Diarmuid O’Murchu Interview

Summary:

Full interview, edited for readability

Diarmud: One begins to wonder, and this indeed may be the great paradox in what in Christian faith we call the Paschal Journey, does there have to be some kind of a major crisis or maybe a number of major crises that will bring us humans to our senses? And in the face of which, maybe there will be some serious calamities for our species before we kind of wake up. In other words, does there need to be some kind of a calvary before we’re open to this new resurrection?

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. I’m Rick Archer. My guest today is Diarmuid O’Murchu. Diarmuid is a Catholic theologian known for his insightful perspectives on spirituality in the evolving nature of human consciousness. He often addresses themes of chaos and transformation, suggesting that these can be opportunities for growth and new ways of being. Diarmuid encourages people to embrace change and view it as a path toward deeper understanding and spiritual evolution. His work highlights the importance of thinking globally while acting locally, emphasizing the role of spirit in guiding humanity through social and political upheavals. And these days we’ve been putting a little several word phrase in the thumbnail image on the YouTube videos, and for you we put “theology coming of age.” And so I think we’ll start off talking about that, and you know, by its name, theology seems it would be the study of God, but I looked it up, and indeed it’s the study or science of God and divine things. And what I found when I looked it up is that it’s understood there are two aspects of theology, rational theology, based on reason alone without relying on divine revelation, and then revealed theology, which is based on divine revelation using sacred texts and religious experiences as sources of understanding. So, does that concur with your definition of theology and what do you mean by theology coming of age?

Diarmud: Okay, thank you for having me and welcome to all who are joining with us on this presentation. I come from a social science background and one of the things coming from my background is a closer look at language and how we use language and how we use concepts and how these have been enculturated at different times in history. So when you talk about rational theology, to my mind there’s a fundamental contradiction there. Theology is the opening up to the mystery or the mysterious reality that we call God. And we humans have been doing that for thousands upon thousands of years, long before formal religions ever came into being. The notion of rational theology as officially defined is when we begin to build our theology as we have been doing for most of the 2000 years of Christendom on the basis of Greek metaphysics, our classical Greek philosophy, for which the use of reason is a very central feature, and hence the word rational. Then when we come to the word revealed theology, what we have to first give attention to is how we have defined that concept or that word of revelation again in our Christian story and in Christian history. Basically the word was originally defined in the 300s in the context of some of the major councils of the early Christian church and the official definition which still lasts to this day for revealed theology is that it begins with the story of creation at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian scriptures and ends with the death of the last apostle. And there is no formal revelation therefore after that, according to that formal definition. Now that definition was drawn up by a small group of elite males in the Roman Empire of the time. Half of humanity had no say in the matter and the rest of creation through which God has been revealing God’s self for billions of years before we humans ever came on the scene. All that is excluded. So to my mind, that’s a narrowly dangerous way to define theology. It’s almost verging on idolatry. And therefore, both definitions, I suggest, need to be re-examined pretty profoundly.

Rick: Good. Well, let’s continue to re-examine them in this conversation. And I’m glad I asked you to define those because when I read the words revealed theology, I thought, oh, that must be like a mystical cognition that, you know, the saints had or yogis have and things like that. They’re talking about direct experience, but you just explained it completely differently.

Diarmud: Correct. In actual fact, traditionally, and this is one of the sad features, and this is where the word rational has been so important in the history of theology, is that anything to do with human experience was perceived to be highly suspect. Working on the premise, we are fundamentally a flawed species. So our experience cannot really be trusted. And when we’re doing something as serious and profound as theology, we need to rise above our experience and all the personal features of it and hold more firmly to the rational mind. And that’s where then the definition of the rational one also needs to be re-examined. I think experience is incredibly important for our understanding of theology today, and indeed has been for many centuries, particularly in the lives of the great mystics, because for them experience was a very fundamental stratum in their theological understanding of life.

Rick: Yeah, and when you say that experiential spirituality is suspect, can’t be trusted absolutely, I would agree with that. I mean, we shouldn’t have absolute trust in anything. I like Aldous Huxley’s suggestion that the development of the working hypothesis was the greatest contribution of the scientific revolution. And I tend to take everything as a working hypothesis, which means it has a certain degree of credibility and degrees vary according to how much empirical evidence you can find for it. And I think, personally, I think that spirituality could be approached in that way too. What do you think about that?

Diarmud: Yes, except I think when we are dealing… One of my favorite definitions of spirituality today, as we’re beginning to understand it now in the 21st century, is Spirit with a capital S connecting with Spirit with a small s. And basically I’m drawing there on one of the great foundational insights of Karl Rahner, that contrary to the earlier understanding, particularly say since the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the human spirit is fundamentally open to the Spirit of God and not fundamentally alien to the Spirit of God, which is the whole theory of original sin claims. And therefore, at that level then, to begin exploring the deeper meaning of life from the realm of experience is quite appropriate, but of course it needs to be done dialogically or communally. It needs to be done through the medium of conversation. And that brings in the whole notion of the theology of story, which has been kind of quite popular, our narrative theology over the past 50 or 60 years. And in the United States, the work of Jack Shea would be very fundamental in that particular approach.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. It’s reminiscent of the Hindu approach of the Jiva, the individual soul is Atman ultimately, the universal soul. And you need to understand their oneness experientially and not just conceptually.

Diarmud: Correct. Yeah.

Rick: And then Atman is Brahman, meaning the totality and thou art that, you are that totality. But again, it can’t just be an understanding and nice words. It has to be experiential.

Rick: Yeah, okay. So, one thing I just want to throw in here is that in your books you often quote the fact that human evolution goes back maybe 7 million years, and I interviewed a cosmologist a few weeks ago, and we were talking about the size of the Universe and the likelihood of Earth-like planets, and he said, “Oh, there are possibly millions, if not billions, of Earth-like planets in each galaxy, and there are trillions of galaxies, Maybe about 2 trillion of them. So when I think that, you know, and I think that life is probably abundant throughout the universe, and so if we really want to broaden our perspective, we should think in terms of more than just the 7 million years of, or whatever it is, of human evolution, we should think of, you know, the totality of the universe and how, you know, we’re just on this little grain of sand, making a great fuss about our ideas and our institutions and our politics and our wars and our religions and all that. Whereas there’s really a kind of a divine or cosmic reality to the thing that we’re largely oblivious to.

Diarmud: Well, actually, I would concur with that same argument, except I suppose I’m a more practical person with my feet on the ground. Some people say may be influenced by my Celtic background. And I think if we are really to appreciate those larger horizons of the meaning that science is illuminating today at a rapid rate. And number one, appreciate them. Number two, try to understand them. And number three, try to embrace and integrate them. Then I wonder it may be. For me, I think it’s eminently important. We need to begin with ourselves.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Diarmud: Our view of the human, I think, is incredibly narrow, reductionistic and self-destructive, basically. And for an example in the case of the Christian story, we’re back to your the material of theology a few minutes ago. Most Christians around the world and other cultures directly or indirectly influenced by Christianity, basically put a huge emphasis, often implicit, but to stay on the 2000 year benchmark, as if really nothing of significance happened before that. Our people of other religious persuasions might argue back three and a half or 4000 years, but they don’t link meaning, particularly at the human level, with anything back beyond those dates. And I think that’s incredibly self-destructive and very dangerous in many levels of the world in which we’re now living. We need a bigger vision to live more sanely, humanely and intelligently upon this planet. And therefore, let’s begin with what our real human story is and the story. But I’m speaking particularly in Christian audiences. I often use the language. What is actually God’s story for us in terms of our species? It’s not a story of 2000 years. It’s not a story of four or five thousand years. It’s a story of seven million years. And I believe our God has been fully involved with us every step of the way along that journey. Which then of course raises huge and very difficult questions for our Christian faith, which claims that Jesus came to rescue us from something that was fundamentally wrong. I mean that verges on idolatry because it’s saying that this all-wise, all-creative, wonderful God was making an absolute mess of things with us for most of the 7 million years. And to me, I just can’t buy into that at all.

