057-bourgeault-almaas
===
Maurizio Benazzo: Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening, everybody. Welcome back. It's a joy to have this, our community together, and even more of a joy to have Amit and Cynthia
Zaya Benazzo: with us.
It's
Maurizio Benazzo: been a
Zaya Benazzo: month,
Maurizio Benazzo: alas. Yes. Okay. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya Benazzo and we're delighted to be hosting this conversation, a very special conversation with two of our beloved teachers that have been with us for many years through the evolution of SAND. They have been helping the evolution of sand
Maurizio Benazzo: dramatically dramatic, immensely crucial.
Yeah.
Should we start going? I start reading the bio one bio read the other. I read the Cynthia bio, introduced Cynthia in case some of you don't know her. Reverend Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault. is an Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader.
Cynthia Bourgeault divides their time between solitude at their coastal home in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative path. Cynthia, she's the author of 10 books and numerous articles and courses on the Christian spiritual life.
She passionately promotes the practice of Centering Prayer and has worked closely with Thomas Keating, Bruno Barnhart, Richard Rohr, as well as many other contemplative teachers and masters within Christianity and other spiritual traditions. Cynthia, such a joy. I was saying, when in my 20s, trying to become a monk, I entered the monastery.
After a week, they kicked me out. And if I would have met you, I would probably still be there because you, I, yeah, you present such a beautiful open angle of what Christianity is that touches my heart as it touched me when I was a teenager. So thank you for being here.
Zaya Benazzo: And yeah, Hamid, welcome.
And thank you so much for inviting this conversation so Hamid Ali, A. H. Almaas is the founder of Diamond Approach, a spiritual teaching that utilizes a unique kind of inquiry into realization Where practice is the expression of realization. This inquiry opens up the infinite creativity of our being, transforming our lives into runaway realization, moving from one realization to another.
to further realizations. Our most latest book is non dual love awakening to the loving nature of reality. And that's also the topic of this conversation today. So we were thinking to maybe begin the conversation, to understand or put a ground of understanding of what non dual love is. And also, I'm not sure if Cynthia would use the expression of non dual love and maybe from your own inquiry, you have a different understanding to what the non dual love definition or points to.
So I was just thinking to explore if the ground is common here before we assume we know what non dual love is. How is that?
Cynthia Bourgeault: I would assume that the ground is common. But that the terminology basis may not be common amongst all four of us at this point, or it may, I would prefer myself to use the term something like objective love or conscious love rather than non dual love.
Partly because non dual love, non dual has become such a household word nowadays, that it's almost like organic. You just put anything you want to push, you put the word non dual in front of it, and it immediately looks like it's a whole new thing, like non dual hatred, but but, More importantly, I think that there's a, there continues to be, particularly in the West a continuing confusion about what non dual means, whether it's a an attitude, an angle of perception, or a cosmic reality.
And I've come more and more to feel like non dual understood in that latter way, as a cosmic or cosmogonic reality, requires the conditions that we would call duality, or I would call it, nah, bipolarity. Because love is above all else the measure of flow. Between points and around points, and it's always playing off the backboard of some sort of fixity, and I think it's been this way right since the beginning of the Big Bang.
And so within that, what we're talking about for non dual is is not for me so much an original state of oneness to which we return, but an alchemy or a dance between the finite and the infinite out of which something new emerges. And it's that which I would call conscious or objective love, which knows how to bring the color and the capacity, which would mostly kneeled by non dual of looking through things from a lens of.
of non bifocal separation in our brain at an intensely particular and flowing world. So that's just my use of nomenclature. How is it for you, Hamid?
A.H. Almaas: I think that's a good thing you said. Actually, the title of my book, Non Dual Love. And it came about in discussion with the publisher Shambhala.
As those titles is not always the choice of the author. And because this is the second book of a series about love. First one was Love Unveiled, and the second one, I was going to call it Divine Love. This book was going to be called Divine Love, but Shambhala said there are many books called Divine Love.
We can't use that. I said, how about Universal Love? He said let's use that book. So finally, we decided, Non Dual Love, because non dual, the way I understand it, covers non dual love. The sense of being boundless, infinite, objective, and and I thought that way I could bring in to non duality love, because most people when they talk about non dual, they don't talk about love.
So really non dual love is In many ways experiencing love, like in my first book, Love Unveiled, to talk about what is the nature of love, what is love that is unveiled, that is not just an expression or an action, not the effects of love on us, how we live our life, but love in its beingness. ontology of love.
