Matthew Wright Interview

Summary

Matthew Wright explores the meeting point of Christian mysticism, Hindu and Buddhist wisdom, and interspiritual practice. The discussion considers the continuing presence of awakened teachers, the value of embodiment, and how religious traditions can recover their living spiritual depth.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can Christianity and other spiritual traditions be integrated without losing their depth?
• Are Jesus, Buddha, and other awakened teachers still spiritually accessible after death?
• What is the relationship between nondual awareness and embodied human life?
• How can religious traditions recover mystical vitality while avoiding institutional dogmatism?

Key takeaways

• Mature traditions bring together devotion, contemplation, ritual, community, and guidance.
• Christian mysticism shares important ground with Hindu and Buddhist wisdom.
• Awakened teachers remain accessible through the qualities they awakened in human consciousness.
• Nondual realization does not require rejecting the body or the world of form.
• Religions preserve spiritual treasures but need continual renewal to keep them alive.
• Awakening includes serving the planet and the continuing evolution of humanity.

Transcript

{BATGAP theme music plays}

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Its website is www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and there have been well over 300 interviews to date, so if you want to check out the archives, go there and look under the “Past Interviews” menu.

This enterprise is made possible by the generous support of appreciative viewers and listeners, and there is a “Donate” button on the site, so thank you for that.

My guest today is the Reverend Matthew Wright. Matthew is an Episcopal priest, writer, and retreat leader, working to renew the Christian Wisdom Tradition within a wider interspiritual framework. He writes a monthly column, Belonging, for Contemplative Journal, and serves as Priest in Charge at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock, New York.

Matthew lives with his wife, Yanick, alongside the brothers of Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York. You can learn more about his work through the Center for Spiritual Resources, which I will be linking to, along with several things from his page at www.batgap.com.

I know Matthew, kind of, from the Science & Nonduality Conference, where he has gone for the last couple of years. I had to miss some of his talks there because I was doing other things in other rooms, but I always listened to them later, when the Science & Nonduality people put the talks up online, and I’ve always found his talks to be very inspiring and interesting. So it’s really a joy to have him on today. I think we’re going to have a great conversation, so thanks, Matthew.

Matthew: Thanks, Rick. It’s great to be here.

🕊️ Matthew’s spiritual beginnings

Rick: Yeah, so I want to talk about all kinds of things with you. Just to give people some main points, as I read through your material, here are some things that jumped out at me, questions that we might talk about:

Is Jesus alive and interceding in human affairs?

If God is omnipresent, then we’re looking at Him. There’s a saying from the Gospel of Thomas that he quoted: “Come to know that which is before your eyes and what is hidden from you will be revealed.”

We will talk about interspirituality.

We will talk about the notion that “you are not the body,” or maybe you are.

We want to talk about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose name I probably just mispronounced, but whose thinking is very inspiring both to Matthew and me, although I more or less just discovered him.

We want to talk about the Divine Mother and the feminine in the world.

We will talk about devotion.

Something that Matthew terms “the second axial age.”

Belief versus experience.

Intermixture of spiritual traditions in people’s lives, such as people who might call themselves a “Buddhist Christian.”

So there are some topics that jumped out at me as being interesting to talk about, and maybe we’ll take it elsewhere in the discussion. Online viewers are, of course, welcome to send in questions as we go along. There is a question form on the “Upcoming Interviews” page on www.batgap.com.

But for starters, let’s get to know a little bit more about you, Matthew—where you came from, how you got interested in spirituality, and what kind of major milestones you’ve gone through on your path.

Matthew: I’ve been serving as a priest now, I guess, for about three years, and I think my spiritual journey started sort of unconsciously unfolding late in high school. I grew up in a much more fundamentalist, charismatic, Pentecostal type of Christianity.

I had a high school teacher who was actually a devotee of Paramahansa Yogananda—of all beings, of all people—and she was the first person to ever ask me if I thought God was within me. I had grown up with a very sort of dualistic conception of God, that Deity was in another dimension, sort of watching down on us. So that question, as I sat with it, sort of inverted my whole theological framework and worldview.

I remember sitting on the porch at my parents’ house one day and having this overwhelming sense, this experience, of God in the apple tree in our front yard. So that sort of opened up a realm of nature mysticism, I guess—encountering God in the natural world.

I remember asking my dad at the time, “Do you think God is in everything? In the rocks and the trees and the grass?” I expected him to scoff, coming from this fundamentalist church, but he paused for a minute and said, “Well, yeah!” And I thought, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this?”

So that sort of opened a journey into the more contemplative dimension of faith. It was around that time that I was turned on to the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, and Eastern texts and traditions.

Rick: If you ask the most fundamentalist of Christians, “Is God omnipresent?” wouldn’t they say, “Yes”? I mean, doesn’t it say that in the Bible someplace?