Rick: Yeah, some of the Hindus have that kind of attitude too, that the world is an illusion, and it’s kind of a mistake, and you just want to get out of it as quickly as possible, get liberated, never come back here. And to me, that seems kind of disrespectful to God, particularly considering the incredible beauty and profundity of the world. By world, I mean the whole thing, the whole universe. And just which you can see, you know, who was it? William Blake said something about infinity and a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. You know, if we look closely at what’s staring us right in the face, God is hiding in plain sight, just alive in every little cell and blade of grass and ant and whatnot.

Diarmud: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. So this whole idea of the whole thing is a mistake and, you know, it’s just getting it off on the wrong foot.

Diarmud: Yeah, it is. And a lot of that thinking you see is anthropocentric. It’s almost like it begins with the assumption, a presumption. Well, we humans are messing things up and we don’t have it right. Therefore, nothing is right or can be right. And again, that’s a very dangerous, almost irresponsible way to be arguing or to be thinking about life. And it’s based, of course, on the premise that we are the supreme species. And again, that’s very much, we’re back to Revelation. That’s arising really from a basic postulant by Aristotle and Plato. We’re creatures with a soul, and that gives us the status of being superior beings to everything else. And so that whole anthropology has to be revisited and reworked.

Rick: Yeah. Well, there’s plenty of evidence to support the contention that we are messing things up, but perhaps they drew the wrong conclusions from that observation.

Diarmud: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, maybe we could say that we’re messing things up because we’re not actually adequately aligned with divine intelligence or whatever we want to call it. You know, we’re just kind of reflecting it very partially.

Diarmud: That’s very much my line of argument.

Rick: And so the project would be to learn how to attune ourselves to it more fully and ultimately completely if that’s possible.

Diarmud: Yes. Yeah. And I think particularly with the wisdom coming from the sciences today, from what we call the hard sciences, but also from the social sciences, there’s now abundant information around inviting us to come on board and enter this journey of exploration.

Rick: Yeah. So you call for a paradigm shift in Christian theology. I think we’re kind of hinting at what that might be, but perhaps you’d like to elaborate a bit on what it should be. And also, you know, paradigms are notoriously hard to shift, and for a good reason, because if they just shifted at the slightest contradiction, there would be no stability. But eventually, if there’s enough evidence to challenge them, anomalies they call it, then they will eventually shift. And so, you know, how do you think it’s going in terms of shifting the paradigm of Christian theology?

Diarmud: In a sense, I suppose this is very much the work of my great friend Ilya Delio. And it’s almost as if we’re living through evolutionary times where things are moving with a kind of a rapidity that we haven’t known for quite some time. Why now is obviously a complex question for which there’s no easy answer or obvious answer, but that this momentum is happening I think is obvious to me at least, and to many others indeed too. And therefore, in the context of theology, I very much like the phrase that’s being used today by a lot of theologians and scripture scholars, the call to rework the tradition. So in other words, we’re not trying out the baby with the bathwater. And it’s not merely a case of cling on, make sure you cling on to the tradition, which is what I was taught in my early years as a seminarian and as a student and so forth. And what is about reworking the tradition? Now, in the case of theology, I would be quite happy to begin with that little phrase of St. Anselm that was adopted by Thomas Aquinas. That theology is about faith, seeking understanding. Except, of course, for Anselm and Aquinas, when they were they talked about the deposit of faith, which was the formal scriptures and the church teaching around the early tradition. Today, I went back to the experience. Obviously, the word faith has a much more expanded meaning. And in conjunction with yourself, I would I would want to bring in the insights of the other great world religions. But I also want to bring in the insights that are coming to me from anthropology and the social sciences that we have been a spiritual species and have been engaging spiritually with life for thousands upon thousands of years. I think all that now has to come into our definition or understanding of faith today. And so, yes, how do we bring an understanding then to that evolving sense of faith that would be more relevant and meaningful for our times? And in that process, what does it mean to rework the different aspects of our tradition? So, for instance, I suppose one of the most controversial ones that people would see in my work, the very story or the very place of Jesus in terms of incarnation. If our God is fully with us, us when we first evolved 7 million years ago in East Africa, then that’s where incarnation begins in the Christian sense of the word. The embodiment of God in our bodies, in our flesh, in our lives. Therefore, where does that leave us there with the person of Jesus? My response to that question is that then it would seem that a more responsible and creative way to understand the story of Jesus, is to see Jesus as an affirmation, confirmation and celebration. To me, those three words are very important. Affirmation, confirmation and celebration of everything we achieved over the 7 million years. Because believe it or not, and fortunately we’re dealing with a science that’s becoming more and more rigorous. Believe it or not, it would seem that we got it right most of the time over the 7 million years. And we got it right because we remained very close to nature. And when we humans remain very close to nature, we tend to get it right. In the more recent millennia, when we put ourselves over against nature, and we create these awful dualistic divisions between ourselves and the natural world, we’re getting it desperately wrong. So, I would want to argue that Jesus didn’t come to rescue us from anything. That Jesus is about an affirmation, confirmation, celebration, and then offers us that very, I think is a great prophetic vision. The Gospels call it the Kingdom of God to help us to move forward with that mandate, if you like. And that will carry forward our own project as a human species, as well as what evolution I think is doing in us at the present time. Now, so I’m using that as an example of what I understand by the reworking of tradition.

Rick: Yeah, when you use those three words, affirmation, confirmation, celebration, what strikes me is that Jesus could be seen as evidence of what a human being is capable of, could become.

Diarmud: Absolutely.

Rick: And I think he said things along those lines, you know, all these great things that I do, you shall do even greater things.

Diarmud: Exactly.

Rick: Things like that. So, and if we jump back to my point about, you know, the trillions of advanced civilizations throughout the universe, you know, it calls into question the exclusivity or uniqueness of Jesus. I mean, unless he’s on tour, and that would be a very, he’d have to move at a pretty fast pace to cover all those planets. But probably they all have their Jesuses and their, you know, their divine revelators, they’re saints and sages and teachers and so on.

Diarmud: And we’re more likely to understand and appreciate that if we deal more creatively with our own.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. And then even staying on this planet, you know, I’ve often wondered, if Jesus was the only way, then what happened to all the people who lived and died before Jesus came around or who or even while he was alive or since he was alive who lived in Borneo or someplace and never heard of Jesus, you know, I guess as a Christianity or some branches of it have explanations for that, but they seem a little bit contrived to me.

Diarmud: Well, they tend to be very exclusive and they carry this rationality that we talked about earlier on and unfortunately, this sense of superiority. I mean, there are still strands, even in what some people would consider more progressive Christian theologians, that are saying things like, “We have access to revelation in a way that no other world religion has.” I find that totally unacceptable.

Rick: Yeah. And not only Christians, other religions are saying the same thing. And even sub-sub-subcategories of specific religions. You know, we’ve got the only way, those guys down the block, they’re off the beam. There’s a very funny comedian who does this skit about, you know, he’s meeting a guy, his name is, I forget his name, he’s meeting a guy who’s about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and he gets into a conversation with him to save his life, you know, and it turns out they’re both into Christianity and he starts narrowing down the sects and the streams of Christianity that they belong to, and then finally he gets to a point where there’s a difference between some obscure branch that they each belong to, and so he pushes them off the bridge. Emo Phillips, that’s the name of the guy. If you look up Emo Phillips, Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll find the skit. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Diarmud: It’s sad really that some very intelligent, creative people, and I’m thinking particularly at that strand we call evangelical, who spend a huge amount of their time at that kind of nitpicking of these small details and almost splitting hairs between what one sect believes and what another doesn’t and so on and so forth. From my perspective it seems a terrible waste of time and a terrible waste of talent, but there we are.