That was that what the book about and different kinds of love, the melting kind of love, the appreciative kind of love, the passionate ecstatic kind of love. And then this book was supposed to be about love. That is, these are particular, different kind of flavors of love. That can be experienced in their beingness, their ontology, and their effectors in our life, in our relationship to either to the world, or people, or the divine in a different way.
You can feel love with the divine, you want a union, or you feel passionately in love with the divine. Two different kinds of love. And actually, In my experience, they have a different texture, different kind of sweetness, different, um, different phenomenology. But divine love is the ground of love as a whole, when love appears as the ground of all reality, which is the source of all kinds of love.
So divine love is like the heart of God. The heart of God is not just one person love. It's the love that creates the universe and the love that makes everything happen. Oh, divine love is the universe. And it's non dual because if you experience that way known love as infinite, divine, unbounded boundless, then And the experience becomes non dual because nothing is separate from everything else because everything is an expression of love and that's what really the original meaning non dual is that nothing is separate from anything else.
There's no self and object, a separate thing. There's no one object, so they're all expression of the same thing, the same reality. So this love, this book about man dual love is to show that love underlies all of our experience and underlies all of reality. And I wanted to interject in spiritual discourse.
That the beingness or spiritual nature that is the nature of everything is not just awareness and consciousness, but also can be experienced as pure love, pure goodness, pure generosity, pure tenderness, pure sweetness, luminous art. That has no bounds. Bringing Sunan to first understand non duality, what does it mean?
Because I agree with you, Cynthia, that the word non dual now be used by everybody to mean everything. Basically, people use non dual to mean spiritual. When they say a non dual teacher, that means non dual, but non dual is a specific way of experiencing spirituality, which is experiencing the unity and the oneness of reality, which is, not an easy place for many people to experience and to know.
It's not the only way to experience spirituality, but it's a particular way where the ground. It's usually seen as conscious awareness, and I'm saying, Hey, wait a minute, guys. I also experience outpured love. as a pure goodness. It is conscious love. It is, it's objective in the sense is not produced by a person, is not dependent on our mind or history or reaction or what happened in our life.
It is its own thing. But that's true about love. Even when it is non dual, like in my first book, it's not, you could experience personally one person, you could experience the divine or the individual as a personal experience. This one goes beyond the personal, although it's always expressed through persons, that's another thing about non duality, the non dual, tradition tend to eliminate the person or individual.
I'm saying that the person as a The divine needs the person to, for the divine to express it's treasures. So that's where the. term, non dual love came from. And my, which precede my next book, third one, which is going to be called The Inner Beloved, which is divine in itself.
Zaya Benazzo: You said something at the beginning, Cynthia, and I wonder how that connects to what Hamid is saying that love is experienced between two points. Did I hear you correctly? The flow. The slow of low is always between two points.
Cynthia Bourgeault: Yeah or, yeah, that it takes flow to manifest anything. And and so flow is first of all a condition of, it's, we use it like an abstract noun.
This is love, like this is my cell phone and this is love. It isn't like that. Love is first and foremost the sign of movement. And I actually found that, I stumbled over that, oh, 30, 40 years ago when my teacher and dear friend Rafe just casually tossed into my lap one holy week the, some of the core essays in the Spirituality in Practice series by Jacob Burma.
And Burma asked a question. Of course, she's this 16th century, unlettered German cobbler, shoemaker mystic, and who, at one extraordinary point in his life, the heavens open, and he says, and I knew more in 15 minutes than if I'd been for many years at a university, cosmic revelation download. But the one thing he saw very clearly was that, that in order for love to manifest into the world, in order for anything to manifest the divine steady state, if you want to call it ineffable, utterly transcendent, sometimes in nuclear physics today, we might call it cosmic inflation, that steady state Unmanifest has to bring itself into form and separability in order to be able to create a manifest world at all.
And this is brilliant. I'd never read about that anywhere before, but it went, aha, this is right. And so the first step before we have any kind of outward anything at all, is that a change, a sort of change in the divine nature. And the, how the divine does this is interesting and it bears for me the absolute tie rod connection between all these various kinds of love that Hamid has so beautifully just laid out for us.
But in order to move from a steady state impartiality Unmanifest and in some sort of homostasis and unmanifestness, the divine has to start something moving. It has to constrict something. And the only thing that's available to constrict is the divine will. So by putting it under pressure in a way that's really like a mystical equivalent of Bernoulli's principle, The divine creates flow.
