Episode 10: "Holy Smoke!" Holy Fire with Tom Yeomans

Thomas Yeomans, Ph.D. is the founder and director of the Concord Institute. His background includes education at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of California and professional work in the fields of literature, education, and psychology. Tom has been involved with Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Psychology for over forty years. He studied with Roberto Assagioli, M.D. in the early 1970's, and has trained professionals in Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Psychology since then, both in individual and group work, throughout North America and in Europe and Russia.

Tom has published writing on Psychosynthesis and Spiritual Psychology as well as three volumes of poetry and a childrens' book. He is founder/director of The Concord Institute and co-founder of the International School in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is also a painter and musician. Tom maintains a private practice in psycho-spiritual consulting and mentoring in Shelburne Falls, MA. His latest book is Holy Fire: The Process of Soul Awakening.

Tom Discusses

-  What is contemplative?
-  What is psychosynthesis (PS) as a framework for human development? Freud, Jung and Assagioli – the full spectrum of human consciousness and experience
-  House as metaphor of human consciousness and Assagioli’s addition of a “terrace”
-  The inherent, natural evolutionary tendency of human development toward integration, synthesis and spiritual maturity
-  Abraham Maslow and self-actualization
-  Tom searching in his 20s, PhD program and discovery of Assagioli’s “egg diagram” as personal epiphany
-  The centrality of the present moment as a touchstone in PS underlying aliveness and vitality
-  Doctrine and dogma – “you can’t dogmatize the present moment”
-  Tom’s lastest book, Holy Fire: The Process of Soul Awakening - the purpose of using  “holy” and “soul” as terms
-  The book is primarily written for “serious seekers” not necessarily for professionals
- In PS the emergence of needs arising from existential reality is key and techniques and methods are selected appropriate to serving those needs specific to each individual
-  The story of Craig the dumpmeister
-  Four types of awakening and their "wildness"
-  Importance of cultivating an appreciation of the unknown
-  Pythagoras, his lyre and awakening to the cosmos
-  Paradox of opening to the Big Picture and self as unique
-  No split between macro and micro as with Aristotle – the non-dual
-  The lived experience of poetry and painting as spiritual practices
-  Tom closes by reading his poem “Now”

References Mentioned

The Concord Institute

Holy Fire: The Process of Soul Awakening

The All Things Contemplative Blog 

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Hello, this is Ron Barnett, the host of All Things Contemplative, the podcast that explores the variety of ways in which life expresses a contemplative dimension in human experience. Today our guest is Tom Yeomans, and we'll be turning to Tom in a moment. But before we do, I wanted to mention a couple things. First, as I always do, if you have speakers, a guest or topics that you would like to see on the podcast, please drop me an email and let me know, and we'll see what we can do with getting the person or the topic on. Also, I'm starting a new newsletter, a monthly newsletter that will come out for the podcast. And if you'd like to sign up for that on the podcast blog, you'll be able to find a very easy, simple way to sign up for that podcast newsletter. And I won't snow you with too many emails.

My plan is just to do one per month so it doesn't clog your inbox. Our guest today is Tom Yeomans. Tom is the founder and director of the Concord Institute, and he's trained professionals and consulted with individuals in what's called Psychosynthesis and spiritual psychology for over 40 years throughout North America and internationally. Tom's background is quite a renaissance background in that he has education at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of California and professional work in the fields of literature, education, and psychology. The institute itself offers programs and services that speak to the increasing engagement with and understanding of the spiritual dimension of human experience beyond any particular religious context. Very important clause there beyond any particular religious context and the responsible and conscious cultivation and expression of its wisdom, power, and love within the context of daily life. Tom's work is based on the need for such new perspectives on psychological and spiritual development and greater awareness of how they or whether these aspects of our experience affect the way we live and work and relate to each other on the planet. Finally, last year, Tom published a new book entitled Holy Fire, the Process of Soul, and we'll be talking about that book as we go along today. So with that said, Tom Yeomans, welcome.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Ron. I'm very glad to be here. I've contemplated this meeting for a long time.

