395
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's good.
16:10.595 --> 16:13.300
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what I think the ego at guard is.
16:14.309 --> 16:26.200
[SPEAKER_00]: He begins with, there's a lovely book by Reiner Sherman on the thought of Mystrakart, and this is the first step for Mystrakart, because he lived in the midst of the world.
16:27.621 --> 16:34.147
[SPEAKER_00]: The first step for Mystrakart is detachment, and he says, what detachment is, is to have a virgin mind.
16:35.068 --> 16:44.316
[SPEAKER_00]: And a virgin mind is not to have closure in any thought or belief about yourself, about God,
16:44.296 --> 16:48.040
[SPEAKER_00]: You just know the very fact you're capable of thinking it, it's not adequate.
16:49.281 --> 16:54.847
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's almost like a liberation from the ideology of conceptual understanding.
16:55.508 --> 17:00.493
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just going on that way, it starts to happen, it calls it the birth of the word in the soul.
17:00.513 --> 17:10.523
[SPEAKER_00]: And you start to then recognize the divinity, pouring itself out, and giving itself away in a immediacy of life itself.
17:10.503 --> 17:15.673
[SPEAKER_00]: Which we are, which we are, we are there exactly.
17:15.693 --> 17:16.795
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
17:16.815 --> 17:29.760
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jim, can I go sort of build on that and ask about a, you know, he moments of insight in your work in relation to the nature of consciousness, which I imagine is, you know, your own mystical insights.
17:32.120 --> 17:33.582
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll share for me what was a big one.
17:34.743 --> 17:37.446
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a number of them really, it was very significant.
17:38.167 --> 17:52.022
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was in the midst of my doctoral work, and I was seeing people with supervision and therapy, I was able to see this mystical, the step-dimension shining out in their work.
17:52.363 --> 17:55.126
[SPEAKER_00]: In most, I call the axial moments, these turnings.
17:56.087 --> 18:01.553
[SPEAKER_00]: But for my dissertation, I didn't know how to say it, and I had to articulate it.
18:01.533 --> 18:06.299
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, when I was in my last year, I was at a VA hospital.
18:06.399 --> 18:11.166
[SPEAKER_00]: It was inpatient alcohol treatment unit, mainly from vets coming back from Vietnam.
18:11.186 --> 18:20.257
[SPEAKER_00]: So they had dual diagnosis, they had PTSD from the war, and then drugs are alcohol to drink, so they had dual diagnosis.
18:20.318 --> 18:23.001
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a 30-day inpatient program.
18:22.981 --> 18:44.972
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found out that my first day on the unit, that some years earlier, the members of the unit had an initiation right, an initiation right, and the person, and these people coming in, there's a waiting list to get in, and these are people, Galinal wine a day and sleeping under the, they're literally dying of alcohol.
18:44.952 --> 19:05.070
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had this initiation, right, and the morning I arrived, they were going to have one of these initiation, so it was a big room, maybe there were a hundred chairs around the four walls of the room, and all the men on the unit were sitting in these chairs, and in the middle of the room were two chairs facing each other.
19:05.303 --> 19:15.361
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the recovering alcoholics who was going to leave the initiation, right, brought in this person coming into the unit, kind of nervous because he didn't know what was going on with the bees.
19:15.741 --> 19:28.223
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had him sit down, he sat down, and the person asked the person, and by the way, when he came in, they were all looking down at the Granoi contact, that's why, because it's a serious his death, which it is.
19:28.203 --> 19:32.028
[SPEAKER_00]: And he asked the person, what do you love the most?
19:32.709 --> 19:33.670
[SPEAKER_00]: I was stunned by it.
19:34.131 --> 19:38.937
[SPEAKER_00]: And that, in fact, the configuration of the rumor, the people said, remind me of a Zen meditation hall.
19:39.978 --> 19:48.949
[SPEAKER_00]: And the person would say, my wife, at which point, everyone in the room would yell as that as they could, bullshit, real, and he would jump.
19:49.770 --> 19:55.037
[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, what do you say, my children, finally, he would say alcohol.
19:55.017 --> 19:57.521
[SPEAKER_00]: And when he said alcohol, they had him stand up.
19:58.123 --> 20:00.787
[SPEAKER_00]: They also had to give him a standing ovation.
20:01.909 --> 20:06.377
[SPEAKER_00]: And they came up one at a time in silence and held him and he started crying.
20:07.639 --> 20:09.883
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was off to the side and I'd tear it up.
20:10.184 --> 20:13.650
[SPEAKER_00]: And the voice inside said, this is just like at the monastery.
20:14.474 --> 20:16.318
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I found a way to say it.
20:16.758 --> 20:23.271
[SPEAKER_00]: I would use him to mentor me because in that moment, in that moment, he was vulnerable.
20:24.373 --> 20:28.761
[SPEAKER_00]: The true invincibility was manifested in the world.
20:30.164 --> 20:36.516
[SPEAKER_00]: In that moment was solitude, he was unto himself, but he was bearing witness unto how we're all alone together.
20:37.475 --> 20:47.354
[SPEAKER_00]: In that moment, he was very childlike, meaning not child-ish, but disarmingly transparent, and true maturity was being manifested in the horror.