Rick: Yeah, as I say, it’s not exclusive to Christianity as you well know. Even you know contemporary spirituality with this guru or that guru and there’s so many people who have the attitude with our teacher is the best or even some of the teachers say this I’m the best and my teaching is the best and if you if you leave me you’ll be have to be reborn for a hundred more lifetimes before you find something this good. I think it’s just a reflection of a certain egotism or something that afflicts people in general. Anyway, it seems silly in the big picture. Okay, so, let’s move along here. One point that came to mind is, there was one of your books that talked a lot about anthropology. And the thought came to me that, in terms of many fields of study, but anthropology and theology in particular, since that’s what we’re talking about, aren’t just academic or religious pursuits, but that when their understandings become institutionalized, they have a major impact on civilization, just as an individual’s understanding of what life is about can have a major impact on his behavior. For instance, if you think that when you die that’s the end of it, there’s nothing else, that changes your whole attitude as compared to whether you think that you go to heaven or you get reincarnated or various other possibilities. You get a broader perspective if you entertain those possibilities. So what do you think about that in terms of the entrenched or ingrained or common understanding that these fields of knowledge have?

Diarmud: Now there are different ways of approaching that, so I think your mainline Christian scholar might approach it along the lines that I mentioned earlier on, tracing the sources back to classical Greek philosophy, of what in time came to be known as scholasticism. I think several of the major issues confronting our species today, I tend to trace them back about 12,000 years to the shadow side of the agricultural revolution. And I comment on this in a number of my books. Now, the problem one runs into then with that statement is that it’s amazing to get a baggage many of us are still carrying, some consciously, but for the greater part subconsciously. Now we’ve been so indoctrinated by benchmarks of 2000 years, or maybe 3 or 4000 years. Now, when somebody mentions something like that we’re immediately being accused that we’re into the area of fantasy and that we’re no longer dealing with reality in any kind of a meaningful way. And therefore we’re not to be taken seriously. So we’re back again to the difference between a big story and the narrow reduced down story. So about 12,000 years ago, one of these breakthroughs known as the agricultural revolution, which a lot of people think has to do with the beginnings of agriculture, when in fact it’s not, because we had been exploring the fertility of the land as a species for several thousands of years before that. The agricultural revolution has to do with an ice age, an extreme freezing, that disrupted the whole schema of life at the time in what today we would call Southern Europe, and more particularly in North Africa. In the case of North Africa, leading to the Sahara Desert that we have today. And that created huge dislocation of human beings in the face of which a new movement, and it may be more than one group that was involved, began to emerge that we now call patriarchy, with a kind of an irrational desire to dominate, to control, and to sort out what was, I suppose, quite a messy situation. In the process of which they began breaking the land down into sections and parceling them out to different people, setting up adversarial relationships and setting up what eventually became the basis for what today we call the nation state. Then subsequent to that, there were a number of important, I suppose we’ll call them political structures emerged. The most dominant one is the king. Kings are unheard of before seven or 8,000 years ago. And then the king taking his validation and mandate from the king above the sky, the sky god, which is a projected of human beings themselves. And that’s where the notion of a sky god comes from. Now alongside the king, you have the warrior on horseback and you have the priest. The role of the priest is to offer sacrifice to pacify the god above the sky. All that it seems to me is not just distant stuff that’s about some kind of weird fantasy. That’s very central to the whole development of our species over this past 10 to 12,000 years. And I think to take a long time to elaborate on this, and I wouldn’t have the knowledge immediately before me to do so, that the evolutionary phase that we’re going through as a species in this past 10 or 12,000 years is now beginning to break down into fragments. As more and more people are naming that reality and beginning to try and move away from it and to embrace something more of a communal way of engaging with life, which would have been something similar to the hunter gatherer stage of our species before the agricultural revolution. So that would be the context. And that is the context out of which I try to develop both my anthropology and my theology, and in my psychology as well and spirituality.

Rick: I think what you just said relates to what you said a few minutes ago about the exponentially increasing pace of change. there does seem to be some huge breakdown or reshuffling of things. Even people who don’t really think of things in terms of spirituality talk about how the amount of information we have available to us is increasing exponentially. It used to take maybe ten years for a certain amount for it to double, now it’s doubling every fourteen days or some such thing. I don’t know if my figures are right, but it’s just taken off like a rocket ship. And I don’t know if you can think of, you can comment on this, but many, many people suggest that human beings aren’t biologically or neurophysiologically wired to deal with such a rapid pace of change. It’s very hard for many people to cope. And just one more thought is, you know, with this change, you mentioned earlier that some people are clinging to their worldviews or their theologies and others are more flexible and open and letting themselves rise with the tide. And you know that saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” But if certain boats insist upon remaining anchored, as the tide rises, they’re going to capsize. because the water is going to get higher than the length of their anchor rope. So I think it’s critical that people don’t cling rigidly to antiquated notions and be open, but you can’t mandate that. It somehow has to come from within the ability to do that.

Diarmud: Yes, some people would say, well then, you know, we require a radical change of emphasis and focus in our educational systems. But again, there’s going to be a big resistance to that in several quarters. And so one begins to wonder, and this indeed may be the great paradox in what in Christian faith we call the Paschal Journey, does there have to be some kind of a major crisis or there may be a number of major crises that will bring us humans to our senses. And in the face of which, maybe there will be some serious calamities for our species before we kind of wake up. In other words, does there need to be some kind of a calvary before we’re open to this new resurrection that you’re talking about? I think that has probably been a pattern. So I was talking a few minutes ago about this 10 to 12,000 years. Fortunately, we’re reasonably aware now what went on during that period. I suspect myself that was not the first time that we as a species went through a major crisis. The problem is we don’t have the evidence as yet to be able to point to it and see how did we pull ourselves out of it. And I think if and when we get that evidence, and I have no doubt we will in due course, and perhaps it’ll be a bit like some of the great extinctions. In all of them, there were some major losses, but at the end of the day, there was a breakthrough. And I think maybe that’s what’s going to happen to us as well. So if you look at something like another crisis along the lines of COVID, that could be a serious and cataclysmic event that would bring us to our senses. And during which there may be some significant loss, even loss of human life, but the breakthrough that evolution wants to bring about.

Rick: Yeah, I’m afraid it often has to work that way.

Diarmud: Yes, I think so.

Rick: I mean, you can even look at things like the Holocaust, which is such a horrible thing, but you know, look how Germany finally changed after realizing what a horrible thing they had done. And that’s just one case in point. But it kind of reminds me of something Winston Churchill said about the Americans. He said, they always end up doing the right thing after having tried every other alternative. (both laughing) So sometimes we seem to have to have a hard knock, you know, in order to.

Diarmud: Right, right. The other thing I think is worth keeping in mind here is a very simple little statement from scholastic philosophy. One of the good little bits that I cherish from my study of it. Action follows thought. Now, I think we’re living in a world that’s very preoccupied with action and achieving this and achieving that targets or, you know, whatever it might be. Whereas in fact, it’s the consciousness we all need to work at. Unfortunately, I think there’s a lot of work being done on that. Unfortunately, not by our major institutions from the top down, but more from a growing body of people from the ground up. And there’s a little known French philosopher, I sometimes quote him in my books, called Gaston Saint-Pierre. And the way he puts it in a more poetic strain, “When I change the level of my awareness, I start attracting a different reality.” I think we need more and more people on board in that project. When I change the level of my awareness, I start attracting a different reality. In other words, the shift in consciousness and AI may indeed contribute significantly to that. A lot of negative things are being said about it. Personally, I am concerned about the ethical ramifications of it and the fact that it’s still very much in the hands of a small group of very powerful people. Whereas it needs to be brought more under the control of our governments, for example. And we really need an ethics and a morality to work with it. But I do think it has the potential to shift this consciousness in ways that will be to our benefits in the long term.