Matthew: Well, I don’t think the word “omnipresent” shows up in Scripture, but a sense of the all-pervading reality and presence of God is certainly fundamental to Christian tradition. But I don’t know that people—I think that sometimes they think of omnipresence almost in the sense of, “God can see everywhere,” rather than in the sense that God is actually one with all things.

Rick: Aha. Sort of like He is up in the sky in some spaceship with some cosmic telescope checking on us—like Santa Claus; He knows if you’ve been naughty or nice, but He’s not necessarily everywhere.

Matthew: Right.

Rick: Okay. So as you began to transition to reading the Upanishads and stuff like that, was there any kind of theological rapids that you had to go through in your little boat of life? I mean, was it rough, was it awkward? Was it beginning to clash with what you had been ingrained with?

Matthew: Sure. I think it was really exciting and also frightening. When you’ve grown up in sort of a fundamentalist worldview and you start questioning it, you think you may be risking your eternal salvation, you know? So there is something fearful in that.

But I think there was a shift for me one day when I realized how much love my parents felt for me, and that if we imagine Divinity as the most loving Parent—which is the sort of language I grew up with; I don’t think of God so much in parental terms anymore—but if God is supposed to be the ultimate loving source, and my parents could never damn me to hell for eternity, then how could the Source of all life do the same thing?

Once I sort of got my mind around that, I thought, “Okay.” I think it’s okay to ask these questions and to go down these roads.

Rick: So this is still high school, right?

Matthew: Right. That would have been late in high school. Then I wandered into an Episcopal church one evening.

Rick: Before you get to that, let me just ask you: did you go through any crazy teenage stuff? I mean, you live near Woodstock, New York, and that is notorious for certain things. Did you go through any of that stuff, or did you have a pretty pure, smooth ride?

Matthew: Nothing too crazy. I actually grew up down South, in the mountains of North Carolina. Maybe in my college years, but nothing too wild or out of the ordinary.

Rick: Okay, just curious.

Matthew: So moving on, before I went to college, I wandered into an Episcopal church and it sort of opened for me the whole “Catholic” side of the Christian tradition, where all of the saints and mystics and contemplatives had been hanging out—voices I didn’t have access to in Protestant Christianity, where you sort of jump from Jesus and the Apostles to Martin Luther. You sort of bypass 1,000 years of Christian history.

Discovering all those voices—Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross—that whole rich contemplative lineage, that mystical lineage, suddenly provided a reference point for everything I was encountering in those Eastern texts, in the Upanishads.

And I thought, “Ah! All this is here in Christianity, sort of buried, maybe swept under the rug, but it was all there as well.”

🕊️ Recovering the contemplative traditions

Rick: I was just reading a Dana Sawyer book last night about Huston Smith. He was talking about Aldous Huxley and how Huxley kind of thought that religions were basically an obstacle to enlightenment because of all the sort of narrow-mindedness and degeneration that seems to take place after the founder dies and centuries pass. Whereas Huston Smith disagreed with him. Although they were good friends and everything, he was saying, “No, all the different religions can be paths to God, if you know where to look.”

Matthew: Yeah, I think at their very best, religions are wonderful ways into the mystery of God, into a journey of awakening, because at their best they hold all the things we need for a balanced path of awakening. They hold devotional practices and contemplative practices; they have ritual and language that give meaning and shape experience; community; mentors and elders who have walked a little further down the path and can help guide you along the way. Any traditional spiritual system, at its best, has all those components held together in an integral way.

Now, like you said, oftentimes we receive these traditions in really degenerative or fragmented ways. We don’t receive a tradition in its fullness, which was part of the problem for me, coming from that more Protestant Christianity where I didn’t have access to a lot of the pieces of the puzzle that were there but weren’t being made readily available.

Rick: My former teacher used to say, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance,” and what he meant by that is someone like Jesus or somebody can come out with an absolutely fabulous, pure teaching, but as Jesus Himself said—or He always used to say—“Those who have ears to hear it,” and “pearls before swine,” and stuff like that. So He is saying that as He is saying one thing, people are hearing another.

As time passes, it becomes like one of those party games, where a message is passed from one person to the next and it ends up becoming completely different from what was originally spoken. Would you concur with that perspective?

Matthew: I think that’s often the case, yeah, absolutely. As you move away from a lineage founder, from the awakened experience of a lineage founder, it is certainly possible to move into increasingly shallow forms of the tradition that become sort of mechanistic observances. You’re just following empty rituals, reading empty words, because the living impulse behind them maybe isn’t there anymore.

As you move away from the awakened experience of a lineage founder, it is possible to move into increasingly shallow forms of the tradition.

Rick: Yeah. Aside from that, why do you think that there’s always been this—at least from my perspective, from my understanding—this kind of conflict between the administrator types of a religion and the mystics of a religion, and usually the administrator type seems to win out?

Matthew: Why is there conflict? Well, you know, as institutions form, they also form institutional-sized egos. Institutions want to perpetuate themselves, to keep themselves alive, and often it is at the cost of the living spiritual impulse that brought the lineage into being in the first place.