Speaker 1:

It's funny. I was going to say I actually know your wife better than I know you better than I know you, but that's another story. I should say that as way of transparency, I actually trained back in the seventies in Psychosynthesis, both as a professional undergoing professional training and personal growth through this method that Tom will tell us about or approach to human development. Psychosynthesis. Tom, as I always do, I always ask gas to say what the word contemplative means to you, what makes something contemplative. When I read your new book, the Holy Fire, I noticed that word doesn't appear yet. Knowing what I know about you, I know that that's not a bad word and certainly a word that you're familiar with,

Speaker 2:

With absolutely.

Speaker 1:

So what makes something contemplative?

Speaker 2:

Well, I was thinking about this word, and I think that in some ways there are levels of meaning, that there's a more, in a sense, popular use of it where someone spent a long time contemplating the menu before they chose or contemplating suicide or contemplating a trip to Europe. So I would say that this core experience of contemplation is sustained attention, paying close attention and sustained attention to something. But a deeper level, which I think is what you're interested in, is when you pay sustained attention to the spiritual to God and their people who make their lives as contemplatives, they really choose to draw back from the world and live in daily relationship to the divine to God, to the spiritual world, however you would say it, it still sustained attention, but it sustains attention in obviously over a much longer period of time. And is also the other thing is that sustained attention over time of contemplation, I think entails the experience of surrender and letting go and becoming one with whatever you are contemplating.

So that the contemplative traditions are those that give us the capacity to surrender, become one with the divine, and in a sense to lose our individuality, or I would say rather to have our individuality be subsumed by a larger field of energy or being, again, whatever the words would be. So I think of it as in a sense, a secular term contemplating the menu and then also a very deeply religious or spiritual term, not only really paying close attention for a long, long, long time, which includes paying attention to all the blocks to your attention or all the distractions that come up, but it also entails an experience of surrender of oneself to something larger. And again, there'd be many words for what that is, but it's definitely something larger that you surrender and are subsumed within. So that's how I think about competitive.

Speaker 1:

Right. Would it be true to say that when that letting go and surrender occurs that in some sense one is actually expressing or manifesting some nature of self that is enlightened, that's new, that's wise? Would that be true? When we say surrendering to God, it's like, well, what happened to me? So can you comment on that? Oh,

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. No, I mean I think that there's a confusion there of losing yourself, and in some teachings there's a strong emphasis on you have to give up yourself, you have to let go of yourself, you have to rise above yourself, so forth and so on. I would say more along the lines of what you're saying is that there is something in us that is inherently in a state of contemplation and is connected to our individuality and to our individual lives. The term I use for that is the soul. And I know that you're going to ask me a question about the soul, but if you want to say, I say the soul is an intermediary between God or the spirit or the divine and the personal. So I would see it as a figure ground phenomenon that as a person enters into a state of contemplation, that connection that comes out of surrender and letting go becomes foreground.

But they don't lose who they are. It simply that it's there, and when the contemplative experience is over, they come back to after enlightenment more laundry, that there is a paradox here, and this is very central to my work. Also, a paradox between as human beings are having a contemplative nature, which I call the soul, but also needing to live in the world and needing to be very practical. And I was thinking about Thomas Merton, who of course was a wonderful contemplative event who devoted his life to being a monk, but he was a very earthy and pragmatic and lively person and had a very strong personality and friendships and love affairs, and he was very alive in the world. And of course, one of his books is called Contemplation and Action, and I think of him as someone who embraced that paradox and lived both sides of it. So that's a long answer to your question, but no, I don't think we disappear. I think that's a distortion of what the experience is. I think we are suffused with spiritual energy or force or with God, but we remain ourselves, remain who we are.

Speaker 1:

It sounds like becoming something that we didn't know we were in a sense.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

And that our identity takes on new meaning and therefore new expression.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, yes. And this ties in with awakening in a sense. The experience of contemplation is awakening to a deeper level of who we are, and it is not a foregone conclusion. We can talk about that later, but certainly that experience is awakening to some experience of ourselves that we didn't know before. And at the same time, we don't leave the world, we stay here. And the way I talk about that is the experience of contemplation that you're speaking about could open up greater. The word I use is soul infusion of the personality and personal life, so that we would come to live more and more from that deep and true place within ourselves, but we still would be in the world and have jobs and have friendships and get sick and all the things that human beings struggle with. So it's not leaving the world, it's somehow coming into a new relationship with the world and with human life through this opening that you're talking about. That make sense?