Rick: Oh, you said a lot of great things there. Firstly, the thing about consciousness being fundamental has been one of my guiding principles all my life. And I spent years, I mean, I’ve been meditating since I was a teenager, but I spent years teaching meditation in the hope that by enlivening consciousness, I could have an effect on the more manifest levels of life. Because as we know from examples in science, the subtle is more powerful. The fundamental is more powerful. Molecules are more powerful than just the physical level, or atoms are more powerful than molecules, and so on. And I’m optimistic because I feel like there is some sort of global pandemic of consciousness awakening, some kind of a wave sweeping the planet, and people everywhere are waking up. And that’s one of the main themes of this show. And it doesn’t make the 6 o’clock news, but I think it is having– it’s foundational. And everything that’s less foundational, although it may seem powerful– governments and institutions and finances and all that stuff– is ultimately on shaky ground. If the foundation shifts, it’s going to have to shift in some way or cease to exist.

Diarmud: Exactly, and I think that’s the great panic fear that we see. I mean, you see it in America with Donald Trump making America great again. We see it in Russia, where Putin is just desperate to hold on to the old imperial reality. And it’s slipping away from him. We see it unfortunately in parts of Europe too. We see it in Hungary. We see it in Italy. Georgia Maloney on her visit to Donald Trump a few weeks back used the very same phrase, “Make Europe great again.” She was really saying is, “We need to keep out all these foreigners and then build our own little empires once again.” So there is a real panic reaction going on. I think you’re right. And it’s an optimism that we do need to keep to the fore, that there is a shift in consciousness and there is a consciousness raising that I don’t think can be subdued.

Rick: Yeah, I think you’re right. And sometimes I wonder whether it’s rising because just people are getting on board and participating or whether there’s some kind of cosmic shift taking place and some people are just picking up on it and participating in it. I think it could be both, but I really think that there are kind of larger trends of time that are even beyond human volition, and that people go along with those waves or they don’t.

Diarmud: Right. I would be inclined to go along with your latter point of view. I think people are tuning in a bit more. One of the great little phrases from my meditation teacher many years ago, people are tuning in a bit more to the subtleties of what’s happening, And some of the energy for that is coming to us from a deeper understanding of science and of the universe and of cosmological processes. And so I suppose we are all, well, at least I would like to think many of us are, unknowingly and maybe knowingly to a certain degree, growing into that great little world coming from the mystics, that sense of fundamental oneness in everything.

Rick: Yeah, beautiful. Would I have known of your meditation, teacher? anybody I would have heard of? I, I, Transcendental Meditation has been my passion for years.

Rick: Okay. That’s what, that’s what I was a teacher of. I learned it when I was 18 in 1968 and I still do it every day.

Diarmud: Yeah. Same here.

Rick: Oh, cool. Well, you’re, well, TM brother. Um, I don’t teach it anymore, but, um, you know, it turned my life around. I was basically headed, headed to being a drug addict and I had dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple times and boy I just I did an about face as soon as I learned to meditate. So let’s see then, oh yes your point about AI, I mean there are people who really understand what AI is about and how powerful it will be and some of them are scared you know and these are guys who really know what they’re talking about who are helping to develop it. But some of them also are, again, optimistic. I think it’ll be like many technologies, predating modern technology, even like fire. It can be very harmful, it can be very helpful. The internet gave us all kinds of interesting things and reshaped the world, but it could be used for all kinds of ridiculous, horrible things. It has been, it still is. Friend of mine just got ripped off by some Chinese fraudulent people who told him that they had this great investment opportunity and he just quickly lost a thousand dollars. Not picking on the Chinese, by the way. But AI, I’m actually very involved in it. I have a thing called the BatGapBot. It’s an AI chatbot and it’s part of this network that was initially called the Compassion Bot Network. There’s a wonderful man named Nipun Mehta behind it. And then these days we call it Awaken, A-W-A-K-I-N. But in any case, it’s, you know, there’s a promise, well we don’t have to get into AI in a big way, but there’s a promise of all kinds of wonderful things, you know, curing diseases and, you know, new technologies that it will help in so many ways. But again, it could be immensely destructive. And which way it goes, I think, depends upon what we do with it. And if so-called good people are just afraid of it, then the so-called bad people are the ones who are going to use it anyway. So I think those who have a sort of altruistic motive should get involved in some way if they have the means and the purpose. and to help to steer it in the right direction.

Diarmud: Yes, I think ethical or model guidelines for its use are going to be critically important. And one of the difficulties on that front, I mean, I remember, and you may recall too many years ago in the British government, ’cause I spent much of my life in London, and when ethical model issues came on the floor when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, her typical response was, “That’s for the churches. We don’t deal with that. We deal with the market”. Now, if that attitude is still around, we could be in deep trouble, not just in terms of AI, but of other very serious issues coming on stream. Our governments today have to deal with very serious, ethical, moral issues. And we, the voters, need to be aware of that in terms of the people we vote to government. And a lot of our governments, I think, are in nowhere near ready for this challenge facing them. Now, the European Union, which doesn’t get things right some of the time, but I think this one they are beginning to get right. And they haven’t done their final report on it yet. But just about 18 months ago, they have set up a European Commission to draw up a set of ethical guidelines for the management of AI within the European Union. My hope is that more and more governments will begin doing that.

Rick: That’s great.

Diarmud: Yeah, absolutely. Because otherwise it’s the Elon Musk’s and other such people that are using them very often for their own grandiose projects and advancement. Whereas if this is touching the lives of all of us, which it is, then I think democratically there needs to be some kind of a structure or a method that helps to protect us while at the same time advancing the qualities of what all this is about.

Rick: Yeah, and I hope it can have some teeth in it to make sure that people adhere to it. I’m not sure how exactly that’ll work because it’s kind of a wild, wild west out there in terms of what people are doing. Yeah, that reminds me of something that’s a little tangential, but I just want to throw it in there so you’ll know about it and remind the audience about it. In terms of ethical and moral values, I’ve always been very concerned about the lack of those in many branches of contemporary spirituality, both traditional and the problems that the Catholic Church has had, and in terms of just various teachers and teachings these days, there have been so many examples of sexual or financial, other kinds of abuse. So I got together with some friends about eight years ago and we started an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity and it’s grown to be quite popular. Over 800 or about 800 members and about 60 member organizations and so on. So just something to throw out there so people know.

Diarmud: Yes, what you’re saying is critically important. I mean in the case of the Catholic Church, which is my church, and I’m aware of this problem for some other Christian denominations as well. Our clergy are not obliged to have formal supervision in their pastoral work. When I worked as a counsellor, which I did for much of my life, and I was working with two different groups, I was obliged, I had no choice in the matter, under British law, to have personal supervision on a monthly basis. But our clergy don’t have anything like that in place. And the same is true for clergy and other denominations. I think that’s outrageous and I’m not just thinking of the sex abuse issue. I’m thinking the fact of we’re dealing with people pastorally with a lot of complex, often sensitive issues. We need the supervision, not just in terms of keeping an eye on the model and ethical values, but we also need it for our personal support. And if we’re to be responsible discerning people with people on their own spiritual journeys, we need to be able to fall back on some responsible supervision as well.

Rick: Yeah, and then somebody needs to supervise the supervisors.

Diarmud: Of course.

Rick: They need to supervise each other. Yeah. Yeah. Which reminds me of a joke. So this young priest just graduated from the seminary or whatever you call it, and he joined a local parish and shortly thereafter his bicycle was stolen. And he said to the old priest who was running the place, “Oh, you know, I don’t have any money, my bicycle was stolen, what am I going to do? I can’t get around.” And the old priest said, “Well, you give the sermon next Sunday and give it on the Ten Commandments. And, you know, when you get to ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ look at the audience carefully and you’ll spot the culprit. You’ll see it in his face.” So, you know, after Sunday passed, he went back and visited with the old priest and the priest said, “Well, did it work? I mean, did you catch the guy?” And he said, “Well, I didn’t get that far. I just got as far as thou shalt not commit adultery, and I remembered where I left my bicycle.

