What Creation Spirituality Means with Matthew Fox

don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people will keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Matthew Fox, who's been on the show before. He's an internationally acclaimed spiritual theologian, episcopal priest, and activist. He holds a doctorate in the history and Theology of Spirituality. Today, Matthew and Eric discuss his book, Matthew Fox Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality. I love this quote from the Buddha. The mind hard to control, flighty a lighting where it wishes. One does well to

tame the disciplined mind brings happiness. Happiness can often feel like an elusive goal everyone seems to strive for and never quite achieves, because we seek it outside of ourselves rather than going inward, which is something mindfulness teaches us to do. And Jenny, yes, Eric, this idea of taming the mind is why you named your program the Well Trained Mind, right yep. And I'm excited to announce that

it's open for enrollment now through October eight. In my live virtual six week Introduction to Mindfulness program, whether you're new to mindfulness and meditation or you're looking to strengthen your existing mindfulness practice, I'll teach you the foundations of mindfulness so that you can live with more ease, create a nourishing and fulfilling spiritual practice, discover how to be a friend to yourself, and strengthen your ability to live

in a more grounded, connected, peaceful way. To learn more about the program go to when you feed dot net slash mindfulness. That's one you feed dot net slash mindfulness before October eight. I hope to meet you there. Hi, Matthew, Welcome to the show. Eric. Good to be with you again. Yes, it is a pleasure to have you back on. I don't remember when the last time was. It's been a good number of years ago, but I love that conversation and so I'm really happy to have you on again.

We're going to be discussing your latest book called Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, which really is bringing together a lot of your writing over the years, and it was great to see it all in one place. And we'll get into that in a minute, but before we do, we'll start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second says, well, which one wins?

And the grandparents says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do, and I thank you for it and naming your program, and after giving it that kind of exposure which it deserves. You know, it very much parallels the teaching from kicknot Han, the Buddhist monk, who says that we have two seeds in us, the seeds of violence and the seed of compassion, and you have to

water one or the other. So you know, that kind of wisdom is abroad, thank God, whether we're east or west. This is human nature, isn't it That we're capable of great beauty and kindness and generosity and forgiveness on the one hand. On the other, we're capable of well the ground Ukraine, war or denial about climate change and all

this nonsense. Our capacity for evil. You know, Thomas Aquins in the thirteenth century said one human being can do more evil than all the other species put together, which I think is an astounding observation because you made an eight hundred years before Hitler or Stalin or whole pot or Putin. But it's saying the same thing, really you know, don't underestimate our capacity for destruction. And of course this is what climate change is all about today. And there

are many ways. You know, you don't have to be dropping nuclear bombs. You can go into denial. You can create a whole political life out of denial. An awful lot of politicians have been doing that in our lifetime. So there are subtle ways of being evil, choosing evil. And of course if you kind of back up and figure it out, well, why do politicians go into denial

about climate change? Well because power and ego in money and power kinds of money is their god, is their idol, and so it's a form of idolatry ready to choose that which destroys others. And today, I mean it's been wrapped up. Destroying the environment is literally putting millions of other species into extinction as well as ourselves down the line. So it's a simple parable, and it's a grandfather to his grandkid, and that's marvelous way to set a parable.

But it's so true, and I think we're facing that today as a species, and it's more true today than it was twenty years ago. Extinction is a real possibility for our species. At this time. And you know, I've been struck lately by how they've been uncovering, especially in Southeast Asia, a lot more hormid species are cousins like Neanderthal. You know, we knew about them because they are hanging

around Europe. But now they're just goiving fourteen others that they've so far unearthed, and they're going to be more. But the bottom line is every one of these cousins of ours, including Neanderthal and Dennison, are out of business. They're all extinct. So we're the last one standing home of sapiens. And I mean, if that doesn't ratchet up, you know, the stakes that we're living with today, I

don't know what can you know? So I think all these lessons, these parables are really important because they put the spotlight on our capacity for divine compassion on the one hand, and for destruction and our participation and evil on the other. And again we can't underestimate either. Yeah, yeah, that is a striking quote from a quientess. I've never

heard that, but yeah, it seems absolutely true. Particularly to come to it at that point, Let's start with talking about what creation spirituality is, because I think it's going to give us a chance to unpack the parable in some other ways also, So let's let's start there. Well, that word creation, of course, is a really big word. It includes this universe we now know as thirteen pointy billion years in the making and still growing, and two

trillion galaxies. The last time we talked, neither you nor I know anyone else knew that there were two trillion galaxies, each of hundreds of billions of stars. It was two or three summers ago that science discovered that. But it's about the sacredness of nature, of creation, of these billions of years, and of course of our own existence and of this earth, which of course makes our existence possible.

But to realize how interdependent we are, and all these previous happenings, the original fireball, the birth of the of the original atoms, and first galaxy, these very things, and how that, thanks to our ingenuity as a species, web telescope is beaming into our living rooms and on our computers today is just amazing. Really, the human capacity for questing after knowledge and devising instruments that instruct us. So that's the basis of creation is beginning not with the humans.