Speaker 1:

It does. It does. Very much so. Tom, I know that that psychosynthesis has been foundational for you professionally and personally through the years, and I think it would be good if you could sort of tell us what Psychosynthesis is, just sort of lay the foundation, because I think, well, you can tell us, but I think it's foundational to everything that you're about and have been about for what now going on 50 years. 50 years, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's interesting. It's not an easy thing to define, but I'll do it. Term was first coined by an Italian psychiatrist, Roberto Asli, who lived, he died in the seventies, and he was born in 1888. So he was contemporary, slightly younger than Freud, a colleague of young, a psychiatrist in Florence who was very interested in the psychology of that time, psychoanalysis being the main branch and depth psychology. And for a while, he was in touch with Freud's circle. He went to Vienna, and Freud was quite excited about him. And there's a letter between Freud and Yong where Freud says, ah, this young Italian, he is reel. He is very lively. We will make him a disciple of psychoanalysis. And he actually did write his thesis for medical school on psychoanalysis, and his professors didn't know a thing about it. So he was way, way ahead of his time.

But the interesting thing about him was that he and young did this in a different way. He found that psychoanalysis was too limited for how he understood psychology, and the way he put it rather only way. He said, it's only about the basement of the building, and there are all these other levels to the human being, including the terrace where you can go out the stairs to the terrace and come out and see the sky and the stars. So he coined a word to make the distinction of psychoanalysis, and Freud was very disappointed. He at the same time, joined young in analytical psychology who in his own way was trying to include the self and the spiritual dimension. The other reason that I was speaking about the term psychosynthesis, he also posited that from birth to death, there was within the human being a drive for evolution, for maturation, for greater maturity and integration and synthesis.

And he termed that the process of psychosynthesis with a small P, in other words, there was an inherent directional growth trajectory in every human being toward the fullest expression of who they were and toward the fullest maturity that they could achieve. And that this process of psychosynthesis with a small P could be supported in many, many different ways. And we could trust it, we could count on it, and we could learn to cooperate with it. And that human growth wasn't just haphazard, it had direction. And Abraham Maslow was developing at that time a similar idea in terms of self-realization and self-actualization.

There were a number of people speaking about this inherent drive, and this was Astro Jo's contribution was to call it the process of Psychosynthesis. In my book, I talk about trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, and I realized this morning I was just thinking that was doing what I wanted to do, but I didn't know it. But Psychosynthesis gave me the understanding of what I was up to. It's a funny thing. I can look back earlier in my life and seeing that I was very interested in the soul and spiritual life, but I didn't know it. And I also thought there were other things that I should do with my life, what my father thought I should do, what my culture thought I should do, so forth and so on, which created a fair amount of confusion. But anyway, at age 30, I was in the graduate program, PhD in education and psychology, and someone said, oh, Tom, you're interested in guided imagery.

You should read this book. It had just been published a few years before. So I read it and I was enjoying, it was very interesting, many, many different ways. At one point I came to what's affectionately called the Oval Diagram or the egg diagram. It's a map of the consciousness of the human being, which includes the higher self, includes the spiritual. And I looked at that map, it is a diagram in the book. I looked at it and I said, my God, this is what I've been looking for. I had an epiphany right at that moment, I would call it now soul moment, that I recognized at that moment what my life was about in a conscious way. So the discovery of Psychosynthesis very personal and spiritual to me, it put me on my track. It put me on my path. The confusion fell away.

I studied it in California, and then my wife and I with our two small children, we had a nine month baby, old baby and a 4-year-old. We went to Florence to study with us. Julie, who at that time by that time was 82 years old, and we spent several months with him in the fall of 1972. I mean, that's a whole story in itself, but we became people who wanted to teach psychosynthesis and work with people in that framework and develop it further. So from age 30, and I'm now 80, so I could have chosen analytical psychology, I could have chosen Buddhism, I could have chosen any number of things, but this is what came to me and has been very, very useful. The problem when you first asked what it is, is it's a very broad and a very comprehensive framework for understanding human experience.