Diarmud: (laughing) – Oh my God, Oh, okay. (laughing)

Rick: Okey dokey. So let’s see here. Incidentally, as we go along here, you know, any thoughts that come to mind, if I’m not bringing up a question, just launch into them and we’ll talk about them. ‘Cause I’m running through my notes, but there might be things I’m missing or things you want to talk about. Let’s hit this point a little bit. You referred to God at one point as the great birther, rather than a patriarchal ruler, implying a feminine, corporeal, nurturing, and co-creative divine presence. The spirit requires bodies to manifest its creative energy. Embodiment is central. Let’s talk, why don’t you elaborate on that a little bit.

Diarmud: Okay, so I’m really drawn, I’m picking up there on one of the great insights of Catherine Keller, who I would consider to be one of the great American theologians of the present time. She works out of Drew University and particularly her book published in 2003, Face of the Deep. Now, what Catherine, I mean, that particular book, which is something in the region of 250 pages, is all about the first two verses of chapter one of the book of Genesis. (laughing) The whole book is on the two verses and our basic contention and a few theologians are beginning to pick it up, but it has taken quite a while because I guess it’s so revolutionary is that when we look carefully and look deeply at the material in those two verses, it becomes very clear to us that the whole begetting of creation, the bringing of creation into being, the sustenance and continuing of creation is the work of the Holy Spirit of God. It’s the Holy Spirit of God drawing forth creativity, drawing forth expression and forum from the open chaos of creation. And in the light of that, therefore, she suggests we need to revisit the traditional story, which is that the creation is done initially by this father figure. This male patriarchal creating God who creates ex nicola, the Latin phrase, from nothing. And that little phrase is telling us that sometimes the people ask, maybe coming from a more scientific background, so what’s the nothing that the father was creating out of? And of course, the answer is that that statement is not intended to say anything about creation. It’s the purpose of the statement is to protect the absolute integrity, power and dominion of this patriarchal father creator before whom nothing could exist, because he’s the absolute beginning of everything. So she says, we need to move away from that understanding of creation and replace the phrase ex nicola with the phrase ex profundus from the profound depths where the energizing spirit is always energizing. And it’s in the power of that energy that this father figure creates in the first place. Just as, for example, it said in the letters of Paul, it’s in the power of the spirit that Jesus was raised from the dead. Therefore, I suggest then taking her argument forward a bit, and this is a nice example, too, of reworking the tradition, that instead of thinking then of the creator, So we have the spirit who is the fundamental energizer, the energy of the energizing. Then we have the energy of the creating or the act of the creating. So instead of equating that with a father figure, the whole thing of creation, if you pick up the metaphor of birthing and thinking particularly of a lovely phrase from Meister Eckhart, the great mystic. What does God do all day long? God lies in a maternity bed giving birth all day long. Now picking up that metaphor. And then, so instead of the father creator, why not talk about that the mothering God was forever giving birth. And in that way, there’s the kind of inclusivity and there’s a whole different relational approach to it. Now, several issues then arise there in terms of our understanding of the Trinity of works. What she’s saying and what I’m saying is, we put the spirit first. And it’s through the energy of the spirit that the birthing principle can work. And then for a lot of Christians, then the panic reaction is, well, that’s reducing Jesus down to the third place. We can’t, we mustn’t do that. My suggestion in the parts of the book where I talk about this topic is then we could redefine the role of Jesus as the great ancestor. And I’m drawing there on African spirituality and African theology in which the Africans talk about the living dead and the ancestors who inhabit the trees, inhabit the lake, inhabit the mountains. And of course it also nicely links Jesus in with our great African story, which I talked about earlier on. So that’s where that notion comes from of using that metaphor. Now, you see, if we had used that metaphor down through the centuries, Instead of the ruler God, the birthing God, we have a totally different theology today. And I think we’d have a theology that would be much more respectful and inclusive of many of the other issues that we’ve been talking about in the earlier part of this interview.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m no physicist, but from what my layman’s understanding, from what I’ve listened to and read, at the most fundamental level of creation, you have an inconceivable amount of energy and potential. Even in a cubic centimeter of empty space at the level of the vacuum state, there’s more potential energy than is in the whole galaxy at the more manifest level.

Diarmud: Absolutely.

Rick: And the creation just keeps kind of bubbling up from that level. So it’s like you say, Meister Eckhart, God is eternally on the maternity bed. I mean, it’s like we think of creation happening 13.8 billion years ago or 6,000 years ago, if those fundamentalists are to be believed, but it’s actually happening now, now, now. Every second there’s a just a bursting forth from that unmanifest level to the manifest.

Diarmud: Yeah. Yeah. Now, maybe this might be an appropriate moment to just mention then some of the implications of that, bringing back to the anthropology for ourselves as human beings. And there’s the beginnings of a movement. And I can’t cite any specific experts on it because I don’t think there are experts as yet. This Christian notion of the soul, which you also find in the other world religions. So in the case of the Christian religion, coming particularly from Plato and Aristotle, that the soul is that energy bit or that alive bit that’s brought into the growing fetus in the mother’s womb at some very early stage. And from there on, it becomes a human person. And the notion of soul is still extensively used in Christian theology, but also it’s used in philosophy and in other branches of wisdom as well. And then at the other end of the life cycle, it’s the soul that leaves the body to go out to the happiness of life in another world. Now personally, I think we need to move away from that concept of soul. I don’t think it’s really helpful anymore and replace it with the notion of spirit energy. We are creatures of spirit energy. All creatures in creation are creatures of spirit energy. In explaining this to audiences in my workshops, I often remind people, and fortunately there’s nearly always one or two older people there who have worked in hospice care. People who work in hospice care, sitting with a dying person, will often tell you that they can feel the energy disappearing. And in my opinion, that’s just, that’s not their imaginations. That’s for real. Because around our bodies are these range of energy fields, which connect us to creation. And as we approach our end, they begin to shrivel and shrink until eventually we’re left with what the healers call the aura. And when that disappears, then the person dies. Now, we’re dealing here with the limitations of human language. Energy never disappears. You know that, and so many other people coming from the scientific background. Energy always reconnects with energy. So our beloved dead, our beloved departed, that are all around us, even at other energy levels. So we’re all energy beings. Now, one of the disturbing things in that for a lot of people is then the realization that what energizes me is the same energy that energizes the tree, the plant, the mountain, the lake. So at that level, we’re all on an equal playing field. According to that understanding, there are no superior beings in God’s creation. Everything is unique, but nothing is superior, is the challenge. And the other corollary arising from it, you will recall, and the hearers will recall, that anecdote in the gospels where an evil spirit is cast out of somebody, and we’re taught the spirit goes roaming around looking for an alternative habitat. The commentators very often miss the point in that little anecdote. The point is that spirit and body are intimately interconnected. The body is lifeless without spirit, but spirit is impotent without body. Whereas in our Christian story, and to a lesser extent in some of the other great religions, we’re always splitting the two. The two are highly complimentary. So that’s another feature when we talk about energy. And I mean, for me, quantum physics, I’m not a formal scientist at all. In fact, I came rather late in life to study science. Quantum physics is profoundly spiritual, as I understand. And it’s all about the power of energy at the end of the day. And the whole relational capacity for energy to interconnect and work at every level of life, including ourselves. We are energy beings, first and foremost.