See the modern consciousness began with the human decre I think therefore I am, well bully for you, but that's not right to decar The reason you are is that thirteen twenty millionaires gave birth to you, to the Earth, to the Sun, to the moon, to everything humans need to be here. But that thinking, I think, therefore I am I mean, you know, get out of the room.

But this has been the basis of modern consciousness. This has been the basis of education, of politics, of the law of religion in in in the last few hundred years. Whereas the pre modern people's, including indigenous peoples, but also these great pre modernistics like I mentioned a Cladness and Hill the Guard and Francis of Assisi who is the best known, Juliana Norwich. All these great souls, not one of them began with with the human. They began with

the universe. Hill the Guard is painting pictures of the universe right and left because she's listening to the the signs of her day. Early in her career, scientists were saying the universe is an eight. Okay, she goes ahead and paints the picture of the universe as an eight. Then they switched and said, oh, the universe as a circle. It's it's oh okay, so she starts painting pictures university circle.

The point is that these great mystical minds and souls, like indigenous people, are eager to know our real home, and that we humans we stand out in many ways, including as you and I just said, in our capacity for evil, but also our capacity for intelligence. But the point is we are part of something much bigger. What hill they are called the web of creation, and of course so create. Spirituality is of course a response to this anthropocentrism that has brought about climate change, that has

brought about the destruction of the planet today. This mindset of modern consciousness that puts the human first is the opposite of that, and it's the opposite. Therefore of a religion begins with sin because sin is a human thing. What other species is sinning? Know, every other species it's just trying to be their best self. You know, the best dinosaur. You can be here in the best way, or you can be the best tree. You can be cool. It's wonderful. It's for humans, who have so many sources

that we can choose to be unhuman. Other species don't choose to be not themselves and Rabbi Heschel says that he said sin as a refusal to become who we are, because humans, we don't know who we are, and we get off the tracks so readily. So we have to keep taking stock and in a sense, we define who

we are. And I think we're in that kind of crunch time today in terms of history, and there's a lot of depression and a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos and sadness because I don't think our professions are really honoring our capacities for beauty and for compassion

and for a kindness and for healing. I mean sometimes it flashes through, certainly in the COVID and all these doctors and nurses and other hospital workers who you know, literally gave their lives and certainly put themselves in danger, and that was a beautiful thing to see. Really, that's humanity at us best. And of course coming up with vaccines and record time is a wonderful thing too, But still there's so much of the other going on all around us and making headlines every day, so humans have

to work at being human. There's a beautiful teaching from the Messia Americans one sentence. I just love it. Says, to be human, one must make ruin one's heart for the wonders of the universe. That's creation spirituality. That the world is full of wonders. We are part of that wonder and it is a grace, It is a blessing just to be here, and everything else flows from that that. As my striker said, if the only prayer you're say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice.

So we should be saying thank you for our species being here, and thank you for being individuals, you know, in that circle of overse species, and then asking how can we help you know, how can we assist the next generation of fall in love with life and and make things healthy and beautiful for the next generations. I love that Master Eckhart quote, and the earlier one about

being human is to see wonder. You talk about how Western spirituality has two basic traditions, right, So we've got the first that starts with the experience of sin and develops a fall redemption spiritual motive. And that was starts with the experience of life as a blessing and develops a creation centered spirituality. So here's creations centered spirituality over here.

The other is the fall redemption model, and you talk about in your book how original sin came about later on in Christianity, and I'm curious if you could share a little bit about other ways of interpreting what we see in the Bible, as you know, known as the fall right of Adam and Eve. How do you interpret that story in the sense of creations, yourtuality, so that

you end up with something besides the original sin. Well out of rank was a brilliant psychologist in the twenty century, and he was Jewish, not Christian, and he came up with the term original wound. And I really like that language. It's so much more accurate I think a wound. And his theory on the original wound was when we leave our mother's womb, that is the original wound because being separated for nine months, we were very content and very

at home. Things went along swimmingly, quite literally because the water in the room. But when we enter this world, you know, usually there's neon lights, you know, in the in the operating room, and you get hit on the butt, I mean, the first thing that happened, and there's noise, and it's just imagine what a shock that was to all of us totally yeah, and he goes out the original wound that comes back, it's a wound of separation. And he says the only resolution is the unio mystica.

That's the language he uses, the mystical union which we experience in love and an art. He said, those are the are the healing graces that resolve that problem. And it keeps coming up. Let's say you're going through a rough divorce or separation or someone you love dies. See, separation keeps coming up. It's a motif in human experience and that whole issue of letting go and letting be that Eckart talks about to return to that place of union and communion and peace and so forth that humans

you yearned for. That. So I find myself vary at home with auto rocks naming. Of course, humanity has a problem. Look around, read the news, and of course it didn't start with us. With Adam and Eve, our closest ancestors, the Apes, they make war two. In the fact their wars we now know it can be horrible. They're very sadistic. They eat each other's fingers, they eat each other's genitals in their wars, and so you know, violence is part