So it seems to be a degeneration that happens in lots of traditions, and you have to have a reformation or a revolution—another voice that comes, reclaims the buried treasure, sort of breathes new fire into the lineage, or kindles the warm coals beneath the rubble. But it seems to be a pretty typical process across traditions.

Rick: Yeah, but you seem to feel that we needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, that we can actually resuscitate these traditions and, as you say, clear away the ashes and find the glowing coals, and maybe get the fire burning again.

Matthew: Yeah, honestly, I think that, in many ways that are best for the future, we really, genuinely need the traditions because of the treasures and practices that they hold. They hold the tools that best mature, ground, and develop the human soul. And like I said, at their best, they hold them within an integral system and framework.

Now, as we sort of enter into a global era, it seems that all the religions need to shuck off their superiority complexes, their competition, one-upmanship—all that has to go. So it seems like we sort of need each other. Human beings need the treasures that religions hold, and the practices and frameworks that they have, and then the religions also need human beings who can help the religions themselves mature and step into a new era.

📚 Are Jesus and the great teachers still present?

Rick: Last week, I interviewed someone who had a profound series of mystical experiences—Mary Reed is her name—and quite unwittingly and unexpectedly. She didn’t have a mystical background, wasn’t looking for them, but all this stuff started happening to her, one of which was that she found herself experiencing Jesus on the Cross, actually kind of entering His consciousness and experiencing what He was experiencing at that time. And she also had a similar experience with Buddha at his enlightenment.

Do you think that Jesus—or, with all the millions of people who are praying to Jesus or to Buddha or to various founders of various religions, do you feel that these entities, these beings, are actually alive and well in some dimension and are interceding in human affairs, blessing people, pouring blessings upon people? Or do you feel that they have just merged into the Absolute and that something else is happening when people pour out their devotion to men who died thousands of years ago?

Matthew: I think it’s a little bit of a both-and kind of situation. I do think that these living Masters are available to us, are accessible to us. Does that mean it is in a personal, sort of individuated way?

The way I like to think about it is that the name of God, so to speak, that each of us speaks into being through our own life—that these great souls, Jesus and Buddha, through their impact on the planet, create something of a shockwave, and that the qualities of being that they bring into the life of the planet—the qualities that are associated with the heart of

Jesus: gentleness, mercy, belovedness, humility, love—that those qualities that are the essence of Him, the essence of His personhood, are still accessible and available. We can turn, or rather tune in, through our hearts. We can tune in to the heart of Jesus. Everything He was, in essence, is still available in the ground of our own hearts.

And I think these figures have, in some ways, become archetypes within human consciousness—you know, the Buddha, Jesus. So I do think there’s a living presence that is accessible through the heart, and I also think each of them continues through what, in Christian language, we would call their “mystical body.”

We speak about the “mystical body” of Christ, and in that sense, Christ isn’t just one person, Jesus, but is an ongoing, unfolding body or collective that continues to embody the qualities that Jesus brought into being and carry them in a living way into the world. So, yes, I do think they’re accessible in many ways.

Rick: That’s nice. Yeah, I like that idea that each of them kind of infuses certain qualities into collective consciousness that maybe hadn’t been there, or hadn’t been there very much, and there’s this huge sort of surge of certain qualities, and it has a ripple effect over thousands of years. It’s kind of a nice thought.

Matthew: And to put it in really personal terms, I think about when my dad died a few years ago, very unexpectedly. And I came to find that he was still very much accessible to me, not through memory, not through remembering times we spent together or events that happened, but through actually calling into presence the qualities that were his most essential personhood. In my own heart, I could tune in to that, and in a way, that was still alive and available in the universe, or as I like to say, “In the heart of God.”

And so, if that’s possible for someone we’ve known in our own personal histories, I think “the big ones,” certainly, their impact still reverberates through the planet.

Rick: If we take the Bible literally in terms of Jesus rising three days after the crucifixion and then appearing to the disciples in a subtle body or celestial body, or whatever it was, then if He was around for a month or so after the crucifixion, well, then why not now still?

Matthew: Right—and there’s actually a sense of continuing subtilization of the presence of Jesus in the Gospel accounts. First, they know Him corporeally; they know Him in the flesh. Then, after His crucifixion, there’s the resurrection experience, where He appears in some much subtler form that sometimes is recognizable and sometimes isn’t.

And then, the way St. Paul says it in what is traditionally called “His ascension,” St. Paul says, “He was raised far above all things in order that He might fill all things.” (Ephesians 4:10) So it is a sense that He is now utterly ubiquitous, that His presence now sort of just pervades the universe, that He is filling all things, so available at any point—no longer localized, but universally present.

Rick: And if beings take on roles of cosmic servanthood, then awakening beings—that’s really the path: to become a cosmic servant, serving deepening disclosure of God through the planet, serving the awakening of the human family.

Matthew: Exactly. I think those who are no longer with us in physical form certainly continue as cosmic servants who are continuing to guide and help evolve the life of the planet.