Rick: Yeah, I wanna comment on what you just said, most of which I agree with, but this is a good time to bring in a couple of quotes that you have in your book, “Doing Theology in an Evolutionary Way.” First, you quote Einstein as having said, “Everybody who is seriously involved “in the pursuit of science becomes convinced “that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, “a spirit vastly superior to that of mankind, “and one in the face of which we, with our modest powers must feel humble”. Then you quote German physicist Hans-Peter Dürer as having said, “As a physicist, I have spent 50 years, my entire life as a researcher, to ask, ‘What is it that hides behind the material?’ And the result is simple. There is no matter. Basically, there is only spirit.” And I was moved to read those then because of what you you just said, because I think there’s a perspective which can reconcile or harmonize the different points of view you just mentioned. You know, just as a radio is dead without electricity or is useless unless there’s some kind of radio transmission for it to pick up, the human body is dead, literally, if it is not inhabited by a soul. And as you described, time of death, the energy or whatever it is leaves. And I’ve interviewed so many people who’ve had near-death experiences and also one guy named Rob Schwartz, I think it was, who specializes in shared death experiences, which is people who have these profound mystical experiences at the bedside of someone who is dying. They actually, they see visions or they partake in what the dying person is seeing or, you know, something happens that is triggered by that atmosphere. Kind of my take on the whole thing based upon just my, I’ve never had a near-death experience or anything, but what I’ve got so far in my understanding, and you’re welcome to criticize it or whatever, is that there is something we might call a soul. The Hindus call it Sukshma Sharira, which means subtle body. And it carries on when the gross body dies. And it contains all the components that we have in our human life, but without the gross body. In other words, mind, intellect, ego, breath, all that stuff. And they believe, of course, in reincarnation that it eventually inhabits another body and carries on the journey. Whereas on one level, as this Hans-Peter(Hasenfratz) fellow said, there is only spirit and it’s not hierarchical, on another level, just as we see in nature, there are hierarchies. I mean, a mosquito is less evolved than a dog, is less evolved than a human, you could I should say, if by evolved we mean ability to embody and reflect the intelligence of the ultimate being or spirit or God. And perhaps I should stop there ’cause I could keep rambling on and let you respond to that so far and maybe I’ll have another come back after you respond.

Diarmud: But I would think is that how the mosquito or the other organisms will engage or will respond is in their uniqueness rather than in any particular superior power. That it’s the one and same energy, the one and same spirit, but that each will respond in a unique way. So in our case, the uniqueness, I’m dealing here with kind of official anthropology, that we are the creatures who seem to have, and I’m picking my words very carefully here, the most highly developed capacity for self-reflexive consciousness. In other words, that we can think about the fact that we can think. Now, there are people that argue that dolphins seem to have some of that as well. And I’ve come across one scientist whose name escapes me now, who was claiming that beehives would seem to have some of that capacity. But that we have it at some particular high, more highly developed level. Yes, I’m happy to run with that. But we don’t have it to lord it over the others. We have it to bring as our gift to the, if you like, the table of dialogue with all these other creatures who will bring their giftedness and their insights from their particular embodied structure. That’s how I would approach it.

Rick: Oh, I would agree. Just as a parent, because they happen to be more educated and powerful and wise in some ways, that doesn’t grant them the right to abuse their children or have their children for lunch or something like that. I mean, they have a pastoral role to play, taking care of the children, nurturing the children. I think that’s what the human obligation is. If we are more evolved in some respect, that should make us greater custodians of creation, not rapists of it.

Diarmud: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Diarmud: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes I watch an ant or something like that, a fly, a little insect. And I think, that little ant, he has no idea that I’m even here or that all this is here, these trees, these clouds, those birds flying over. He’s got his little ant world, which I’m sure is, an ant is a marvelous creature, amazingly complex in and of itself, but there’s so much more than the ant realizes. And then I just take the next step and think, I’m the ant too, because there’s so much more than I could possibly realize that’s actually going on. And it’s just a matter of, it’s just a matter of degree to which we both are extremely myopic.

Diarmud: Correct. And it’s something then about how we work collaboratively and non-violently with those other organisms, which of course is a huge challenge. Several years ago, as part of a workshop out in Long Island, we were taken to this beekeeper who had this, as well as having beehives, he had this big sort of shed where the bees were. And as he was showing us around, and he walked right in to the middle of the bee place itself with no protection on him. And of course, those of us that were part of the group, and you could feel the kind of reaction among us. And then he looked over with a big smile on his face, and he said, “No need to worry. I know my bees and my bees know me.”

Rick: That’s great.

Diarmud: Yeah. And you know, there was a man that he had made that connection. For him, the bees weren’t some kind of just a material secondary kind of objective entity that he had control and domination over. Yeah, he was managing the beehive and managing the production of the honey and all that. But there was a kind of a relationship between him and the bees, which is somehow along the lines of what we’re talking about. It’s almost like his creative, responsible energy was in tune with their energy. Yeah. But that’s just a spirit of the light.

Rick: I’m reminded here of Jesus saying, “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” Yeah. You know, that would imply, that would include the ant that I just mentioned and the crops and the oceans that we dump plastic into and everything else. And you know, the me Jesus is referring to there, which is, I think he’s saying, I’m in this ant and in this forest and in this ocean just as much as I am in this body. And if you’re doing things, you’re harming those things, you’re harming the me that you really care about. You know, I’m not just this body. And I think all of of us can say the same thing because, you know, as we’ve been discussing, we’re all that spirit. And if we’re inflicting harm on anything, on any level, we’re doing it to ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, moving on. Let me see here. I printed out far too many pages of notes and then at the last minute I didn’t have a chance to scrunch them down. Okay, here’s a couple of points that I noted. You suggest the term companionship of empowerment instead of kingdom of of God. What do you mean by this and how might this idea change the Church’s mission? We’re back to the Church here. We kind of keep zooming down into this particular religion on this particular planet out to the cosmic perspective. But how might this change the Church’s mission and its engagement with social justice issues?

Diarmud: Okay, so firstly maybe to mention for the benefit of our audience, the phrase “Kingdom of God, which was used, well, it’s used extensively in the Gospels, particularly the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. And then in the early church or in early Christian times, was usually understood as this idea from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, and going back to things I said earlier on today, that the king was understood to be God’s primary representative on earth. Therefore, anybody of messianic status, of being a special messenger from God to the world would have to come to a royal line. And we see that in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke of Jesus being traced back to the great King David. So it’s against that kingly background that early Christians would have understood at least something and maybe much of what that phrase represented. And then from the time of Constantine in the fourth century, it really took off big time. And popes and kings beginning to collaborate very closely with each other, both representing the royal line. Now, when you go to the actual Aramaic language, which is the language that Jesus spoke to the people of his day, that phrase, “Kingdom of God” is open to other translations. And a number of scholars have remarked that. And I have opted particularly for the one that initially would sound awkward to a lot of people, namely the companionship of empowerment. That that seems to be fundamental to the Aramaic understanding of the phrase. And that in all probability, and that’s all any of us can say, or any scholar can say, that it’s with that meaning that Jesus was actually using the phrase. And therefore the Greek translation that gives us kingdom of God does need to be reworked and possibly changed anew. And so then companionship of empowerment. So empowerment is obvious enough that Jesus was not about patriarchal hierarchical kingly power. In fact, that he denounced it quite openly, but that he was about a strategy of empowerment. And therefore the parable stories and the lyrical stories and the Sermon on the Mount can all be seen in that vein as serving the empowerment. But the more revolutionary word actually in that redefinition is the word companionship. So companionship is like where the pyramid has collapsed into being a circle and therefore we needed all times to try and convert pyramids down into circles for communal processing. And that then becomes the foundation which to be fair I think Paul did pick up very accurately from Paul’s notion of the church as the ecclesia. The ecclesia was a political term that Paul actually borrowed from local town councils or local city councils. But whereas in the secular domain, ecclesia was for male ruling people only, Paul used it, opening it up to everybody in a much more inclusive way, which I think is honoring that dream of the companionship of empowerment. And then moving from that, if I can bring it right down to our own day, in the Catholic context, there was a process going on in Rome over the past two years under Pope Francis called the synodal church. And it’s unfortunate that he used that term because I don’t think a lot of people really… the word synod itself or synodality has to do with hierarchical structures in earlier historical times. Whereas what Francis was really talking about and trying to inculcate was a sense of a church that would be much more communally based from the ground up with real participation between people and clergy, between people and bishops and so forth. And a very interesting thing that emerged in the course of those two processes was the people were sitting at round tables with priests, bishops, and even the Pope himself sitting there among the people. And the metaphor of the round table, particularly in the first session of the synod, became a huge thing, as if it was something totally new in the life of the church. And, you know, if they only knew what we’re talking about here, that the foundation in the gospel itself is all about communal process in the companionship of empowerment, that Paul was heavily into a communal way of doing things. Then this desire being articulated in and through the the metaphor of the round table, is a desire to reconnect with this very deep part of our story. The final comment that I make on this, both Elizabeth Johnson and Roger Haidt, just to mention two theologians, have tried to highlight the point that when Jesus is talking about this kingdom of God, this new reign of God, or this new companionship, he’s not just talking about a new way for people to interrelate among themselves. He’s also talking about a new way to interrelate with the whole of creation. And another scholar, Wes Howard-Brook, an American, links that with the idea of the covenant in the Hebrew scriptures in the Old Testament. Again, we hear of the covenant of Abraham, the covenant with Noah, the covenant with David and with Solomon. But Wes Howard Brook claims that actually the original covenant in the Hebrew scriptures is in chapter one of the book of Genesis. It’s the covenant with creation. And Wes Howard-Brook and others are saying, and that’s what was inspiring Jesus the Jew, bringing the concept of the covenant, including the creation, and that that’s what the foundation of what Jesus meant then by the companionship of empowerment in the gospels.