of our family tree. But again, it's like you're a parable There are ways you can choose other than the violence, but you have to work on it. Like Ticknutoun says, you have to water the plants of justice and plants of peacemaking. I think that's a fine way of thinking about our fall. But also I've talked a lot about

dualism being the fall. Hill. The garden paints a picture of Adam where he's sniffing the flowers, and she says, this is what Adam's failure, his fall was that he only sniffed the flowers, that he didn't stick around longer to take in their full beauty. So she is saying that humanities struggles are from a failure of eros, a

failure to really enjoy the beauty of life. And I think there's so much truth in that that it's so much easier to go running off and doing our thing rather than to stick around and learn not to take for grant the healthy air and the healthy soil, and our healthy bodies and the healthy waters. You know, all this we abandoned to extract from the earth and build up empires and all the rest. And I think that's what hill the guard is saying that it's easy for

us to forget to savor the beauty of existence. And many people in their deathbeds, you know, Koba Rassai, there are two ways that people die. One is happily and peacefully, and those remember the joyful times in life. Then those who die kicking and screaming, she says, are those who never really learned to enjoy life at all. So there's still haven't learned the deeper lessons. So I think that's

another insight. And then the duelism part, well, you know, patriarchy is built on dual is a matter versus spirit for example, and this whole I think that everything is in competition the us, the reptilian brain, I win, you lose.

So I think that the patriarchal consciousness, which has dominated human awareness for at least six years, I think that's another foundational split that goes on in the human We have to recover that sense of both and instead of either or, And that's a struggle for a lot of people and a lot of philosophies, a lot of religion and so forth. But again it's back to the idea of the circle and the circle we're all equal. We can see each other's eyes, can see each other's suffering

and one another's joy. And that's how you mitigate the temptation to be the winner and make others losers. That reptilian brain consciousness that is obviously so prevalent in the world today. We treat the earth that way. Men are often talked to teach women that way, or the oldie's young that way. I mean, there's so many rualisms that we build up and and of course between religions and all that that battle that we project onto one another and UH participate in. So I think all those ways

are ways of understanding the flaw of our humanity. That the East talks a lot about ignorance and illusion, and that's true. I mean, all those things are illusory, that that we were here to conquer others and to be on top and so forth. B number one, that's false thinking. Yeah, back to this idea of you know, Adam sniffing the flowers. You say that falling in love with earth and life and all our creaturely companions all over again and on a daily basis is the first response of Spirit working

in and through us. And I love that idea of truly falling in love with the world around us. Is that wonderful quote from Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Poetry in the seventy two He says, the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. I just love that because it's so realistic. History isn't always pretty, but the world is much bigger than human history, thank God.

That's why I talked about cosmology and the earth and these bigger realities that are part of our world and it should be part of our history. So we're learning through a tough time of history now, but that sentence from walk comes back to me all the time, to fall in love the world in spite of history, and then the implication, okay, and then we can remake history.

We can do history differently. And I think that's what Jesus was teaching, what Isaiah was teaching, that the Buddha was teaching, but Mohammad was teaching, and that is that you know, we're capable of compassion, we're capable of changing history that way and times running out. So let's talk about some of the work you did in creation spirituality, was defining sort of for haths of creation spirituality. And I'm wondering if we could just talk briefly about each

of them. I'm going to read what the four are just so people get the whole picture, and then maybe you and I can sort of deconstruct them one at a time. The first path you call the Via positiva, which is the positive path positive experiences of awe and delight. The Via negativa, which is communing with the divine through silence and loss suffering, third path via creativa, and the last is the Via trance for tiva. I may have pronounced all those wrong to how do you say your Latin? Okay?

All right, so yeah, let's just walk through them. I love this idea of thinking of these four different paths. It makes me think a little bit about the four Yogas. Right, there's some crossover there also where they talk about the four paths. There. Let's talk about the first one, the

Via positiva. Well, I think in a healthy situation, such as a child with healthy parenting, this comes first that you excitement, the wonder of the universe, and of first of all, your toes and your fingers and all this. I often worked with scientists, and I loved to ask scientists this one question, when did you know he wanted to be a scientist? And there's always a pause and

they scratched their head. And I remember one chemist I asked that question of here's an old guy, and he said why, he said, I haven't thought about this in twenty years. But the same thing happens everyone tells me. Asked Popert Sheldrake, the British ballatists that once and he said, h He said, I fell in love with the bush when I was five years old. My father was a naturalist. You showed me to this one bush. And then he said, oh my god, I never thought of this. I did

my doctorate thesis on that bush. But every time they say I fell in love with the star, I fell in love with the worm. I remember woman scientists said it when I was six. She said, it's a love affair, and so love comes first. I mean, how important is a love affair with the bush when you're five? And then your life becomes a life of a biologist. And all the wonderful work that Rupert Shelter has done as a for thinking biologists. I mean it's amazing that our

vocations come from falling in love. So our capacity to fall in love is there from the beginning. And you know, with good parenting, you know you are encouraged to follow your your loves and your interests and to develop the skills. And for the rest you know, and you know at different ages their sports or there's flowers, or there's cameras or ideas, their study is interacting with others. I mean, there's such a wonderful diversity of human interests. But the