Rick: So you were in high school when we last left off, and you were starting to read the Upanishads and things like that, getting inspired. You eventually ended up going to India, right?

Matthew: That’s right.

Rick: How soon after high school did you do that? How long were you there? What did you experience there?

Matthew: I went to India a couple of times. I’ve been really drawn to India, one because of the encounter with Indian spirituality through this high school teacher I mentioned, through texts, and through Bede Griffiths.

Some of you listening know Father Bede Griffiths. He was a Roman Catholic priest who spent the last half of his life in India, where he said he went “to discover the other half of his soul.” And his life really became an integration of the masculine and the feminine, the active and the contemplative, in a really profound integration of Hinduism and Christianity.

And so he became a sort of icon of the potential integration of these traditions for me and inspired me through my college years. And so I wanted to go to India and spend time in the community that he had left behind.

I ended up going my final year of college to India with a Tibetan Studies program, and so we were mostly up in northern India and Dharamsala, and also in Nepal and Tibet, studying Tibetan spirituality, culture, and politics.

So I went back a few years later, after college, and spent most of my time in the south of India and spent time with Father Bede’s community there. And I spent time alongside the ashram community of Ramana Maharshi.

Rick: I recall from something I read that when you were in Ramana’s ashram, you had a rather powerful unity experience.

Matthew: Yeah, when I was spending time there, I was working with Ramana’s self-inquiry process and asking the question, “Who am I?” And as I worked with that question over and over and over, suddenly there was just a total freezing, a shutdown of the rational, dualistic mental apparatus.

And I looked out, and there was a person, a stranger, standing across from me. And, you know, there aren’t good words for it, but I experienced an experience of no-self or of shared self. There was absolutely no separation between myself, this other person, or our surroundings. I was just seeing myself—we were just two poles of a single reality.

Very hard to put into language, but it was as if all the boundaries weren’t there, you know? It was just oneness—one self, no-self, all at the same time. And it lasted for really just a few seconds, but in that experience it was timeless. Then suddenly I was back in my lines and boundaries and limited self again, but it was a very powerful experience.

And I had been struggling with Ramana while I was there because, often in his tradition, he will say, “You are not the body!”—calling you to awaken to the ultimate, essential Self, that you are not the form.

And I was really struggling with that because there was a sense that manifestation matters, that individuated body-selves matter. If the sole goal of life was to awaken out of these limited forms and into “Self,” with a capital S, then why these forms to begin with?

So there was a sense of, “I may not only be the body, I may not be limited to the body, but I am also the body, and that matters. Manifestation in form matters.” And that’s when I actually first encountered Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit that you mentioned, Rick.

I may not only be the body, I may not be limited to the body, but I am also the body, and that matters.

Matthew: I’d been struggling with this seemingly disembodied nature of the nondual spirituality I was getting from Ramana, and I got up early one morning and walked up Arunachala, the sacred mountain there, and listened to a monk chanting his prayers in a cave on the mountain. And I had this intuition, this impulse, not to walk back down the mountain the way I had come up. Instead, I walked down the other side, and I wound up smack in the middle of the market.

And there was an elephant in the temple courtyard, there were vendors selling spices, children running and playing—it was just colors and sounds and smells, and this profound sense that, “Ah! This was where God was at: in the midst of the marketplace, in manifestation, in form and embodiment.”

I wound my way from the marketplace back to the ashram, and I went to the library to look for a book—something on Hinduism or Buddhism. Instead, what jumped off the shelf was a spine that said The Mass on the World, or, The Hymn of the Universe, by Teilhard de Chardin, which included this piece, “The Mass on the World.”

I read that, and he was singing the song of an incarnate God, God who was incarnate in the cosmos as matter. And it was the perfect counterbalance to “you are not the body” that I was getting from Ramana.

Teilhard de Chardin and cosmic incarnation

Rick: This hearkens back to something we were talking about a few minutes ago, when I asked you whether fundamentalists would agree that God is omnipresent. If He is omnipresent, then we are looking at Him, as I said in the intro when I read the main points we are going to talk about. And there is that quote from the Gospel of

Thomas: “Come to know what is before your eyes and what is hidden from you will be revealed.”

It seems to me that God is not merely transcendent, because if He is only transcendent, then He is not omnipresent. What about all this? He must be totally infusing and permeating and orchestrating, as pure Intelligence, all this as well.

Matthew: That’s certainly my sense within the Christian tradition. The language of incarnation is so central, and Teilhard really beautifully expands that to see cosmic incarnation, that the whole cosmos is the incarnation of God. And the whole cosmos is actually a deepening, unfolding disclosure of the heart of God, that God is longing to come into form through the world.

So, if you imagine God as the ground of all possibility, unmanifest ground of all possibility, those possibilities want to manifest; the heart of God wants to unfold and disclose Itself. So the world is that unfolding, and Teilhard linked that, of course, to an evolutionary worldview that saw that disclosure deepening through the evolutionary process.