Rick: Yeah, you talk a lot in at least one of your books about how in Jesus’s time during his life, women were very much involved. And then also during the early years after he died, women were very much involved in carrying on the work. In fact, all the men scattered as Jesus was being crucified and it was the women who stuck around. And yet, within a few hundred years, the men had moved in and pushed the women aside and started to build their hierarchies and all. I think Jesus would have been rather displeased with that had he come back a few hundred years later and seen what was going on. –

Diarmud: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, and there’s a really important book written by members of this controversial group, the Jesus Seminar, but there are people that have done their research very, very profoundly, and they come from a multidisciplinary background, which is really important. So the title of the book, “After Jesus, Before Christianity.” After Jesus, Before Christianity. A woman called Erin Vearncombe V-E-A-R-N-C-O-M-B-E is the main editor of the book. Now, what they look at throughout that book, at the first 300 years, 250, 300 years after the death of Jesus, most historians focusing on the hierarchical side the church developing. So we had the semblance of the four gospels by 150. We had the beginnings of a presbyterate, mainly bishops and priests, and we had the beginnings of a sacramental structure. And the historians give the impression that that was the main stuff that was actually going on during those first 250 to 300 years. Whereas the authors of this book are claiming That was only one strand. At the more important, significant strand was a vast range of complex groups meeting, discussing, exploring, reaching out to the poor and the marginalized, as we find in Acts chapter 2 and 4. This whole communal notion from the ground up. And very interesting, a lot of these clubs, associations, and groups would often end their meeting with sharing a meal together, which they understood to be Eucharist, even if there was no priest there. That was the stuff that kept going into the beginnings of the fourth century. And then, unfortunately, it’s Constantine that really impacts very negatively upon that whole thing. And more or less demands that everybody, see one of the first things that that Constantine did, I think, maybe the Council of Nicaea, He re-baptized Jesus, if you like, with a new title, Pantocrator, ruler of the whole universe. We’re back into the imperial kingship stuff. And that becomes the pattern for the next 1500 years almost. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we need to keep that in mind that early, those early centuries were much more complex than we have in a technology up until now.

Rick: Yeah. This rulership thing, you know, is very dualistic that I mean, whether you place Jesus in that position or God himself in that position in some kind of detached overseeing position, you know, like, like a master puppeteer of creation or something, and, you know, whatever happened, the idea of God being omnipresent and all pervading and, you know.

Diarmud: The Emmanuel notion.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I’m reminded of another joke. You may have heard this one. So, so God and the devil are walking down the street and God sees something shiny on the ground and picks up and puts it in his pocket. And the devil said, hey, what you got? What was that? And God said, oh, it’s just the truth. And the devil says, give it to me. I’ll organize it for you.

Diarmud: Yeah, yeah, right. Right. Yeah. And that’s what began to happen from the beginning of the fourth century on. I mean, some people claim that Constantine chaired every session of the Council of Nicaea. Now, even if he didn’t chair every session, he certainly had his key people in there managing the whole thing. And any bishop that disagreed with him was kicked out of the council. So you know, you had that very sudden, rather brutal kind of shift from what seems to have a fairly strong communal culture to one that very quickly became hierarchical and patriarchal.

Rick: Yeah, since you were an old TMer, Maharishi used to say, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance.” And he used to talk about how this sort of cycle of loss and and revival of knowledge just repeats itself throughout the ages. And it’s like the old party game, I guess, when the kid whispers something to the next kid and it goes around the room, and by the time it comes back to him, it’s a completely different message.

Diarmud: That’s right, yes.

Rick: But another point here is that, you know, Jesus was speaking from his level of consciousness and everyone was listening from theirs.

Diarmud: Correct.

Rick: And if they’re not on the same level of consciousness, then there’s immediately a loss of something.

Diarmud: Yes. And then nothing’s written down for I don’t know how long, one or two hundred years. And so the whole thing is set up to disintegrate in a way. But that’s not to say that we can’t derive tremendous benefit from it or that many people haven’t. But I think your main theme here that there needs to be a resurgence or a renaissance or reinvigoration of all these ancient structures and probably a complete restructuring or reshuffling of them is long overdue, is critically needed now.

Diarmud: Yes it is, and my hope is, which I hope is not me being over-utopian, is that whatever is going on in this evolutionary time will reawaken a deeper consciousness reminding us all that we do need to move in something more of that communitarian direction with the insights of science among other things and assisting us. Communitarian and much more expansive and inclusive. I think are the key qualities that are emerging in our time.

Rick: I think it will and I think that you know many religious people might see this as a threat but I think it’s actually a blessing. I know in my own case, you know my parents dragged me to church pretty often when I was a kid I had no idea what was going on. It was boring, it was a perfect way to ruin a Sunday. But once I got into my own spiritual quest, I thought, “Oh, that’s what it’s about.” It began to make sense to me.

Diarmud: You were growing into the adult.

Rick: Yeah. And I realized that there’s an inner dimension to it, not just this outer dimension of words and stories and yes and all that and that’s what it’s really all about. What do you make of Jesus’s so-called miracles? Do you think that those are just parables or metaphors or something or do you think that he literally may have done many of those things?

Diarmud: Now I think that would be two related issues that would come in there. Number one, the whole notion of the healer and the healing outreach were very common in the time of Jesus. And a lot of people had gifts of healing. And we need to distinguish between healing and curing. The concept of curing, which is more a medical concept, really belongs to the 18 and 1900s. So we need to keep that in mind. Secondly, it does seem that a lot of the people and the culture at the time of Jesus was very conscious of the spirit energy within different aspects of the culture. And so disease and illness was often understood as not being in tune or not being connected more meaningfully with the spirit. And therefore the healing was to realign people with the spirit. And also then the realigning was to be done communally and not just merely with the person himself or herself. But what you mentioned there, which is the line that I’m beginning to move more in, is to understand the miracles as parables of action. So we have parables of word and we have parables of action. Now, a man called Bloomberg, I can’t remember his first name, back in 1968, suggested that. And I’ve been in communication with him just in the past three months. And sadly, very few people have actually picked up his very rich, seminal ideas. So very quickly, if we look at Mark Chapter five, that rather bizarre story of a guy out among the tombs and he tearing himself and he naked and he doing all sorts of dreadful things. And the story is about that he’s inhabited, ah possessed by an evil spirit. But the language used, I’m trying to think of the legion is the name that they give to the spirit, that’s given to the spirit in the story. Now legion was a cohort of Roman soldiers, it could be 600, it could be up to 2000, but that was the original meaning of the name. And then when we look at the Greek text, nearly all the verbs being used are related to military activity. In other words, in all probability, this is the story of a man that was either attacked or attacked and maybe his land robbed from him under the Roman occupation, or maybe some of his family killed in front of his eyes. Something very dreadful happened to him, as a result of which he he went insane. So that using that as a backdrop. The backdrop, therefore, of so then this becomes a parable attacking or addressing Roman imperialism. And then we have that very strange bit about the pigs going down the cliff into the sea. At the time in Syria, one of the platoons. Of these Roman soldiers. They all carried banners. One of the banners was that of a pig or a bore. So is this a metaphorical way of saying that the solution to the curing for this man is to get the imperial forces out of the land, go back into the sea so that they can get back to Rome. For me, that’s quite a compelling interpretation of that story. And I think one can look at all the one can look at many of the medical stories in that line. When we hear of people being crippled, when we hear of people being blinded, when we hear people being deafened and dumb, has it happened to them as the result of something physical under the impression, under the imperial system of Rome? And so there’s a group of scholars that come from a school called the post-colonial approach. That would be the approach they use, and I’m personally very attracted to that. And again, it means then that all these medical stories are narratives about empowering people, not just curing them, but empowering them to take a new strand or movement in their lives.