point is that we do fall in love. I say, the first commandment in the creation traditions, who fall in love at least three times to day. And that takes falling in love outside the circumstance of anthropocentres of not just about finding your mate till death to your part. That phrase following in love is a big concept. And you can fall love with wildflowers, you can fall love with planets, you can follow with poetry and with music

and with trees, and there's no limit to it. That's our capacity for goodness and so that's what the real positiva is. It's about coming face to face with goodness. And you know, love and goodness and joy. They're like a trinity. They go together. You fall in love with something you perceive as good, and the good speaks back to you and then joy happens. So there's a wonderful

relationship that goes on. Then in the video Positive and Now, Rabbi Hashol talks about ah is the beginning of wisdom, and OH is very important for him, and it's interesting he defines on one place this way. He says, AWE is the human mind encountering the universe. It is the act of the human mind encountering the universe. Well, I love that because once again we're back to that cosmic awareness, back to creation, that this capacial of all love is

built into us. We're hard wired for the via positiva, and you have to return to when things get tough, when there is grief and when there is suffering, you have to keep in minding yourself. I say, it's like

being a camel. You have to store it up on the via positiva as you head out into the desert, and there's plenty of desert in life, and you have to call on that big hump of that source of water that you're carrying with you, which is the via positive of the love of life as you come across struggles and challenges along the path, and we all do so,

that's via positiva. Well, it makes me think a little of the wal cut quote you just said, which is, not only do we fall in love with life in the world in spite of history, right, it's important to fall in love with life in the midst of our

own suffering. You know, I fall in love with my two dogs three times a day easily, right, But that's because I'm consciously I mean, hey, they're adorable, but be I'm you know, consciously cultivating that that idea of falling in love three times a day is is similar to gratitude practices, or appreciation practices, or lots of different things which are all about simply saying, look, all of it's here. Let me try and train my brain to look for

the beautiful. Because there's a poem I'm memorizing right now in the last line of it is as if this day, with its tentative light, were not enough, as if joy were not strewn all around. You know that's always the case, exactly, But as Mary Alverst says, you've got to pay attention. Yes, you know, that's just what you're doing, is you're saying, but I love that phrase. Train my brain to look

for the beautiful. Yeah, so true, And in theological language, that's training your brain to look for God, because the beauty and God are the same things according to the mystics. China says, God is the most beautiful, the super beautiful, and all beings participate in the divine beauty. So the quest for beauty is the quest for God. Joy too,

says sure, Joy's gods in this demand's companionship. So the whole idea for him then, is that the universe exists because of joy, and we're here together because there's a built in hardwire to share the joy. You know. That is a different way to look at the world, and it could change a lot of things. So I could stay on the positiva all day, because who doesn't want to stay there? Right? It's a lovely place to me. But we've got four paths, so let's keep moving here.

The second path the via negativa. Well, as you pointed out in your brief naming of these pasts, there are two parts of the via negative, but one is silence itself. So this is what meditation does, for example, teaching us to let go of noise and input and just be still. And there's that line from the Psalmist and be still and learned that I am God. So this invitation is stillness is what a lot of meditation is about, and it's a wonderful thing. And of course there are practices,

especially the East is very rich in these practices. But there's also so ways to find stillness. For example, I think a lot of men go hunting and even fishing for the stillness of it, for the contemplative experience. That they don't tell anyone that they are'm going out to catch a big fisher. I don't understood the DearS of but really they want to go out to get away from the everyday noise of life and work and all the rest and the household, and to experience this deep

connecting in silence with the silence of nature. My starec Card says, nothing in all creation is so like God as silence. So that too is a tremendous affirmation of our capacity for stillness and silence. And again all traditions say that this is a doors, not the only door, but it is a door into the divine and distill the mind, as they say, the mockey mind and the

busy mind. You know that we're often in a state of problem solving, and silence is kind of forgetting the problems for a while and just to be with being. And we have to find how we do that. And as I say, there are practices that get you there, but there are also other ways to put yourself in any circumstance. And sometimes it just comes to even are we talked about awe and via positive but all itself when you think about it, Ah shuts us out. By definition,

when you are awe struck, you shut up. There's a great story in the Book of Job that says that your job is talking on telling God what he should be doing. You shouldn't be here. And then guys said, where were you job when I created the earth and the foundations of the earth? Were you there? And did you teach the mountain goat how to make love? And all this stuff? He goes on and on, and then the Bible said, Joe put his hand over his mouth.