20:48.335 --> 20:48.997
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a moment.
20:49.237 --> 20:55.028
[SPEAKER_00]: I also saw this, when they came up to hug him, it's like they were walking him into their midst.
20:55.008 --> 21:01.278
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also saw, you were coming up for another dose of the golden glow, like someone just newly arriving.
21:01.518 --> 21:02.059
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes.
21:02.299 --> 21:02.680
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
21:03.020 --> 21:07.026
[SPEAKER_00]: It's mainly heal, broken people, and I was so touched by that.
21:07.067 --> 21:12.014
[SPEAKER_00]: There's sometimes when we see something dramatic, we can see it in subtle ways.
21:12.054 --> 21:14.518
[SPEAKER_00]: So then when I was sitting with people in therapy,
21:14.498 --> 21:19.525
[SPEAKER_00]: And in much more subtle way, I could see it shining out this way.
21:19.886 --> 21:29.960
[SPEAKER_00]: So I saw that the, I worked with trauma that the foundations of trauma are not the traumatizing things that can, and sometimes, and do occur as terrible as they are.
21:30.882 --> 21:38.633
[SPEAKER_00]: The foundations of trauma is not how they get internalized as a post-traumatic stress disorder, as hard as that can be.
21:38.613 --> 21:49.370
[SPEAKER_00]: The foundation of trauma is the traumatized capacity to experientially abide in the infinite presence as pouring itself out and giving itself to us breath by breath.
21:50.191 --> 22:01.870
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in therapy, I worked on a horizontal level with symptom reduction, like working through, working through in such a way that the depth dimension could come shining out.
22:02.018 --> 22:02.761
[SPEAKER_00]: from the work.
22:02.781 --> 22:03.143
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
22:03.424 --> 22:04.549
[SPEAKER_01]: They got so bored.
22:05.051 --> 22:08.788
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and if you want, I can show one striking example of that.
22:08.853 --> 22:09.534
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, do.
22:09.574 --> 22:11.496
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we'll go on to the next question.
22:12.037 --> 22:13.058
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, it's very subtle.
22:13.899 --> 22:15.100
[SPEAKER_00]: Just one example.
22:15.120 --> 22:15.941
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a woman.
22:16.302 --> 22:18.164
[SPEAKER_00]: She wasn't seen me in therapy.
22:18.605 --> 22:19.666
[SPEAKER_00]: She was never as a child.
22:19.706 --> 22:21.388
[SPEAKER_00]: She was never physically abused.
22:22.449 --> 22:24.472
[SPEAKER_00]: And she wasn't sexually abused.
22:24.492 --> 22:28.456
[SPEAKER_00]: But her parents had these horrendous intense screaming fights with each other.
22:28.476 --> 22:29.878
[SPEAKER_00]: There was scared of death.
22:30.419 --> 22:32.041
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were so enraged at each other.
22:32.061 --> 22:33.763
[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't see what it was doing to her.
22:33.823 --> 22:37.527
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said she felt invisible.
22:37.507 --> 22:39.454
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why she was in therapy, became it.
22:39.535 --> 22:40.820
[SPEAKER_00]: She still fell into the book.
22:41.763 --> 22:42.707
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's what happens.
22:42.747 --> 22:44.072
[SPEAKER_00]: We take an intense moment.
22:44.393 --> 22:46.200
[SPEAKER_00]: It gets internalized.
22:46.467 --> 22:48.930
[SPEAKER_00]: as kind of an interior traumatized state.
22:49.812 --> 22:52.255
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we were talking about this.
22:52.335 --> 22:55.319
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she told me, this is the axial moment, the turning.
22:57.522 --> 23:00.467
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, one summer night her parents are screaming at each other.
23:00.507 --> 23:09.419
[SPEAKER_00]: And she went to the back screen door, went out into the dark in the yard, climbed up in the low branches of a tree in the yard.
23:10.280 --> 23:15.107
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said, she closed one eye and lined up
23:15.492 --> 23:21.100
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said to God, if you know I'm here, make that star move to the other side of that twig.
23:22.162 --> 23:23.684
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, the star didn't move.
23:24.866 --> 23:34.521
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, but there's something about the remembrance of myself as a little girl sitting alone in the dark waiting for God to move was star that moves me.
23:35.642 --> 23:39.108
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, yes, and when you shared it, I was moved.
23:39.448 --> 23:41.331
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how God works in our life.
23:42.020 --> 23:45.530
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it's a such a touching storage in fact.
23:45.670 --> 23:57.362
[SPEAKER_00]: It is touching and notice so so that in that moment See so so that in that moment she was vulnerable she was childlike she was this so then I say to her
23:58.135 --> 24:06.866
[SPEAKER_00]: you know what we can do here together is how to be more habitually stabilized in this sensitivity because you're not in this civil you're so present.
24:08.148 --> 24:23.166
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be like one example of the tonal quality of the work that I'm sure that will speak to people and then Jim thank you and how does your understanding of mystical consciousness influence the way you live your life?
24:23.627 --> 24:24.548
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure it does.