Rick: What do you think about some of the other ones like walking on water or multiplying the loaves and fishes or turning water into wine? Do you think those are all metaphorical too?

Diarmud: I think that would be for the greater part, yes. And they are more difficult to explain. Even the traditional scholar like John Mayer, the late John Mayer, was having doubts about those himself. And he, in many cases, he was taking some of the other stories quite literally. Now, if you take the water and wine, a very interesting aspect in that story from John’s gospel is that they have these containers for the wine, sorry, for the water. And we’re taught that we were taught what they, what the amount of water in them is that will be contained. And then it’s turned into wine. Those were the containers that were typically used at the temple and elsewhere for ritual cleanliness. So metaphorically, are we hearing a story here? The ritual cleanliness stuff is over. We’re into celebrating a new feast of the new reign of God, of the new companionship. That would be the interpretation I would be inclined to follow in regard to that story.

Rick: Oh, I was gonna ask you a question that came in from David Reeves in somewhere in the US and he said, “No question, just a comment.” Brilliant, thank you for your work, Diarmuid.

Diarmud: Thank you.

Rick: Okay, so let’s see here. So we have about 10, 15 minutes left, I think if we’re gonna hold it to an hour and a half. I have a few more pages of notes here. Are there some things you would like to suggest that you want to make sure we cover?

Diarmud: Well, the one thing that I would mention which is indirectly and indeed directly related to things we have talked about earlier on. And one of my books that I wrote some years ago is called “In the Beginning Was the Spirit.” So that would relate back to that work about of Catherine Keller that I spoke about earlier on. But the reason I wrote the book was from encounters that I had with First Nations peoples. Originally in Australia, then in the United States, in Canada and other parts around the world, in which their faith and their naming of what we call God is called the Great Spirit. And I find this a fascinating field. And I wonder, very sadly, I’m not aware of any Christian theologian that has picked it up. So for our indigenous peoples, the great spirit is not some transcendent being away above the sky. The great spirit is eminently here on earth. And the great spirit, we make connection and contact with the great spirit in and through the land, in and through the soil. Now that’s not pantheism. Let me say that loud and clear. And they’re not saying that therefore the Spirit of God is confined to the land of the soil. They’re saying it’s in and true, a more organic relationship with the land of the soil that we make contact with the great spirit. They don’t have any system of worship in relation to the great spirit. And they don’t pray to the great spirit. So their rituals, and they have quite a number of elaborate ones, are to prepare them, are to enable them to collaborate more meaningfully with the great spirit in the work in and around the land. And an interesting thing about prayer, for me, one of the favorite definitions of prayer is from Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he says, “It’s not we who pray, it’s the spirit of God who prays in us.” And it seems to me that that’s very, very close to the faith of our indigenous peoples. don’t pray or beseech the Great Spirit, they try to be more attuned with the synergy of the Living Spirit in everything in creation and primarily through the land. Now I think that relates to several things we have talked about during this interview.

Rick: It does, I mean again it brings up the sort of the notion of oneness versus dualism, you know.

Diarmud: It does.

Rick: Are you reinforcing an I-Thou relationship by praying to some distant or on high entity or are you discovering that that entity pervades you and you can align yourself with it by tuning into that level of your own life?

Diarmud: Which is basically what we try to do in meditation.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so some final questions that actually are on this very point. The idea of a conscious universe or panpsychism has profound implications. How does this view alter our understanding of human uniqueness and our responsibility with the cosmos? And I’ll just add to the question, you know, as I understand it, panpsychism is often described as the notion that things are conscious to varying degrees. You know, a little atom is conscious in some rudimentary way, or a toad is conscious to a greater degree or whatever. But I would jump back to that quote by the German scientist that basically there is only spirit. So spirit appearing as an atom, appearing as a toad, appearing as you and me. And so it’s not that we have consciousness, it’s that we are consciousness. And consciousness manifests complexity through its self-interaction that results in greater and greater ability to function as a living reality. Irene’s saying, “What’s the question?” I can put a question mark at the end of that statement and let you comment on it.

Diarmud: Yeah, I mean, sometimes what I find myself saying to audiences when I’m working with them, everything in this body of mine has been given to me by the wider creation. And, and therefore, and what the vitality of my body, the intelligence, not just of my brain, but of my body is gifted to me from creation. And a controversial British astronomer called Fred Hoyle, way back in the 1940s, he wrote a book called The Intelligent Universe, way ahead of his time. And so, it’s at that level, I back again to what I said earlier on, this energy of the spirit, which is foundational to all life forms, is the same energy that’s shared with everything from the ant to the vast galaxies themselves. But instead they have a bland sameness. Everything is equal, but each organism is unique. So yeah, the ant has a uniqueness of being ant. And we have uniqueness in being human, but we share the same spirit. And that spirit is gifted to us. And that spirit was fully at work in creation long before we ever came on the scene, or long before religions or churches ever evolved.

Rick: It had to be, I mean, in the first few microseconds after the big bang, there were already amazingly intelligent orderly laws of nature orchestrating the whole process.

Diarmud: Indeed, yeah.

Rick: And I’m glad you used the word bland sameness because if we think of, let’s say, the ground of the earth as analogous to consciousness or spirit, then the more fertile the ground, the more diversity you end up with, not the more sameness. Like you look at the Amazon rainforest or something, there’s this huge diversity because it’s so fertile. So I think that as consciousness or spirit becomes more lively and collective consciousness of humanity, we’re not all gonna become the same. We’re all gonna become more diverse and yet more harmonious because of our mutual fundamental connection.

Diarmud: Yes, and therefore it needs to be a forum of unity that can hold and honor the diversity, which I think is what the great mystics meant by that words, oneness. I didn’t see it as a bland sameness. –

Rick: Yeah, very good. And perhaps a good point to end on ’cause we’ve been going for more than an hour and a half now. So let’s see. So you’ve written a number of books I will list them on your on your BatGap page. And is there anything else you’re doing that people can plug into any webinars or conferences? Well the few that I’m doing now because I’m basically retired and working from home and if they follow my web page which is www.diermodomoroku.com So it’s www.myfullname.com and there’s a section in there on commitments and in there they’ll see programs that I might be offering. Good and I’ll link to that from your page on bathgap.com. Good well thank you so much I really enjoyed this conversation and I enjoyed preparing for it over the last couple of weeks.

Diarmud: Yeah thank you I’ve enjoyed it too. Good so we’ll be in touch and Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. I think my next interview is with Jürgen Ziewe, whom I interviewed about nine or ten years ago. And Jürgen is a fascinating guy. For most of his life, he’s had this ability to “astral travel,” as he calls it, and very vividly and clearly. And he’s also a gifted artist. And speaking of AI, he’s now using AI to create what he considers to be very photorealistic depictions of the subtle realms of creation that he has experienced himself and that perhaps concur with the mystics’ descriptions of such realms throughout the ages. So it’s going to be a very visual interview where I’m going to be popping in all the artwork that he does and perhaps even some video clips that he’s made about as we discuss those different levels of creation. So stay tuned for that. Okay, thanks Diarmuid, thanks again.

Diarmud: Thank you. Bye bye.

Rick: I really appreciate your time.

Diarmud: Thank you. Bye bye now.

Rick: Cheers.

Diarmud: Bye bye.