He shut up, because there are a lack of greater things going on than our busy little minds and our opinions about things. So that's part of the via negative is silence. But the second part that you spoke of briefly is of course suffering and grief. And they have something common silence and suffering it but they have in common is letting go and letting be. So think of

being sick in the hospital. Let's say you're usually busy and accomplishing that, and then you're stick in the hospital and maybe you don't even know you know how long you'll be there, or if you're gonna get well again, or what you learn to let go. You're just to being in hospital, who someone has to feed you, Maybe you can't do a thousand of things you usually do for yourself. I mean, that's just an example of how

real letting go and letting be can be. Or of course you lose a friend to death or to sickness, or or you have a breakup with a friend or something. All these are experiences of letting go. Of course, So suffering itself is not something we need to manufacture. It happens to us, and how do we respond. That's the question, you know, which they say we go into shame and

beat ourselves up for it. For example, you know, in the fifteenth century there's great bubonic plague, much worse than our recent coronavirus, and they had no science to deal with everything. But many men created flagellation clubs. They went around beating themselves from village to village. Why because they said it must be their sins that have brought on this this destruction. It's really kind of weird, but that's how people can be. We flatter ourselves that we think

that we can bring out a coronavirus. But there were so many of these men's clubs doing this, the Pope had it say, hey, chill, this is not going to solve our problem, you know. So there's just many ways in which the human imagination goes overboard and beating ourselves up and wallowing and shame and guilt, and this too is part of letting go and letting be. The suffering is a reality, all being suffered, as a Buddhists like to remind us, and of course, as you know, having

two dogs, dogs suffered too, you know. And of course as a caretaker, you you don't want to see that. You want everything you can to relieve it. But how to deal with suffering, that's part, and of course the grieving and today we're in great grief as the species, of course we are. I mean, just this week we saw pictures of the Rhine River drying up, in the Danube River, and the Tamans is drying up, and the Colorado River in America is driving up, and in China

the great rivers are drying. I mean, it's scary and a shocking totally. And of course it does come back on us as to what we're doing about climate change and not doing so. The suffering of the world and our own suffering is a teacher for us, and that's part of the of the Via negativa. And of course in the Christian world, the Cross is an archetype of that, because here was an innocent man, a good man, out there preaching compassion and working with the poor, and he

ends up being not just killed, but tortured. And because that was the purpose of the Cross by the Roman Empire, that's just an archetype of how in fact, as bad as good Fridays can be, as bad as our destruction of our souls and egos can be, it's not the last word. That death itself gets recycled in something like resurrection, and that that's really a cosmic habit we can see because sons live full lives and bursts and all this, but then they too die, but they sent on this

as stars. They send down their elements to feed other beings, and this happened with supernovas. It's this mystery of life, death and resurrection is built into i think, the cosmic processes. We're discovering that more and more from science today. So there's a tremendous law there about don't think that our suffering or death is the last word. And that allows one,

i think, to go through it with some grace. Of course, the Buddhists talk a what about suffering and how all being suffered, and how practices of meditation and so forth allow you to not dwell overly much on the suffering itself, but to move through it. Yeah, I think so much of that. Working with suffering sort of leads us to the third path in a way, right, which is the via creativo. To me, one of the things is how is suffering transformed? Right? How is it transmuted into something

beautiful or at least less negative. So talk about via creativa, which is one of my favorite things that you've really unearthed as part of these four paths. I really love making this a central part of a spiritual path. I'm glad nice direct her at the Great fourteenth century Dominicanistic said, I once had a dream, even though a man I jumped, I was pregnant, pregnant with nothingness, and out of this

nothingness God was born. It's a powerful, powerful dream. And yeah, the via negativist takes us into nothingness, maybe become that emptied by all these difficult experiences in life. But as you say, the next step is creativity. That's what that CRITI is saying that Again, as I said earlier, it doesn't end with the via negative, it doesn't end with death there with nothingness. In fact, this is a beginning for new life. And so creativity becomes all important. And

notice what he's saying. We actually give birth to the Christ, we give birth to God. In a Christmas sermon, he said, what good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Christ years ago and I don't give birth to the Christ and my own person and my own history and my own time and culture. And then he said, God is always needing to be born. We are all here, we are God birthers, We are all mothers of God. And this is a man talking what an affirmation of

the work of the artist. And he applied see story of the Nunciation of the Angel telling marriage he was going to have a child to every person and every artist. He says that we all take in the Holy Spirit when we commit to our creativity. Acquinus before him said that the same spirit that hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation hovers over the mind of the artist at work. It's so beautiful that you know, this

is how powerful creativity is. We are are tapping into, this is co creation, We're tapping into the powers of the universe. And of course this is scientifically supportable. Today. One cosmologist, Brian Swim says, you know, the fireball burned out after seven fifty years, but in fact it is present in the light waves in our brains, and when we get into a creative state, the light in urin is really shooting away. And so we are literally the

inheritors of the original fireball physiologically a king. So I find that the fact that the four paths put creativity at the center of the spiritual journey is so important in our time because we're living in this postmodern time. And Newton he thought the universe was this one galaxy, and he thought it was done and we just had to fit in, whereas Einstein broke that open of course when he talked about the expansion of universe and all the rest. So creativity, I think, is what most distinguishes

postmodern from modern science. And here we have our mystical traditions, saying that creativity is a lynch pin between the mystical experience of the via positive and via negativa on the one hand, and prophetic experience of compassion and justice and healing, which is the work of the via transformativa. And but creativity is the bridge because it is about imagination. Isn't it moral a man generation to think of a better world, to think of, say, inventing ways to defend us against