And so, in the Christian tradition, we can see Jesus as giving voice to this cosmic incarnation, having this experience: “I and the Father are one.” And then He initiates an unfolding, awakening body—that body of Christ, understood mystically as that unfolding, awakening collective, even perhaps the unfolding, awakening human family.

Rick: Here is something I extracted from something you wrote: “Teilhard struck right at the heart of a tension felt by spiritual seekers throughout history and one that I was certainly feeling”—meaning you, when you wrote this—“a pull between a spirituality that is all about swimming back upstream to a rarified nondual awakening, with little relation to the world and the body, and a spirituality that is about fully embracing life, in form, duality, and diversity. These seemingly contradictory upward and downward currents could be reconciled and united in a forward movement, that of an evolving universe.”

Matthew: Right. I think that is what we’re picking up on today, and this also ties into that whole vision of a “second axial age,” a sort of shift in the spiritual current. In past spiritual generations, there has been a real focus on awakening almost out of the world and out of the body, and a sense that the spiritual path necessarily leads you away from the body, away from the world. That God is up and the world is down, and so there is a tension and you have got to choose what you want. Do you want the world or do you want God?

And it’s really set up as an either-or. You see that in some monastic traditions, a real sense of either-or, and you also certainly see it in the maps of the chakra system, where the goal is really sort of up and out: you want to raise the energy and head out.

Whereas with the evolving vision, it is not either-or. It is actually the two coming together and moving in a forward motion. So it is more about converging, collapsing and converging those two poles. And when you think the goal is to get out of the world, it makes sense that you would want to swim upstream. But when you can link evolution to that and see that the world itself is actually the deepening disclosure of God, that God is wanting to unfold Godself evermore, then the goal isn’t “getting out of the world.” The goal is to actually further unfold the world.

Rick: One thing is that a lot of these monastic traditions evolved in a time when a toothache could kill you, you know? It was a rather brutish existence, and living in a medieval village as a serf wasn’t really a picnic. Anything you could do to get out of such an existence might be very alluring.

Matthew: It makes sense that when life is rough, when living in the world is very difficult, that you would have language of exile, that we live in exile in the world. Christian tradition sometimes speaks of it as “a valley of tears,” that we’re “going through this veil of tears,” and those images of exile have sort of dominated spiritual consciousness.

And as conditions of living improve, as you said, maybe that sense doesn’t have to dominate so much anymore.

Rick: In defense of withdrawing from the world, I think that periodically it could be a good thing. There could be a cycle to one’s life—on a daily basis, on an annual basis, or whatever—where one has periods of withdrawal, kind of like the Bhagavad Gita phrase “like a tortoise withdrawing its limbs into its shell,” withdrawing the senses from their objects, and that sort of describes meditation in a way.

But then that same book talks about “having done that, coming out again,” and “surcharged with greater energy, intelligence, and clarity of mind,” and so on.

Another analogy might be: if you want to shoot an arrow to hit a target, you don’t just throw it or let it go. You have to pull it back first, and then you can let it go; then it will hit the target. So speak a bit about how periods of withdrawal, either daily in meditation or annually in retreats or whatever, balanced with life in the world, can be a nice integration.

Matthew: Yeah, I think it is utterly central. The thing that was popping into my mind was the way Shankara sums up the teachings of

Advaita: “The world is illusion, Brahman alone is real, Brahman is the world.” And so you have to go through the negation first—the world is illusion. You negate the world so that you can touch the eternal, touch the depths, and then you come back around full circle and affirm the world as the manifestation of the eternal. And it seems like some spiritual traditions perhaps stop at the second junction and don’t finally make it around to the third.

But I certainly am not against monasticism. I live alongside a community of Benedictine monks and fully believe in the monastic vocation. And I think for those who are non-monastics, the gift that monastic communities hold into being is places of retreat that have a rhythm of balanced living, of contemplation, that is so needed.

And I think in many ways monastic communities hold models alive that the world as a whole desperately needs. They have preserved the rhythm of prayer, the rhythm of contemplation, and they have preserved community. We so much in the world today have lost authentic community. They have created a balanced way of life that manifests the conditions that aid awakening and that help deepen and stabilize awakening.

Now, often monastic communities are celibate communities, and I think that is necessary for the manifestation of that form of life. That’s one way of being that is supported by celibate life. But we have often in the past ranked them hierarchically, as if celibacy is somehow closer to God, because it is on that model of “up and out,” and I don’t think that’s the case. I would see celibacy as a gift that some people are called to or given, but it’s not higher or lower in that sense.

Rick: In various traditions—Christian, Buddhist, Hindu—it’s considered that people who choose to live that life or establish these monasteries are kind of establishing coherence-generating centers for the rest of the world. In a quiet sort of way, maybe in a cave in the Himalayas, they are actually helping to maintain a much greater degree of peace and coherence in the world by their very existence, by the influence they radiate from that silence.