Impartiality is turned to desiring and craving. And since there's nothing yet for the craving to slake itself on, it gets anguished. And out of this anguish, more and more tension kind of mounts until finally there's a spark of something that emerges out of it. And that creates the threefold conditions in which outer manifestation can happen.
Burma claims that's what's really meant by the trinity. The Trinity is God in having moved from the state of infinite transcendence into permanent relationship and creativity. The reason is why, and Burma just says it's, he called it the scientia, the secret knowledge at the heart of everything.
But I believe more and more that secret knowledge for which the world exists is love. Because love cannot, the love is incompatible with steady state transcendence. Love is a dance, love is a flow, love is what happens when transcendence is somehow alchemized and turned into this pure elixir of sweetness.
that Hamid speaks about. And that is the secret, the yearning at the heart of the divine that caused a whole manifest world to come into being. So I think that speaks to the question of why I resonate to the term flow. And it also speaks to me to the question why love understood is what everything we would call non dual nowadays, constriction, desiring, passion, yearning the sucking motion.
Is joined at the hip is intertwined with the free giving and you can't end run that because they are intertwined and the common mistake that people make that think that I'll just deny all this craving. I'll just deny all this desiring are going. against the very process by which love is, emerges through the transformation of craving and desiring into something else, not through any kind of repression, denial or or premature stepping around it.
So long answer to a short question, but I hope it's I hope it gives Hamid some good things to springboard off.
A.H. Almaas: You have quite a way with words, Cynthia
Zaya Benazzo: beautiful articulation. Hamid, do you have anything to reflect or
A.H. Almaas: Love is always a flow and, flow is important for manifestation, as Cynthia mentioned, because my experience of it, my knowing of it, is that from the repose of the fundamental nature, whether we call it divine or true nature, there comes a creative force that is an outflow, an effulgence that brings about everything, all creation.
Which then, but, and that out of law, many teaching, think of it like zhan, think of it as energy or manifestation and then all ways of looking at it. But many teach teaching and tell you so that the primary force in this outflow is love. That God loved to know what God is.
So manifested everything so the manifestation out of love and the love is both the nature of God and also the God's desire, loving desire to reveal. All the treasure that God is, because God can't really know it or God's nature without manifesting it and manifesting being through which God can then perceive and experience and express this goodness.
So it's both the creation of the world, and also the flow that's happening in the human heart. That can bring people together and that makes human, actually, without love, a human being is not human, it's still a brute. So love is what humanizes, it's what makes us truly human, something that these days is becoming less present, actually, unfortunately.
Love is what makes us be good, what makes us be, love truth and make us love, love reality and love each other and see the preciousness of things. And it is. And when we feel love, it is always felt and flow. It's not static, many states of being like stillness, you talk about peaceful stillness, there's no movement there.
It's just still. And it is true. It is wonderful and ecstatic. The anxiety or the, I'll call it Brahman or Shiva and it is complete liberation. However, human beings, human life has to do with change and interchange and interaction and flow and action and all of that is moved really ultimately by love through the heart and why do people want to be happy?
Why do people want all what they want? All of it really has to do with the heart that moves. So we need our mind to understand, but we need our heart for the mind to want to understand.
Cynthia Bourgeault: I loved how you mentioned that Hamid alluding to that wonderful quote from the, I think, the Hadith Qudsi, that God says, I was a hidden treasure. And And it sometimes says, am I long to be known? I always love it when it says I was a human. I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known. And so I created the world's manifest and unmanifest because loving is also the only process by which love can be known.
You know, you bring it into existence by doing it, by flowing it, by living it and God. God reveals God's self in the process of loving creativity into existence. And it's that, it's why love is so also inextricably joined at the hip with creativity, with pro creativity on, in all worlds and on all dimensions.
It's about creating. It's about growing something where it didn't exist. Before and I think that what you just said about the one of my greatest concerns in the world that I've seen that we're heading toward is the drying up of this energy as people become more and more cautious, more and more isolated, more and more entitled, more and more disembodied that seems like love brings sentiency, and that it's exactly this sentiency that is beginning to disappear from the life of this planet and from our religions and from our our transactions with each other.
And I don't know how we're going to tap. Work with that one in the time we talk together, but it's good to know that it's in the backdrop of both of our hearts.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah, human being have their hearts their way. That's our salvation breathing, so when there's enmity and discord, and that's what rules the day, we're in trouble.