disease and all the rest. All that is imagination at work, but with the purpose, the purpose being to heal one another and make life more livable for more people. So via creativa is the real bridge. And William Hocking says, the profit is a mystic in action, and the profit is via transformative of work. So we are all mystics. We all go through positive via negativa and learning to

love life and to let go. But we're also all here to serve one another into interferes as what my intent says with the forces of injustice and evil that we're all exposed to. So creativity is at the heart of things in this tradition, and I love it. I think it's very apt for a postmodern understanding of the world. You say that art as meditation becomes the basic prayer

or practice in the creation spirituality tradition. But just a minute ago you gave some examples of creativity that are not the usual definition of art, and so I'm curious for people who are, you know, focused on their spiritual growth and development, do you recommend some sort of what we would traditionally think of as a creative practice, whether it be music, drawing, painting, but what we would traditionally

think of as some sort of artistic practice. Do you think that's an important thing for people to cultivate as part of their spiritual journey. Absolutely. There's a good book done in Meditation in the seventies by Norando and Ornstein, two psychologists, on the psychology of meditation, and they talk about two kinds of meditation introvert and extrovert. Introvert is the kind of sitting meditation where you empty your mind

of thoughts and which has this place. But what they called extrovert meditation I've renamed as artist meditation because when you do pottery, for example, like M. C Richard wrote a classic book called Centering, and she was a potter, and it's brilliant book. And that's exactly what we mean by artist meditation. In the act of dealing with clay on a wheel, you're learning to center things. Actually calls a centery. But the key is focusing, and you do

that whenever you you do art. It's a focusing project. Many writers have to turn off the radi and all the rest to focus on their writing and to listen with inside of them. The same is true of painters and the rest. So it is meditation. It comes in mind, and it puts you in a state of creativity very often where you get carried away. As I say, if you've just said where did the time go, you've just

had a mystical experience. And I know artists painters who stay up all night never look at their watch once because they're just in a flow and that's meditation in the highest sense, is co creating. You were working with the Holy Spirit, if you use that theological language. A guard has a wonderful sermon about a line from the Psamas who talks about the Holy Spirit as a great rapid river. And I love that image because my experience of creativity is often that you're on a river, on

a raft without oars, and you're being carried along. And that's what creativity is. You know, you've been carried along with something worthwhile and something bigger than yourself. So people have these states of consciousness like this when they're being created of And the key, though, is to realize that we're always being creative, that all day long we're making decisions, may be about what meal the cook or you know, how to address the kids, or something how to balance

your checkbook. That the modern consciousness shrunken the meaning of art, but pre modern thinkers art as everything. In fact, many Native American languages do not have a word for art because it's just presume that we're all here to make beauty, and you're supposed to be doing this all day on. We do do it all day are you know, even

combing your hair or what clothes to wear. So the whole idea that art is just for professional artists is really materialistic and capitalistic, and it carries a lot of the weight and the boredom of modern consciousness. A Crientis talks about the art of riding a horse, the art of saving a ship. So his pre modern understanding of art is just so broad. It's indigenous, like the indigenous US.

It's not this modern version of art. And of course David Paladin, a wonderful Navajo painter, said one day he said, I'm sick and tired of hearing white people tell me they're not artists. If you can talk, you're an artist. You're translating your experiences into language that's art. So you know, get over it, step up to the plates, you know. So I think this is a postmodern way of looking at the world in a premodern way. It is certainly not modern, though, So I think this is a big contribution.

And I think when you look at Western history that artists have given us so much and still do, whether it's music or poetry or architecture and so forth, and kind of to relegate this to bleachers or something, when in fact, here we are what three years after modes art and we can still be sitting in all of two thousand people and being touched and moved profoundly by it.

How can we put art off in the corner. And of course we love to watch young artists son YouTube and all the rest, and our young people grow up and express themselves that way and create new art forms. So art is really how you can find a human being. I wrote a book on curativity and it begins with the whole idea that the anthropologists when they're looking for our ancestors, they don't like to find just a biped, but a biped with artifacts next to them, like Julie

and stuff. Then we know there are ancestors. So the human being is a biped who makes things. It's not that no other species make things, but we we go overboard. We make lots of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are prolific. And that beauty that you talked about earlier, we're in hot pursuit of beauty and wanting to share it. Yeah. So I think one of the things that's interesting about art as a spiritual practice is that we so easily get hung up on the thing that is being made

versus the process of making. I think this is where so many people get shut down, is because if I sit down and start working on a symphony, my experience up till date tells me I'm not going to produce a Mozart quality symphony. I play guitar and I love doing it, but I'm not going to be anybody's professional guitarist. And for me, I've done a lot of internal work on trying to reclaim the guitar for myself as simply something that I love to do for what it brings

to me internally. But to your point about capitalism, I mean so much today, like if you become even marginally good at anything, your friends suddenly start going you should start a netzi shop. You know, we're constantly encouraged that if it's either a not really good or not sellable, that it's not worth doing. And I think that blocks a lot of people using art as a spiritual practice. Now.