Matthew: I think it’s absolutely true. We have thousands of people who come through Holy Cross Monastery and Retreat each year, and when I first came here, people talked about the experience. You step onto the property and you feel the calm, the quiet, and the coherence. It impacts you. And then you carry a little bit of that back into the world with you, so I do think they are powerful generative centers in that sense.

And it’s best in the Christian tradition expressed through the language of the “Body of Christ,” that there are different gifts, different callings, whether they be a call to an active life or a contemplative life, but they all ultimately mutually support and enrich each other.

Rick: Back when I was your age, and for many years, I taught meditation and I taught a lot of weekend retreats. Sometimes we would have them in hotels, and other times we would have them in Catholic retreat centers. And I’ll tell you, the depth of experience that would take place in the Catholic retreat center—usually radically better than what you are going to get in some hotel, where you had to kind of walk through the cocktail lounge to get to the meeting hall or something.

Matthew: And I think we feel it whenever we walk into a church, a temple, or a monastery. It is easier to drop in more deeply, more quickly.

Rick: There must be something structured in the atmosphere, on a subtle level that we can’t necessarily see, but something that pervades and is retained, even when the people are not there. You walk into a temple in India where people have been worshipping for thousands of years, and there’s something palpable in the atmosphere that has been established there.

Matthew: I think it’s probably a both-and: yes, there is a sort of resident field of prayer that’s built up, so you step into that vibration. And then I think also, simply, places of worship usually pay attention to aesthetics, to beauty, to balance. You walk into a space and it’s designed visually to pull you into center.

🎵 Heartfulness and the danger of spiritual bypassing

Rick: While we’re still talking about Teilhard de Chardin and “up and out” versus infusing life into the marketplace, some people take that perspective and use it as justification for what almost seems like hedonism. You know what I mean?

Matthew: Oh, yeah. It’s sort of an excuse to baptize the impulses of the ego and say, “Well, everything is holy, so …”

Rick: Yeah, so party on, you know?

Matthew: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: So I think it just has to be understood properly and taken in the right context and all, and not misinterpreted.

Matthew: Right. And that’s again why the traditional systems are so helpful, because they often have checks and balances in place. You have a guide, you have a mentor, you have practices you are given, so that you are learning to deepen and embody and carry that into the world.

Some degree of purification is necessary. You’ve got to pull the bow back first. Some kind of practice that is doing that work has to be a part of the picture.

Rick: I run into this fairly often, where people are using this notion that “ultimately we’re all enlightened,” and “the world is an illusion,” or this and that, to justify all kinds of egregious behavior and misbehavior that is harming themselves and others.

Matthew: One of the reasons I think it is actually helpful in the Christian tradition that there hasn’t been much language of “enlightenment” is that it is easy to think of enlightenment as a goal, something that the ego wants to latch onto and make a possession. And the Christian path talks more about what a lot of teachers today are starting to call “heartfulness.”

We often talk about “mindfulness,” and the flavor of the Christian contemplative path is much more heart-centered: heartfulness. Not to oppose mind to heart; we can talk about heart-mind.

When you read the writings of the early Desert Fathers and Mothers, up through Russian Orthodox lineages that practice the Prayer of the Heart, it’s always this language of “drawing the heart into the mind,” “anchoring awareness in the heart,” and cultivating qualities like humility, gentleness, and surrender. There’s actually not much talk of a goal of enlightenment. It is just talk of the work of cultivating the heart.

And it seems to me that there’s some real wisdom in that, some skillful means in that, because as you cultivate the heart and the qualities of the heart, you create a ground that can then hold awakening in a stable way. So you don’t just have an awakening experience that’s not grounded in your being, after which you fall back into your egoic impulse of self, and it thinks that it’s awake because you had some unitive experience: “You had a touch of oneness, and therefore I’m enlightened.”

So instead, focusing on cultivating humility, simplicity, love, and gentleness, you just slowly walk your way into awakening without perhaps ever even noticing it.

Rick: Do you think that Christianity focuses on the heart instead of enlightenment because it wasn’t understood that there is such a thing as enlightenment? Or do you think it’s because one can try to leapfrog to this state of finality without having actually laid the foundation for it and cultured the heart?

Matthew: Who knows what really happened, what led traditions to develop one way or the other. And certainly, maybe it would have been helpful over the centuries to have had language of “enlightenment” within the Christian Church, but it didn’t develop in that way.

I don’t want to get into, of course, “this one gets it better than that one,” but I do think there’s a mutual sort of gifting back and forth across traditions that is happening today, where they can better hone their understandings of spiritual experiences through that dialogue and through sharing language back and forth.

Rick: If people like St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and people like that weren’t enlightened, then I don’t know who was, you know?

Matthew: Right. In the Benedictine lineage, in most Christian lineages, it’s framed around the language of humility. You are really cultivating humility, and that cultivation readies the heart to hold awakening.