And when Sam Keen interviewed Roberto Assagioli, he asked him, what are the limitations of Psychosynthesis? And Roberto in this sort of ish way said, the limitation of Psychosynthesis is there is no limitation. So it's very hard to pin down. And I've seen over the course of the 50 years, people say, oh, psychosynthesis, it's this right, the will or psychosynthesis, it's this, it's sub personalities, whatever. But the fact that it really is a frame for holding the complexity and the beauty and the unfinishedness and the evolving human dimension in its human experience in its many different dimensions. And I've loved that It's given me plenty of room to move and think and develop. And in fact, to take it further and some of the innovations that have happened within the field have questioned some of the things that Pastor Jolie posited at that time in 1911 when he coined it. And that's a good thing. And he'd be the first person to say, yes, everything's changing all the time. And so Psychosynthesis two is changing, but it's been the framework within which I've thought and work for the last 50 years.

Speaker 1:

Given this broad expanse of the framework itself that you just mentioned, how does the framework not become, to throw out a couple concepts here, how does it not become doctrine or dogma or something in fact that limits human experience as opposed to understanding it, supporting it, facilitating it? Because it's still,

Speaker 2:

That's a great question. And it becomes prescriptive and it becomes judgmental, and it says, this experience is more important than that experience field of Psychosynthesis has struggled with all those things. It certainly, those are times when the system, like any system that is concretized becomes dogmatic, rigid, and ironically gets in the way of the very process it supposedly is supporting. One could say this about Christianity too. It's not that Christianity is wrong, it is just that in limited hands, it will become dogmatic and work against the actual experience it's supposed to support. So yes, we definitely had to struggle with those things. Now, one thing that I've done, which in the book is through the whole book, is to try to root the process of psychosynthesis in the present moment and in the unknown of now. And to say that really is the touchstone for the work.

It's not the concepts, it's not the past and future. It's not the structures. It's whatever experience is happening in the moment. And if we can come, this is this's more to be said than for this, but if we can come to that moment, it keeps the process alive, it keeps the process alive, and then we also, we can learn how to support it in its liveness moment to moment. So it's not that you give up thinking and concepts and so forth, but you make the figure, you make the central ground, the experience in the present moment, either of yourself or the person you're working with. And that saves you from some of the things you're raising. You can't really dogmatize the present moment. I mean, you can dogmatize teachings about the present moment, but the actual experience, that's life, that's aliveness right in the moment. So I can talk more about that. It's very central to holy fire. It has to do with aliveness and aliveness in the present moment as well as this process of psychos synthesis that moves through us over the course of a lifetime.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's just jump into the holy fire if we could. This is a book that you published last year, holy Fire, the Process of Soul Awakening. And clearly two words out of the title Sleep Off the Page are off the screen, the word holy and the word soul. And maybe we could begin, Tom, if you could tell me why you chose that word soul, given that you could have chose alternative terms like higher self transpersonal, self true nature, all good words, but you didn't choose those, you chose soul. How

Speaker 2:

Come? I think I chose it because it's part of our common parlance soul food. I had to look into my soul to figure out what was right. That was a soulful moment. He's a very soulful person, musician, whatever. In other words, it's being used all the time. And what I wanted with book as a whole was to get it as close to the reader's experience as I could. In other words, I was not interested in the reader coming to know in an objective way more about this process. I was interested in writing the book in an informal, conversational, inviting way with everyday language that would invite the reader to participate and to be touched in their own experience. And I thought soul, to use soul as a common parlance would move that possibility.