I have always taught spirituality in my programs. Night had programs masters and doctored and then inner city high school kids for over forty five years. And we all have artists meditation, and sometimes you have people there with real talent and experiences and mostly you don't. And in fact, I remember one talented artist came and he was questioning, well, which course should it take. I said, take the course that scares you the most. He said, I mean, I

can't do my photography, I can't do my painting. Yeah, what scares the most he said, dancing? He said, I have two club feet when it comes down. I said, take dancing. So he did, and it changed his life. The rest of his life, he's been teaching circle dancing and so forth. But the point is that I have seen conversion after conversion happening with people taking clay as meditation, or dance as meditation, or painting his meditation who never

painted or never did clay and sore. And as you say, that's not the point, because the point is the process and what happens to you the process, and if you produce a product that's secondary. And again, a capitalist version of art is to produce something that's salable. As you say, artist meditation is not about that. It's about centering. It's about commuting with clay, communing with colors. I remember the

very first year I taught the master's program. Forty two year old Francis consists of caning me in the spring and she said to me, this is the first spring of my life. I said, what, you're forty two years old, are you talking about? She said, I took this painting class, and she said, it's so opened me up to shade and color and everything I haven't seen before. This is the first spring of my life at forty two. This conversion happened just by painting. That's what I'm talking about.

And there were a million stories like this. So again we have to step out of the capitalist version of art and recover art as a spiritual practice, says a spiritual experience. And I want to put out what Gabriel Marcel, a wonderful French claspher says. He says arts is not just producing a painting or a song or dance. It's those people who look at the painting and listen to the music. They are artists too. When you're taking in beauty from others and other people's art, you are being

an artist too. So are the artist is both giving and receiving. And again that has not taught us in a capitalist version of art. So I think all this is I'm so glad we're talking about it because I know, this is transformative, that people get radically changed through artist meditation. Here's one concrete example. A forty one year old guy came to meet in our program and he was taking massages meditation, and he told me that he was sexually

abused by his aunt. Every Friday, she would come over and abuse him for a year when he was six years old. And he didn't know this until the massage class. Imagine how much energy his psyche and body put into covering that up for thirty six years. And then he graduated about a month later, and I swear he lost at least fifteen years in our program because that truth came out of his body. And that's the thing. All art is bodily, and it carries our experiences within it.

And of course our bodies literally carry the history of the universe in them. Our bodies there are thirteen point eight billion years old. Literally, they're carrying the original hydrogen and helium atoms from the fireball. So that this guy had this amazing conversion and awakening and without having to go to a psychiatrist, just because his body was listening and was being called on to, you know, let the truth out. It was you know, an amazing experience. I

remember the day of graduation. I looked at him from afar and it was like he was skipping back into life again. You know, he was like a child again. It was so beautiful. And of course that's part of the artist too, is recovering the child. I'd like to practice other people massaging me as meditation. Can I do that? Is that a Is that a spiritual path? Of course? Right? It works both ways that Gody Machel says, All right, now let's move on to the fourth path, the via transformativa.

Talk to me about that. Well, that is the way of compassion in healing and justice and celebration. It is the community coming together and are working for that coming together, because it's injustice that keeps us apart. And one thing abstruck by is how all the religious traditions agree on so many important things, and one of them is this word compassion. So the Dalai Lama says, and it's a quote. We can do away with our religion, but we can't

do away with compassion. Compassion is my religion. Well, Jesus, and look sex be you compassionate? Creating Heaven is compassionate. And of course he's Jewish and he got that from the Jewish tradition, and the Jewish tradition compassion is the secret name for God, and Jesus was compelled to let the secret out of the big if you will, and then Mohammed the Koran. More frequently than any other ad jective for Allah. In the Koran is Allah the compassionate one.

So there's teaching how compassion. It's everywhere, but it's a big hurdle. It's not easy. Compassion isn't easy. And make Dreker says compassion means justice, so he's not separating compassion from the social structures that we have to critique continually

and improve on continually. And of course we're going through that as a country at this time, of course, with the latest news about how terribly the Native American children were treated and government schools and religious schools and in Canada to of course, which the Hope flew over for a week to try to apologize for, and of course the truths of slavery and so worth, and there's backlash. Now we actually have states telling teachers they can't teach

them that there's racism in American history or something. You know, it's just beyond the pale. But this is a live issue of course today and it's not easier to hear that our founding fathers, so hallowed, had slaves, many of them, and made other big mistakes and had clay feet. Oh, but that does make them human, because we're all humans. So the point is in taking down the Confederate statutes and all this stuff. So this, this is a big

deal at this very moment in history. And of course to realize how many sins the churches have committed over the centuries, such as the Discovery Doctrine, which two popes came up with publishing three paper bulls in the fifteenth century, which gave carte blanche to Christian kings, beginning with the Portuguese king and queen, to go to Africa and take slaves, and go to Americas and do whatever they want, because these continents were not quote Christian, part of the Christian Empire.