And I think today the language we might use is the language we get from Ken Wilber about “states versus stages.” At any point in your spiritual development, you might experience a high spiritual “state.” You might have a unitive experience, an awakening experience, but it’s just a glimpse; it’s not actually grounded in your being. And a “stage” is when you are actually living stably from that awakening.

And it’s nice to have the language of awakening, so that you know there’s a goal that you are walking towards. But it seems to me almost more important to have the path rather than the goal, because the path prepares the ground for the goal to arrive in.

The path prepares the ground for the goal to arrive in.

🛤️ Devotion as a path to unity

Rick: That syndrome—the tendency of the ego latching onto a state or experience and becoming aggrandized through that—what sort of safeguards have you seen in Christianity or in your own experience to prevent that from happening?

Matthew: Having spiritual elders and mentors in your life—you can’t underestimate the importance of that, having someone who can help guide you and help see when you’re stepping off the path a little bit.

And again, I think the traditional religious frameworks are helpful in this regard because they give a balanced system. When you look at the way something like Buddhism has come to the West, we often think of Buddhism purely as meditation practice. But of course, in the traditional Buddhist society, Buddhism is a lot more than just meditation practice.

It is also devotional practice, sutra chanting, and, if you go to a traditional Zen center, you’re going to see bows and prostrations happening. All of those elements are in place: the contemplative piece, the devotional piece, the embodied piece, the mentor piece, and the community piece.

When you have all that in place, there are a lot of safeguards there. If you start going off this way, you’re going to get bumped back. If you go that way, something over here is going to bump you back. When we try to go it alone, we often don’t have that system and those checks and balances in place to knock us back on track.

One of the things that I think is so important, and that I used to write off, is devotional practice, particularly for those of us who are drawn to a more nondual, kind of unitive understanding of awakening and reality. A devotional practice can seem dualistic and dumbed-down. If you have a God you’re devoted to, it’s external and ultimately a distraction: you’ve got to get rid of that!

But I think actually those devotional practices are one of the most skillful means into a more unitive awakening, because they help cultivate the qualities necessary for that awakening. So you have a focal point—be it Jesus, be it Ramakrishna, be it “God is the Lover, the Beloved”—that you cultivate your heart in relation to. You’re cultivating love, cultivating devotion, and that cultivation can give way to that experience where lover and Beloved merge into oneness.

And so devotional practices are actually a really quick way, I think, to rewire our consciousness towards the unitive, if the devotional practice is held against a more unitive backdrop, a unitive understanding, so that we don’t just brush them aside. The contemplative and devotional together, I think, form a balance.

Rick: You might like a quote from Shankara. He said, “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.” And he himself was very devotional and wrote beautiful devotional hymns. Ramana was very devotional, Nisargadatta was, Anandamayi Ma—just any of these profoundly unity-consciousness sages that we care to mention. If we look at their lives, they were very devotional, post-unity, not just pre-unity.

Matthew: I remember early on discovering nondual teachings and really losing a sense of “personal God.” It no longer made any sense to me. And it was really encountering voices like Ramakrishna, who had profound nondual, unitive experiences but then was also deeply devoted to the Mother, to the goddess Kali. Rumi, again, had a profound oneness experience but also delighted in the language of the lover and the Beloved, and I realized, you can have both!

And the place I think I’ve come to increasingly now with it is that you can have devotion that isn’t dualistic, that entering into the ground of your own heart there is an infinite, objectless tenderness and intimacy that is hard to call anything other than “Thou,” but it’s not separate from you. It is the ground of your own heart; you are it. You can also be “in love” with it. It’s a field of infinite relationality that can hold the dance of oneness and twoness and, you know, all of it.

Rick: Well, I think oneness and twoness can coexist simultaneously without any conflict, you know?

Matthew: There’s a line in the Gospel of Thomas, and I’m not going to quote it exactly right, but Jesus says, “In the beginning, you were one; now that you have become two, what will you do?” What will you do? And I hear in there an invitation to delight in the twoness of things, held against the oneness of things. And devotion seems to be a really great way to awaken the qualities of the heart, like love and compassion and mercy.

Rick: You said, “The ‘other’ is used as a focus for cultivating qualities in our own heart. As we reverence the sweetness of Mary, for instance, if Mary is our object of devotion, slowly, slowly we take on that sweetness. So the objects of devotion we choose matter; they are what we will become.”

Matthew: The qualities we want to cultivate in our own hearts, we should look for them in our devotional focal points. And if we see a lack in ourselves, if we see that we need to cultivate more gentleness or more sweetness, we should have a devotional focal point that itself embodies those qualities. As you offer devotion or reverence to that, you begin cultivating those qualities in yourself.

If, on the other side, perhaps you are too gentle and sweet and you need some fierceness, maybe you want Kali as a focal point. But our objects of devotion do matter, because what we give our devotion to, we will become.

What we give our devotion to, we will become.