Yung uses self, Assagioli uses higher self. I think there problems with higher self because it creates hierarchy. True nature. Han uses true nature. That's beautiful essence to me. They're all synonymous. But I chose soul for that reason. The other reason I think I did is because I am a poet and an artist, I think energetically both for me, and I thought for people too that the word soul would be more evocative and more alive. And just to say a little bit more about that, and it ties in with what I said before. To me, the core of the soul is aliveness. It's vitality. So I wanted to find a word that could hold that spiritual vitality and higher self. I just didn't have that experience. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

No, I get it. I get it. Yeah. It goes back to what you said about Merton being an alive human being, irrespective of what he was. And it also seems to relate back, Tom to what you said about basing matters in human experience in the present existential moment of what's going on

Speaker 2:

In the first part of the book, he doesn't say your higher self. He says, Tom, your soul knows all about it. It's only waiting for you to find out. So the master, so to speak, the founder use his soul. Obviously he wrote about the higher self because he wanted to be accepted by psychology. But in his actual experience. And the other thing, Ron is so interesting, and I just was rereading this. There's an interview with as Assagioli just a couple of years before he died that Evar Lumus does, it's on YouTube. And in five minutes he talks about the essence of psychosynthesis. One thing he says, he says, you need to start with the existential situation of the patient, the existential reality of the patient. That is the touchstone for all the work. He's saying, essentially what I'm saying in a slightly different way. He said, then you figure out what technique, what approach, what concept, whatever you need to use to support that need. But you start with the need. So even in his sort of Victorian writing, he was onto what I'm talking about in terms of the aliveness. And it's a beautiful interview.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, indeed. So Tom, does one need to accept the soul as a metaphysical reality to be able to gain,

Speaker 2:

Oh, it's such a

Speaker 1:

Good question. Benefit from awakening to the soul?

Speaker 2:

No,

I think the word helps, but it's not necessary. In other words, people are having, going back to the building that as Julie talked about, they're having terrorist experiences. They may have sustained ones if their personality can hold it. They may have just momentary ones where they see a sunset and something happens, but they're having terrace experiences. They're also having in basement experiences, and they're also having first floor and second floor experiences. And that process of psychosynthesis with a small P is moving through the house and helping clean the house or make it more beautiful. How are we do the metaphor? Okay, so by the end of the lifetime, it's a really beautiful house with all the stories intact and so forth. Now, if you thought that the word soul was the use of the word soul was dependent on that process, really trouble. The value of soul is that it makes explicit what's implicit and allows a person to say, oh, that's my soul.

That's who I am. That's me at my best. These are the things I really care about. This is what has most meaning for me. This is really how I want to be in the world. Oh, I didn't know I was that wise, whatever it is. So you're in the experience, but you have a frame that can hold it and legitimize it because so many people are ashamed of those experiences or they think they should be somebody else, or they're too wounded to open to that experience. But it's there on all of us. And I was thinking about today, I was thinking about this man who runs the dump here and his name is Craig, and people are bringing recycling and all this stuff. And he sits in this little booth and people come up and talk to him, and he sells tickets for the dump and so forth. He's been close to death two or three times with different illnesses. And he's come back and he there radiant. He's 78 years old, very alive. Everyone who comes, he says, Hey, how are you? He has treats for the dogs, he has lollipops for the kids, and he welcomes everybody to the dump. And the dump isn't a live place. People love going to the dump.

Now, if you said to Craig, Craig, that's your soul, he'd say, ah, Tom, I don't, but so he's a radiant, he's burning with holy fire, let's put it that way. He is alive in the way Craig is to be alive, which is the dump. I call him the dump meister. And he's a wonderful man, and people love talking with him. So no, it's not dependent on the word. On the other hand, if you use the word, it helps.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I see. So we've dealt with one of those two traditionally religious terms in the title Tom Soul makes certainly sense to me. How about the word holy?

Speaker 2:

If you look on page 32 of the book, that's how I define the soul deliberately in existential terms. And I say it is a doorway to religion, but you don't have to go there. And I disclaim basically that connection and say, we're using this in a secular existential way. And soul goes both ways. So he restoreth my soul, he leads me in the paths with righteousness for his namesake. Yay, though I walk to the valley of the shadow of death, their soul in the 23rd Psalm. So yes, it can be used religiously. And it may be that in some cases the work in Psychosynthesis will heal and develop people in the way that they can reclaim the religious roots that they've rejected. But it's not necessary. And what I call this existential spirituality, that this is within the secular world. Now, holy is the same thing.