But I think also the thing that you mentioned, Cynthia, about love and And the relationship because love appears mostly in relationship and relating to something or somebody or the divine that when you really experience if you love somebody if you love someone you want to be close to them you want to be as close as possible because you like them you want to be close you want to feel you know yeah so love inherently so when god said actually the world to So I'll be known.
How's God going to be known? By union with God, by us feeling the love and feeling like my whole path is based on love, loving the truth for its own sake and the truth ultimately is the divine. And because this love takes us, even in the human realm, when we love somebody, We want to be with them, we want to see them, and we want to be close and more complete, more full, we become, we want to be as intimate as possible, intimate emotionally, sometimes for some people, physically, and that brings in, so love inherently brings about union.
It is a force of union. It is the union that is appearing or a force to manifest the union and lived experience. So the union can be with another, with nature, or with the divine.
Yeah.
Cynthia Bourgeault: It a lot of that is contingent on how much space you can bring into the union, how much spaciousness you can bring into it. Because there's a union that either consumes or is consumed by the object of its craving. And there's a union that allows a deeper differentiation, a deeper diversification to come into being.
And I know that was what got Teilhard de Chardin so excited when he was teaching about love. And at one point is quoted was saying the structure of the universe is love. He was talking about this basic evolutionary principle of union diversifies and diversity unites so that people who are in a bond of relationship at that, that highest and most spacious and dare say non dual level are able in a particularly realized way.
To hold in their hearts the other's entire becoming and to create space for the other to differentiate diversity and become more whole, become themselves within the nurturing field of this dynamic bond. And it's a. It's a tricky, as always, there's a razor's edge. I've been taking considerable consolation these past past oh, I guess since the last time we had a conversation, Hamid, in realizing that if you take Burma, seriously, there is an element of crucifixion to use Christian language or pain built right into the emergence of love, because if burma's right, you have to begin with this fundamental constriction or conflation.
The desiring, which is also the source of evil if it doesn't turn around. But but then that has to transform itself. Suffer itself to be laid down for the sake of something else so that a larger and more spacious love emerges in its wake, which can hold the opposites at a new level.
And I think it's at that point that relationships get stuck and life gets stuck. We just don't know how to navigate that first step in the full transcendent. A manifestation of love that first step, which is me mine all the time I want and allow it to turn around and something that says, may you be well.
I think
A.H. Almaas: a very good point to know, Cynthia, which brings me to the question. Nothing. I think many people who are listening need to know for themselves. Which is the question, what is love? Because what most people call love is not the love you're talking about. Not the love that liberates. What most people call love is an emotional thing, it's an emotion.
And it's more akin to desire. And wanting and possessiveness. And it's true, you love somebody, you like them, all of that. But that emotion is the way I see it. Most people, what they think love is an emotional thing. But most people know as love, is not what I call love. That is the outer, the shadow of love.
And the outer expression, the outer reverberation of love, which by that time is distorted by history and relation and hurts and abandonment and betrayal and all of that. And also by the self centered ego. What people call love. Most of the time, I love my friend. I love my wife.
I love my kids and all that is true. But the love I'm talking about is the actual syrup. That flows from God's heart, the syrup that liberate the sweet syrup of goodness. So you could experience it in its beingness and it's fullness. As a substantiality that is a glowing. And giving and dynamic substantiality when I say substantiality, you don't just feel an energy or emotion, you feel something filling your heart, filling your soul, filling it to the brim, filling it with something that is nourishing like it almost you're full of nourishment, you're full of yeah, almost like full of custom of sword.
And but it is this custom made out of light and has a good nature, so we need to know what love is, and not deceive ourselves that we know love because we love somebody, we might yet not know where this loving somebody come from. It comes from the essence of love, which for us to know love, we need to know the essence of love, which is the beingness of love, the ontology of love, which is God's love.
The divine love is something that is true, that is objective is. Not produced by the past, not produced by relationship, not because somebody is good to me and I, they're beautiful. I love them. It's produced by something naturally giving the true love. First of all, it is a beingness as a a medium of fullness and richness.
It has a texture that has a taste. It has a an aroma like appreciative love, for instance, and I appreciate it when I say I like somebody. When you go to the essence of it, it's beautiful, pink, fluffy, like a fluffy pink rose and it smells like roses. When you go to passionate love, it's deep pomegranate color and pomegranate flavor.