And I mean the whole idea that christ wanted an empire is about as close to heresy as you can get. So anyway, I mean, the sins of our fathers are kind of being headlined these days. It's it's not easy to live with and this is why many people are saying I'm spiritual, not religious. The religion is often had a shadow aside to it that is immense. All this is part of the story of the via transformativa. It begins with truth. Like Gandhi said, my religion is truth.

The meaning of Hinduism to me is a pursuit of truth in a non violent way. And notice how much false city is in the air of these days and on the air in the social media and the other media. Lies upon lies. So we have begin to know the truth about how dangerous we've been to one another, and course the Holocaust, and of course now the truths about what we've been doing to Mother Earth and our creatures. All this comes out, and so the struggle against evil

it goes on in all of us. That's your parable story we begin with here, isn't it? And we can all be participants, even unconsciously we take it for granted. That's what privilege means when it's being used in a political way, that we don't realize the suffering of other groups, groups that are different from us. And of course the whole rise of rights for gays and lesbians, that that's a minority too, that for centuries has been abused and forgotten about, and yet science has now declared as of

the seventies that it's not abnormal. It's about eight percent of any human population everywhere, it's going to be gay or lesbian. So you know, give him a break and let's get on with more important things than condemning one another. And we found four d and sixty four other species have gay and lesbian populations, so hey, it's not unnatural to a minority. So you know, we can grow an awareness and that's a beautiful thing. And I think that's

what working for justice means. And of course, compassion is not just about sharing one another's suffering. It's also about sharing one another's joy. Mice Direcker says, what happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me. That is a succinct and beautiful definition of compassion. That we are part of one another at the deepest level, at the level of joy and at the level of suffering, via positive and via eggtivacy. And that's what you bring

to celebration. Celebration is a gathering of our wounds and of our joy at being here. And that's why celebration is is fifty of compassion. Suffering is let's relieve the suffering that we can and back up if we're making suffering on others, but also let us celebrate that we're here. That's where I think Ecker just nailed wonderfully the real

meaning of compassion. And so the V transformative is a is a big path, and it ranges from being jailed for non violent disobedience to creating rituals for celebration and for healing and for grieving together and bringing in all the artists and so forth, which is what real ritual should be about. Wonderful. Well, I am happy to have gone through the four paths. I think they are really beautiful. I thought near the end here we could talk for a couple of minutes about some of the mystics that

you love. You've beautifully layered them in through this conversation. But I wanted to talk about Killed the Guard and you say that she pictures our life's journey as a struggle to set up our tent of wisdom, and I just love that metaphor talked to me about what she had to say about our tent of wisdom. It is a wonderful metaphor prefer that to Young's language about individual

setting up our tempted wisdom. She says, it were born with original stim in us, but we're so tiny that it's a small tent, but that life's journey is setting up that tent, and she paints the picture of it. There are demons along the way, there are obstacles along the way. She has a little like cartoon figures in about six different pictures where the soul is trying to set up his tent, but at the end it is triumphant.

It sets up this tent and demons are outside. They don't get in, but they're still outside shooting arrows at the soul. So it is about life's journey. She actually gets that image from John One, the first chapter John's Gospel, but that gets it actually from one of the Hebrew Bible books where it says that God has wandered the earth wondering where to set up the tent, and set

out the tent among the Jewish people. And then John one, who is Jewish after all Jesus disciples with Jewish, and Jesus was himself, and then he applies it to Jesus that the Christ is also an expression of having set up a tent. But you know, a tent is a marvelous image, you know, it's it's a home, it's a shelter, but it's portable, you know. You know, it's not a mansion to get a camping trip. Maybe hears of it.

It's fragile in a way. It's it's temporary, you know, but that we all have this tent of wisdom, and that wisdom is, of course one of the divine feminine incarnations of the divine wisdom is feminine and the Hebrew Bible hawk mouth Hebrew or is feminine, and Sophia the Greek word is feminine and the East to Kuanian is wisdom, and she's feminine. So it's an affirmation of feminine wisdom.

And feminine wisdom includes a whole, it includes Cosmos, and in the Hebrew Bible and probablys we hear that that wisdom was by God's side, playing with God. And that's at Eross again, playing day after day. She's there whenever there's creativity. That killed the guard, the same who the we're talking about. She says that wisdom is involved in all creative works, and Hill the Guard herself in quest with a genius musician. She was a painter, She painted

many paintings and her Mandela's, her visions. She was a herbalist and a in a healer. She was involved in so many art forms, so she knew what she was talking about when she said that wisdom is part of all creative work. So all that is encapsulated in her in her wonderful affirmation that we're all born with this tent of wisdom, and usaid life's journey is setting up the tent. It's not easy to set up this tent. There are obstacles along the way, but we can do it.

I think it's a beautiful image, beautiful parable. I agree. Well, Matthew, that is a great place for us to wrap up for today. So thank you so much for agreeing to be a guest on the show, for coming back on. Thank you so much for your work. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can find you and your work. But again, thank you so much. Thank you Eric, and thank you for your work and having a platform like this to talk about fun and important

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