Holy leaves the door open to the divine, but it also brings the divine here. And also through the image of fire and aliveness, it brings the divine here. And my interest, and I'm not faulting anybody else's interest, but my interest is to bring spiritual fire here to the world, to the planet, to people's lives. I've been trying to figure out how to do that using the framework of psychosynthesis. And it does seem to me that we really need that fire. We need evolution and transformation. I know that's a question you have further down the line. So holy goes both ways. It's like holy cow, holy smoke, and holy moly. Exactly. And yet it's evocative. It comes from this dream that I had at the very beginning of the book where I describe, I actually had the experience of the holy fire in my cells. So it also just came out of my own personal experience too.

Speaker 1:

As I read the book, it struck me that you were kind of speaking with two megaphones. One megaphone was speaking to professional therapists, psychotherapists, professional educators, maybe even professional organizational consultants because I know it has some applicability to organizations and organizational life. But it also seemed you were speaking to kind of the common man and the common woman who has some other kind of professional life or career or job. And so it struck me as, and not everyone may be able to go and see a psychosynthesis consultant or a therapist that may be increasingly less so given the internet and the ability to interact online together. But I think it's still generally true for different reasons. How does one on one's own make use of these ideas of being in touch with one's awakening to one's soul, one's aliveness in the world without seeing a professional person. And the other thing I think, Tom, that I just want to plug in here is that increasingly survey shows that in our culture, people are increasingly spiritual but not religious. In other words, you said that in some cases people through psychosynthesis are kind of returning to the religion of their childhood, but that's not true for everyone.

Speaker 2:

The book is designed for just what you're talking about. It is for the person who I say for serious seekers, people who really want to find their way, their spiritual path and the realization of their soul, however, and on their own. And a friend of mine read it and said, Tom, this book is psychoactive. And what he meant by that. And I've also gotten a number of letters from people now saying, Tom, I find myself carrying this book around and reading it and rereading it, and then it helped me. Someone wrote me from England and said, this is illuminant where I am and illuminant where I am and what my next steps are. Management consultants dump Meisters gardeners a wide range of people in a number of countries who are reading it without going to a therapist. And I deliberately wanted to speak to that group of people more than the professional.

And what I say is, this might be also good for the professional to learn how to support the process of soul awakening, but the impact of the book, and that's why I made it experiential. That's why I put poetry in it. That's why I put my paintings in it. That's why I kept it informal, was to speak not to the academician and the professional, but if you want to say that the common man and woman who are struggling with their lives, and there is a little section for the professionals. For the practitioners. And what I also say is that because I think this is true, a practitioner cannot be helpful to a client unless they too are engaged in the process. So even if you're a therapist or a psychiatrist or whatever, in order to support spiritual life, you need to be living a spiritual life yourself. You can't do it with your mind, you can't do it at a distance. You have to be engaged. So it's a book for the public, what I could say, serious seekers, but it includes professionals. And it's interesting that a number of institutes have picked it up and are using it in their training program. So it has a place there. But my intention was not to create another textbook

Speaker 1:

On a personal note, as I mentioned earlier, I did professional training in Psychosynthesis in my twenties, and then subsequently in my thirties, I moved away from it. I went back to graduate school and went in different directions. But I still sort of maintained the basic framework that as Joli developed, that there was this process of awakening. I remember from the training program I was in that was said, anything that works for the person is a psychosynthesis technique. And so whether I was doing this approach or that approach or studying with this or that teacher, I always found it useful and pragmatic to have this vision of evolving and synthesis going on your book, actually. And so oftentimes I thought, well, I left, but I, and did I turn my back on something and walk away from it? I must say that your book Holy Fire sort of confirmed that I didn't, because it seemed to me that in some way I was in touch. I say with great gratitude that I stayed in touch with the process, however, it was holding through the decade, and I've just entered my seventies recently. So it's been going on a while. But I found that very appealing about the book that,

Speaker 2:

And it's also interesting that different parts of the book will leap out at different points for people. So it isn't like it's all useful going back to what I said at the beginning, it's useful in accordance to the degree to which it touches the experience of the person's actually having and the need that they have, and forget the rest. It's not important. Now, it will be important maybe in a month or two months, but it's not important. Now, this is touching it. And I want to say that psychosynthesis exercises or practices techniques can totally disrupt that process. In other words, it's not just any other techniques getting in the way. Even some of the holy cows of psychosynthesis in limited hands, I don't want to say wrong hands, but in limited hands work across purposes to the movement of the soul in the person. So no technique can do it. It's more being in touch with the process and supporting it, learning how to support it

Speaker 1:

Just as doctorate or dog. Absolutely. Or theology can get in the way of what's trying to happen for a person. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned just I had a meditation practice for about 20 years daily practice, and then I lost all interest in it. I just quit doing it, and it gave me a lot of consternation because I thought it was critical and it went for a couple years without it and didn't do it. But just in the last, I would say six to eight months, there was a need to reengage it again, not with the same zealot that I had before. So I do a little here, I do a little there. If I miss a day, it bother me. And I think that speaks, if I'm hearing you correctly, to staying in touch with the existential moment of what's going on, what's dormant, what's emerging.

Speaker 2:

If you're connected, you'll know what to do and what not to do. Your Buddha nature, your soul, whatever, you'll know what to do and what not to do.

Speaker 1:

I always love that little statement by Aldous Huxley, where he says, good being, good being results in good doing.

Speaker 2:

In the book, I have these four phases of awakening. And maybe the way of saying it is that, well, it's based on a story about Assagioli actually who when he woke up every morning, he would wake up from sleep and then he would meditate and he would have what he called a second awakening to his soul, to his deeper nature, his true nature, whatever. So you could say that when he first woke up, and actually that's true of us when we first wake up, we could be grumpy, we can, whatever, we're not awake, we're asleep in some way, and then we wake up who we are. And those two awakenings actually are a lot of what psychology is about because there are all sorts of things that happen to us or are all sorts of ways in which our personality develop that keep us from knowing who we are or that we have a soul or that we are a soul.

So in a sense, a first awakening is to consciousness and then the consciousness of who we are at the personality level, if you want to say. And the work in Psychosynthesis does that through sub personality. Now there's internal family systems, and then there's a second awakening to what we've been talking about is the soul, the context that holds our life and the process that's moving. And that awakening is a bit like when we were talking about contemplation. It is to, oh, I'm more than just a frightened child. I'm more than a businessman. I'm more than there's something that's really alive in me that we're using soul for that. And the direction and consciousness for that second awakening is largely transcendent. In other words, we are rising above the things we thought we were. And we also need to let go of those things. Like you let go of meditation to 20 years of meditation in order because it was no longer serving you and now you're picking it up again if you want to say at another level.

So the direction is largely transcendent In the second awakening, the third awakening is descendant. It's now I know who I am, how do I express myself in the world? What is my calling, my vocation? What has most meaning for me? How do I behave in a way that is consonant with who I'm, what are the blocks to that? Because we still can be mean, cruel, forgetful, whatever. So the third awakening is in a sense, emphasizes more the soul's energy incarnating coming into our daily life. And then the fourth awakening, which is the most mysterious, is when there's experience of all of that. If you want to use our metaphor of the house, of not only experience the whole house but the cosmos with which the house exists and you have to clean the basement, you have to tidy the first and second floor, and you have to know how to get to the terrace.

And then when you get to the terrace, something else happens. Oh my God, this is so big, the cosmos, how are people experience it? There's this experience that goes way beyond our personal lives, and we can leave that nameless, whatever that is. So that's why I tried to differentiate in the awakening. It's not like that they happen serially, they're like braids of a rope, but they emphasize different things. So you have some clients who really need to step back and realize that they have this deeper nature and spend some time on the terrace. You have other clients that have spent too much time on the terrace and they're afraid of the world. They need to really develop their personalities in ways that they can express who they are and not just be who they are. And then there's some people who have done that work and something else happens to them.