And it is like a pomegranate syrup. And so when I talk about love, I'm talking about the ontological na dimension of love, which mean the truth of love as it is, as is emanates from the divine source, not the outer expression, which is saying something or doing something that is loving all these are good, but that these are not love.
These are the alterer expression. And if love, the true love is there, then the expression will naturally be giving, not self centered, will bring in union with space, which will, because the, if the love, true love is there, we love somebody, we want what's good for them. We love them because we know them as much for what they are as possible.
Where I know them and their uniqueness and their preciousness and we want what's good for them. We love them not because we want something from them, but we want to give something to them. And then, and there is a mutual love, then an exchange of giving. Really, which expands the love, which brings, which the syrup becomes a puddle.
The puddle becomes a lake and the lake becomes an ocean. And that ocean is what I call divine love or non dual love. So it's important, that from the beginning, we know, we question ourselves, do we really know what love is?
Cynthia Bourgeault: When you speak Hamid, uh, the first thing, and I had a very powerful sensation as you talked about it, the way I would language it is, for me, where the loves come together is in, in world 12.
And I've tasted that love, which has it's got all the vibrancy and all the particularity and all the, And yet it's infinitely spacious. You think it's it's a tiger, not a pussy cat. It's not that kind of D natured agape that everybody tries to use now is impartial love, which is just painting love beige.
But it has flavor. The reason I wanted to speak with it, I think I have to, I think I have to speak a little bit autobiographically at this point, because the problem continues to remain how you get from here to there. And it isn't either or, like everybody likes to do, there's divine love there's human love, Some Swedish fellow years ago named Andres Negrin wrote a book that influenced Christianity called Agape and Eros, or Eros and Agape, calling one God's way to, God's way to man and the other man's way to God.
It's one of these patently destructive cliches, in my estimate, because what's really interesting is the journey between them. And I would say that Agape, as we experienced now, that World 12, that perfection of the intensity the passion, the specificness of the, what we usually call craving, but totally free is found.
through a process of transformation inside. And I found it and I owe everything in my life to it, to my teacher and beloved Rafe, who, uh, who taught me it as he was learning it himself. And it's a law of three kind of setup. And I think they all are in this transformation that the positive force the pushing force is initially That erotic attraction, that craving, that realizing, there's a simpatico here in this person.
I want to get to know this person. There's a kinship here. There's a, and in a way, it's just projection writ large, because at that stage, you're not seeing the other. You're only seeing yourself being made happy. But still, it's not everybody. That we feel that great desire and that great sort of sense that, we could be inside each other and I'm talking spiritually here.
I'm talking, however you want to talk it. We could be inter abiding friends to know that about any human being is a rare gift and not to be taken lightly, but then wholly denying, because that's erotic love. Attracts its opposite and what bangs up against it is, of course, all that stuff, your projections, your neuroses, your fears, your insistences, your self image, all that untransformed stuff and boom.
So what normally happens is that nothing Eventually, the force of the negativity knocks the fire out of that beautiful intimacy that you once tasted unless something emerges to transform some third force. And in the relationship with Rafe and what made it so instructive for me is that emerged and what it was, you can put any kind of language around it, but really what it was the spiritual path.
The search for truth the recognition that there there needed to be a transformation that that things can only finally accord physically, they can only grow to this new level if that love, If that initial Eros is tempered and transformed in the deep kenosis, as they call it in Christianity that willingness to make space, to let go in honesty, to look at your own stuff in as much as it's hurting the beloved to confess to repent.
In other words, to be willing to transform the facade of yourself as you thought yourself was, melt it all together and not do it because you're saying, oh my beloved is so beautiful, but because you realize that's the responsibility. That has been opened up to you in this terrible, terribly wondrous foretaste of World 12 of fully realized particular personal love.
And so it was the mutual work on ourselves that let us get second wind, we'd bang into each other and do all the usual kind of accusing and getting our noses a lot of joint and slunking off in an umbrage. And we go home and think about it. And realize the mistake. And there was enough self inner observation and capacity to be inside your more subtle body to realize that you just knocked the whole thing out of line and demoted yourself to much coarser expressions of things.
So it's the struggle to to realize this love. At a higher level that actually, I think paying the price of what costs to do. So it really transforms that initial kind of free boost you get from the initial attraction into something sacred. And holy safe, and flowing, transfigured.