24:26.418 --> 24:30.786
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I made it to my wife died four years ago of Alzheimer's.
24:30.806 --> 24:34.112
[SPEAKER_00]: She died right here in the living room and her ashes are right there.
24:34.152 --> 24:35.054
[SPEAKER_00]: I sit every morning.
24:35.074 --> 24:37.418
[SPEAKER_00]: I do all my writing, sitting next to her ashes.
24:38.019 --> 24:41.546
[SPEAKER_00]: The oceans right outside the window like this.
24:41.566 --> 24:44.070
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't drive anymore.
24:44.090 --> 24:45.012
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm kind of fragile.
24:45.392 --> 24:49.540
[SPEAKER_00]: Like my daughters call me every day and they take me to the doctor.
24:49.520 --> 25:00.733
[SPEAKER_00]: So how I feel with me is that I feel I feel old and delicate, amazed and grateful.
25:02.214 --> 25:09.663
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say that my spiritual vision influences my life and that it is my life.
25:09.683 --> 25:13.367
[SPEAKER_00]: I think of the disease and the disease that you are marrying us.
25:14.647 --> 25:21.157
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, my master, Martin Heidegger has this understanding of an of a rice and looking out at the ocean, not.
25:21.177 --> 25:25.083
[SPEAKER_00]: He said one way, the rise in is the point, the over which we can't see.
25:25.664 --> 25:27.607
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, there's another way of looking at the rise.
25:28.889 --> 25:35.759
[SPEAKER_00]: The horizon is the place where the unmanifested is manifest, so the poems of your own hands are gods or rye.
25:37.422 --> 25:39.625
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I've been kind of an atmospheric
25:40.904 --> 25:45.188
[SPEAKER_00]: And an explainer, just kind of an habitual sensitivity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I feel I've been blessed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little grateful.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's what you sort of stabilized condition in that way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But it takes a lot of work to get there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It does.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So Jim, do you have a proverb you live by or a favorite quote?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I have a phrase.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The phrase that speaks to me is incarnate and thinnity intimately realized.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and we call it infancy, infinitely realises.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what I see to it is, I think that's what the tradition says, is that ultimately speaking, just one thing is happening.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The infinite presence of God is holy pouring itself out and giving itself away, whole and complete.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In and as the intimate immediacy of our very presence, the presence of others and all things
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think all of us from time to time we get intimations of that, like the sacredness of everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So the path is the path talk is a longing to abide in that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, it's a gift not everybody.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is the way of the artist.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the way of the poet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the way of some musicians and how we're moved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it's in self-donating service for the community.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It can be in silence or solitude.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Another quote by Roka, they must quote letters to a young poet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A young poet sends his poems to Roka.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It says, I want you to tell me my poems are any good.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He said, you're looking outward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You must stop doing that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You must ask yourself, in the stillest hour of your darkest night, must I write poetry.
27:40.345 --> 27:47.918
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the answer is clear and simple, yes, you must build the life-most incidental moments and fidelity to that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Beautiful.
27:50.482 --> 27:55.110
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the line we just speaks to me, and I think we do it in ordinaryness.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We do it in humility of the ordinaryness of our sincerity, as holy as you know.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very much so.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm more just sort of devotion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to put a little extra question in here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm reading a short text by Simon V at the moment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I have a French philosopher mystic and one of the things that really struck me was that she at the certain point she
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[SPEAKER_01]: she had this exercise of saying the Lord's prayer in Greek.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And with total attention.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if a tension wavered, then she'd start again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And she went into such ecstasy that even when she was working in a factory, which I think she was at the time, you know, she would repeat the Lord's prayer in Greek.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I just loved that idea.
28:46.175 --> 28:47.318
[SPEAKER_00]: I lost someone for you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to do her in the podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Such a mess.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She's stunning woman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Really?
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[SPEAKER_00]: See what she's on to here when you look at these traditions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What it really is is it's kind of like this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are there are moments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's a kind of a grace flow where we step into the divinity of the immediacy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes it's a prayer, like a mantra or a vizuals, and as a mandala can help us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then we realize that like a flame that flickers in the wind, it wavers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It wavering up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: See, here's the thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Although it keeps wavering from our end, it never wavers from God's end, because the infinite love of God is infinitely and love with us in the midst of our wavered ways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, that's a very, very broad way to be reinstated again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why she could be reinstated working in the factory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like the holiness of those people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was right there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She was a saint.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Which is the worst, absolutely stunning.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, my last question is, do you have any advice you'd give to your younger self?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I would say this.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to make my younger self to be when the trauma was going on in the high and high school.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was hearing him right now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or even when I was in the monastery, 1819 years old, I would say this, keep going.
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[SPEAKER_00]: keep you doing well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Really.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And just as you can't explain how you got to this point, you don't see the unforeseeable transitions that lie ahead because you're on a path not of your own making.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's the holiness of your own unfolding life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You can't push the river and you don't need to.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and stay calm, be patient, go on and on and on.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And sure enough, that young person is the person that is now 82 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm living at the rim of eternity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It must be true.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jim, thank you so much for your wise insights during our conversation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I really appreciate having you all the