If you were to take the four stages of awakening and have four stage awakening workshops and codify it and create structure around it, it would lose its wildness. The whole process of soul awakening is wild in the sense that we become naturally who we are, which is wild. It's not conventional. It's not just culture produced, it's idiosyncratic. It's who you are like no other person in the world. So it's not wildness in a crazy sense. It's a wildness sense, and we become naturally who we are. And that's unique and beautiful. And also I say again and again that the process itself is mysterious and that the unknown is one of the major things you need to cultivate in order to respond to what life is asking from you. So in all those senses, we are growing toward wildness in ourselves, but in this deeply natural, coherent way.

Speaker 1:

Right? Right. Yeah. Wild and crazy guy, maybe not so crazy, but one of his fourth awakening to the cosmos. I don't want to end without us touching on that at least, particularly given our planetary situation. One of my teachers once said, what it is can't be said, but you have to say something. What it is can't be said, but you have to say something. What can you say about the nature of this cosmic awakening?

Speaker 2:

I chose the word cosmos because it's the word that Pythagoras uses. And Pythagoras distinguishes himself from Plato and Aristotle in a very significant way. He was a mathematician. He was also a social reformer. He was a monk. He was very talented teacher whose community was destroyed in the day or so. So he clearly was a radical, but he basically said, using the metaphor of the liar is that we have the possibility of coming into greater and greater harmony with life. And he used the strings of the liar as an analogy for harmony. And since we're tuning our liar, if you want to say, but he never separated the macrocosm from the microcosm. In other words, he said basically, you're still the liar as you tune it, it would be guitar now, right? You tune your guitar. Guitar doesn't disappear. So I think what I was trying to say in talking about awakening the cosmos is that there's a paradox of opening if you want to say to larger and larger realities.

And at the same time, exactly the same time as the fruit of this process becoming more and more distinctly yourself, you do not leave your life to find God. We'll put it that way. But your life becomes held and infused by the cosmos. That's the word I use, but remain very particularly yourself as like all the snowflakes. There's no two snowflakes alike. You don't become a cosmic snowflake. You become who you are in essence, in particularity. And there's no split. And Aristotle and Plato both split the universe in different ways. They said it's divided. There's the ideal forms up there, and there's everyday life here. And Aristotle in its own way by developing the scientific process created objectification. So it was another kind of splitting. And in talking about awakening to cosmos, I'm trying to say there's an experience where there's no splitting, there's no projection. There's experience of deep wholeness, micro cosmically, and macro cosmically.

Speaker 1:

I guess in the language of today, we would say it's non dual. He was, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Some people didn't like it either.

Speaker 1:

Who knew that Pythagoras was talking about that way back when? Gosh, Tom, this has really been enlightening and fun, which was my two goals for getting you on the podcast to be enlightened and to have fun. And certainly we've attained both of those goals.

Speaker 2:

I was thinking, well, can I rehearse for this? And then I said, no, I did some thinking so forth. But what I need you to do is to come to this interview with Ron and be in the unknown and see what happened. And it was really wonderful. I hope I didn't say too much, but I really enjoyed what came to me from your questions. And it was fresh and new for me rather than something I had rehearsed. So I had this feeling of vitality and joy as we end. And I want to thank you for that. I really enjoyed this a lot. The second thing, I thought I would read a poem and just to say a word about the poetry in the book and the paintings. They were also to try to evoke the living experience rather than just attract a psychological tract. And poetry and painting have both been very important to me as spiritual practices, so I wanted to include them in the book. So on the back cover of the book, there's a poem which is very apropos to what we've been talking about, it's called now. So I thought I would read that. And it also, you'll see in the poem, it has the big picture. It definitely includes the terrace, let's put it that way.

Now, as our Dear Earth turns far stars wheel and the great fire burns, we in long light descend the hill of our birth, descend to death, gather in heart and soul kernels of life as grist for love, wait in growing dark for loved ones before and behind, surrender at last to time and space, returning our bodies ablaze with the almost unbearable beauty of now. So be it.

Speaker 1:

Tom, thank you very much for coming on. And for listeners, if you have questions for Tom comments, you can post those on the blog once the episode goes up. I wish you peace and I'll see you down the road. And with that, this episode of All Things Contemplative comes to a close. I hope you found it interesting and informative and will join me for the next episode piece.