It's the transfiguration of the particular, not the denial of it, or repression of it, or elimination of it.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah, you bring in a transformation that is necessary to discover really what true love is, because most of us don't live in that level. And need a deep and intense confirmation as you said, of what we are, our experience in general. And that happens through contending with what we experience. Not rejecting it, but really understanding it, welcoming it, and delving into it without identifying with it.
So that is part of the process of the transformation. So the spiritual path is basically a process of transformation of our experience from its more surface kind of physical object orientation. to coming from an inner nature that we recognize more like as a source in the meaning if that gives our life meaning.
Just like any fundamental truth will require a transformation Because ordinary life doesn't really provide it much, doesn't much. We need the the inner path, the inner practice. And there are many practices, many inner paths, and they are all transformation, transforming our experience, but also transforming our consciousness, our soul, from being the more animal oriented, desire oriented, to more human oriented, which mean having goodness, being a true goodness being the driving force for our life to to more subtle mystery oriented, loving the mystery of the divine and which is in, in, in everybody and everything.
And One thing I wanted to say about love is that, first of all, human beings all want love. Human beings, regardless of whether they know love for what it is or not, human beings from the beginning, they need love. From the moment we're born, we need love. We can't thrive. We can't, in fact, survive without some measure of love.
Without love and care and nourishment and goodness, human beings need love. And human beings actually want love all the time, even though they might not know exactly what love is. Look at the literature, look at the arts, look at all of these things. How many poems, how many songs are there about awareness?
Right? Compared to love. When you think about it, Human beings want love more than awareness or consciousness or light or anything like that. Our literature, our arts are all oriented on love because love is really what human beings need to thrive, to develop, to Be fully what we are and to know the mystery of what we are and the mystery of our being, the mystery of the universe, because love, not only an art of law that creates, but also an art of law that reveals, that illuminates.
And so we're talking about this so that people who are listening need to know what I want people who are listening to know. Now we're not talking about love so that you have a good loving relationship. We're talking about love that's true, that can help to have a good loving relationship, but it's much bigger, much deeper, much faster, more encompassing than that.
It has to do with relationship to ourselves, relationship to the world, relationship to the divine, the meaning of life, and I
think it's about Yeah, the thing true about love, because it is always, it is the creative force. If love is what rules any relationship, the relationship is always new. Each time you meet each other, it's the first time. That's what love makes it possible. If love is really true, then, it's completely dies and reborn again.
If I meet somebody, I think I know them. I should leave that at bay. Yes, I know them, but I don't know what they're going to be like now. I might discover something completely new. So love opens us up and renews our experience of ourself and our relationship. So my, people I love, my relationship with them are always new.
And like I'm always meeting them for the first time and that is the spaciousness, the freshness, the real love makes possible that people talk about love. You build a relationship develops and through all that's true. However, for the relationship to truly develop, it needs to die and be reborn each time.
Otherwise, it's a continuation of the past, which becomes then inertia becomes a repetition of the old and love is inherently is my manifesting the world. It doesn't like it's manifested. I left it there. No, it's continually manifested instant by instant. The same thing that love does to relationship.
It's continually manifested and you each time it's a new thing. And that is so that mean when I meet somebody I love, it's I don't know what I'm going to meet. I don't know what I'm going to see. I don't know how I'm going to feel. If I'm already think I know what I'm going to feel, I know what I'm going to encounter.
I'm already living in the past. But love is the fact that it's a creative force, meaning it is bringing the now.
Yeah,
Cynthia Bourgeault: I love that the way that moves back that if what you're saying in a relationship that can be new any moment and is that it actually has touched into and has learned to rest in and trust in that, that, that relationship. Cosmogonic nature of love, the primordial, it's going to be new it, and this is great and you have enough trust to move into the very unstructuredness of it to allow the present to create itself.
And it's a rare gift to be able to do that. But I keep thinking that it's so rare,
A.H. Almaas: but possible.
Cynthia Bourgeault: Yeah. Rare, but possible. And how is the real good question? Is it from inside me? Is it the result of my practice? Is it some sort of a grace that weaves through that practice? I don't think you can say that it lies in the object.
That it's being applied with it because that limits it too much. But as we say, as we talked at the very start, if love is a flow between objects, certainly the flowingness of nature or the flowingness of love will work through points that have presented themselves as relational points to make
A.H. Almaas: of them what it will.
I was wondering
Zaya Benazzo: if you can speak about pain and love. Is pain made out of love? And is pain in our bodies, in, in our collective body, in the mother earth, a doorway to, to the love, to the cosmic universal love you're speaking
A.H. Almaas: about?
Is pain made out of love? Oh, yeah. If love is the nature of the universe, everything is made out of love, not just pain. But pain, especially emotional pain, wounding of the heart, is very important in the path of love. Because all of human beings were wounded, were hurt. We're abandoned or not loved or rejected and that creates many wounds in the heart.
Sometimes exploited and all of that, that happens as we grow up and that wounds the heart and closes it down. The wounding closed down the heart and us by us embracing our wounding, our hurt. Our pain and understanding it, inquiring into it, letting it reveal its story so that it evaporates and by us contending with the wounds of the heart has the possibility to open up again.
for love to flow. But if we block our wounding, our hurt and not want to feel it, our heart will be closed. But, and, but for, for wounding, for us to be able to experience our emotional wounds, we need the compassionate side of love. The tenderness and kindness that can allow the heart to feel trusting enough to open to the some of the wounds are terrible wounds, and
Cynthia Bourgeault: that would bring me to a really sensitive and touchy topic, but I think it's one that needs to be said, because we've kind We have so much psychological language and good languaging nowadays in our culture that, that if a person has been wounded, if a person has been abused, and of course, in the corner of Christianity, where I come from, where there has been such widespread abuse of religion in high places, pedophilia and so on, that the thing is that people feel like they have been Damaged beyond healing.
They feel like the heart has closed up because of these wounds that were inflicted on them innocently and that the the only ways out of that are in some sort of a restitutionary action and sometimes that won't come, and this is a real issue today when we realize that, that the substances that the planet is dying for lack of is faith, hope, and love, and that and that we are never going to find a world this point that is going to be feel safe enough, forgiving enough, and compassionate enough to say okay, now I can relax my heart reactively, we're going to have to learn how to open our hearts proactively, not in spite of but because of and through our deep woundings to this ever cosmogonic newness we're talking about.
When we just recycle the old cliches that say I was abused. I was hurt. I was injured. I was abandoned and therefore I'm damaged forever and love won't come. And I can't open my heart. We've just caught ourselves in a vicious circle that doesn't yet. Open enough to the creative and restoring depths of love itself that does really wish to make all things new.
And again, it's the how you get there that's hard, but the first step is to allow the possibility that it can happen. And that if you can't, if you can't, if the only thing you can do with a world that's hurt you is hold it hostage. in anger, there's something else you can do. And that is, and it often begins in spiritual practice, in meditation, or in listening to music, or in just being with people in a low key way, to be able to taste directly that spirit that Hamid is talking about that, that pure love that still flows through the whole thing.
And to say, I have access to that as a human being. This is my birthright. This is, I am part of the structure of the cosmos too and it flows through me. And out of that strength restored in the virginity and sanctity of my own heart to forgive and be grateful proactively. And when that can begin to happen, we change, we increase the level of safety, we increase the level of softness and suppleness in the planet and it begins to feel safer.
But I really think it has to start with that last desperate act of freedom and gratitude. inside a soul to claim our birthright and love even though we don't feel like we've experienced it. We wouldn't be here if we hadn't experienced it because it is the structure of our being.
A.H. Almaas: That's so true Cynthia. I think you bring in a point that's important for many people to hear because I think it's good that Sand, for instance, is doing a lot of work on the question of trauma and abuse and all that because people need it. But there's a danger there that you're pointing to, which is to take that as reality.
That's what defines us, that if we take the trauma to define this, I'm a traumatized person. We're, it's hopeless and we do need to deal with trauma. It's good. We need to deal with it, but we need to know at some point that trauma is part of what happened. It's a history and we need to go beyond that history.
By working through it in a spiritual way, working through recognizing it is the imprint of the past. Imprint of the past is exactly what spirituality wants to liberate us from. So we don't want to take that imprint to define us. To say, to continue to believe I am a traumatized person, hence I behave this way or that way.
That becomes a crutch at some point that is not useful. And regardless of how traumatized we are. One can heal and love is a big part of that healing process. And so the love can heal the trauma or the abuse or the pain. And, but love can also not only heal, can enrich our life, can make or renew our life.
Make it real, make it meaningful, make it, it had fulfillment and gratitude and goodness and happiness. And, what love can bring. So love in some sense is the hope of humanity, really. If it wasn't for love, there won't be a point actually in having experience, that's one thing I think about that sometimes, that when we think of the spirit, the divine or true nature, whatever you call it, I always wonder, especially, thinking of the non dualist, the transcendent, transcendentalist, why is it true nature hasn't a thing like compassion, like love?
If it is just for itself, it doesn't need it. It can just abide. It's a mystery. There is love, there is compassion, there is tenderness, there is gratitude, because it is inherent in the ultimate that there are beings who need it, who can live it, who can manifest it, who can experience it. If there was no individual beings, Who can thrive with love, there is no need for true nature to have love.
True nature or divine doesn't need love for itself. It is there for the being that come out. Through. So the divine you create, they create human being by human being in such a way that they grow and mature and develop to know the divine through the for force of love through the present love.
So what I'm trying to say is that. There is a connection between the transcendent divine and the individual human being. They're two sides of the same thing. And love makes sense of the fact that there are these two. If it wasn't these two, there's no reason for there to be love. It could be just pure emptiness and that's it.
Cynthia Bourgeault: Which brings us full circle back to Flo again and Burma and the Cosmopolitan. I find very simply, we've been working on workshops this past couple of years that I call rebuilding trust where we're teaching people to to take these things, these qualities that have so gone missing in our planet and are at the cause of so much pain and this insentiency we talked about, the world is never going to be Trustworthy, and yet you can manufacture, you can begin to create because we human beings are natural alchemists, we can create trust in the quality of our life, and manifest trust, not because, not as a statement about us, but because it's necessary.
It's the planet. Needs it and requires it and we have the capacity to give long story short. I find the simplest way to begin to reassert our freedom And heal is with the very simple practice of gratitude David, steindl rast I think was the first that great benedictine monk many years ago To call attention in our own times to the practice of gratitude, but it's so You Simple.
And it's a freedom that one has in oneself that whereas one spends a time counting up on scores of, take your parents, for example, which everybody likes to pin the sources of their trauma on myself included. And rather than spending the time talking about all the ways that my mother screwed me up or my father failed me that if I spend even five minutes a day being consciously grateful.
To my parents, because that's what I owe them as a human being. It was through their exercise of the procreative force that I'm here at all. And simple ways of gratitude, rather than seeing the cup as half empty, you see it as half full. It's an amazing. freedom you have in your soul, and it actually begins to change things quickly within you.
It works for me even faster than Centering Prayer. It's the fastest shortcut to changing your whole relational
A.H. Almaas: field of your life.
And gratitude is another quality of the heart, of course. It is another elixir, it's another nectar of the heart, that As you said, that see that the cup half full instead of half empty, but also gratitude means we're recognizing that something is working, something is really happening in a good way.
And the more we see that, the more there's gratitude. So for me, the heart manifests gratitude when the soul recognizes the reality is working. Yeah, it's optimizing that naturally happens and then gradually there's a sign that things are working out on oneself.
Cynthia Bourgeault: I'm not speaking here of, trying to put a happy spin on things or denying or ingraining or spiritual bypassing pain.
Because all that just leads to bogus spiritual practice. But it is the recognition that we have come in our own age to identify ourselves by our pain. And to consider our pain as the most inner and honest thing about ourselves. Without realizing that this is a choice, and even a fashion. And and that as we choose, To do something else.
A, because we can. B, because our planet needs it. That if we don't start recalling and reproducing as human beings, what are called in Christianity the gifts of the spirit. Kindness, gentleness, peace, forbearance, joy if we don't start putting these things back into the planetary atmosphere we're goners.
And since we can't do them in response to something, we have to do it because that freedom to do so is cosmogonic God. And you just gird up your lines and say, okay, I'm not worthy of it. I don't feel like it. I don't feel grateful now, but, hey, I am going to do this anyway, because this is my post as a human being.
so much,
Zaya Benazzo: both for this very rich and heartwarming, expanding conversation. And I hope we have another chance to continue this flow to unfold. Maybe when Cynthia, your book, comes up. Next year we can, yeah, continue the flow of exploration.
A.H. Almaas: Yeah, the two of you are full of joy, so you can expect the rest.
Cynthia Bourgeault: I would have to say, Maurizio, that the monastery's loss was love's gain.
Michael Reiley: And for listening to the Sounds of SAND. We invite you to explore more of our talks, dialogues, videos, articles, events, and offerings through our website, science and non duality. com. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please consider becoming a member to access our massive library of SAND content available to you.
And we would love it if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Google and Spotify and share this episode with your family, friends, and all sentient beings. Be well.