Rick: I think there is a never-ending possibility for further refinement and subtlety, and maybe “divinization” would be a good word here. So even if we were profoundly established in a unitive state, there is no end to the possible refinement of the senses, the heart, and all the various facets of this instrument with which we have been gifted. And devotion is perhaps one of the most efficacious ways of bringing about that continuing refinement.

Matthew: And again, the question is, why is the world even here? So that those qualities can come into manifestation, so that those names of God can be spoken into being. What is love as a potential that exists in the unmanifest ground of being? What is beauty? What is joy?

It seems to me that there are certain qualities of love, beauty, and joy that really only take on meaning in manifestation, and that those potentialities long to be expressed. And the expression and refinement of those expressions is potentially infinite, which is why I imagine cosmos upon cosmos will continue unfolding forever, because the ground of being itself is infinite and therefore the possible expressions are infinite.

Rick: I am one, may have become many. If you’re lying in a bathtub and you’ve been lying there for a while, lying quietly and still, you don’t feel the warmth anymore. But if you slosh around a little bit, you feel, “Ah, this feels good. It feels warm.” So it’s like God is kind of sloshing around here in the universe by creating this manifest world and entering into it and playing within it and so on.

Matthew: Right, and awakening ever more deeply as it does. And as our species continues, God willing, to evolve, we have the potential to refine and deepen that expression of these qualities, of love and beauty and delight and joy and compassion. So that’s the trajectory in an evolutionary model. It is not to get out of the world so that you can get to the beauty of God; it’s to get more deeply into the world so that you can carry that forward.

The second axial age

The idea of an “axial age” came from a German philosopher, Karl Jaspers. He posited that, roughly between 800 and 200 B.C.E., there was this window of time when the headwaters of all the existing religious traditions began forming, pretty much independently, around the world. You had Confucius teaching in China, Lao Tzu teaching the Way of the Tao, the seers of the Upanishads, the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets—all this sort of going on at the same time.

And the idea is that with that, there was a shift that happened in spiritual understanding. Before this sort of axial age, human spirituality had been really deeply grounded in the earth, in cycles and seasons of nature, and our identity was really rooted in a sense of tribe, of the collective, and that tribal, collective identity took precedence over my individual identity.

With the axial shift, all that sort of broke open and we started looking for a transcendent God. That is when spirituality started developing as a path of ascent; that’s when we started getting the “up and out of the world.”

And we also started losing our ties to the earth, and the way of the individual started opening up. You could now break ties with the earth family; you could go off into the forest; you could leave your tribal gods, like Abraham and Sarah did, or like the Buddha left his wife and child in the palace to go search for enlightenment.

And the idea is that this model has been driving human spirituality, largely, for the last couple thousand years or so. And now, as we are entering into this global era with an evolutionary understanding, it is all shifting again. We’re picking up, essentially, everything that we lost in the first axial shift.

That connection to the earth, that sense of collective identity—all that is coming up, but not at the tribal level. Now it’s coming back at the global level, and in the process we’re not losing everything we’ve gained from the focus on the individual and the transcendent. Now we can actually tie the two together; we can sort of wed the immanent and the transcendent, spirit and body, heaven and earth. And again, in that evolutionary model, it is all driving somewhere.

So that’s the basic framework of what the second axial age is. And I think the really cool thing there is that we’ve often lumped all the religions in as “first axial religions,” but when you start looking at them, you see threads of second axial understanding growing in all of them.

In Buddhism, with the Bodhisattva vow in Mahayana Buddhism, the model shifts from “my personal enlightenment and attaining nirvana” to forswearing your final liberation so that you can work for collective awakening. So the model shifts. It’s not “up and out”; it’s belonging to the phenomenal world and working for the awakening of all of us together.

And I think you could see the emergence of Jesus, see him as an initiator of second axial consciousness. You could see the same thing happening in Islam.

Rick: One thing I think about when I think about the Bodhisattva vow is that from the perspective of “I am me, I am this individuality and it sucks, it is suffering, and I just want to merge into the ocean of consciousness and be gone,” it’s sort of a very individual perspective. Whereas the Bodhisattva perspective is more like, “My individuality, such as it is, is a tool of the Divine. And I am happy to not destroy the tool, not dissolve the tool, but have it continue as long as the Divine wishes to use it as an instrument for good in the world, for the upliftment of the world,” and so on.

Matthew: Right, it makes sense to me that it’s no longer about “my awakening,” but it’s surrendering yourself into cosmic servanthood: take this, use this, for the awakening of all.

Rick: You could sort of think of a Bodhisattva not as “I’m going to help everybody get up and out,” but “I’m going to help make this a heaven on earth, which will continue to be an earth, but a heavenly one.”

Matthew: Right, and that’s again the marrying of the two, bringing them together.

Rick: So if the second axial age is just dawning, where do you think it might be 500 or 1,000 years from now if it really fully blossomed?

Matthew: We are always stepping forward into mystery, but if, ideally, more human beings are awakening together, spiritual consciousness is taking a greater hold, and more people are living and seeing from a place of unitive experience, then we would hope for greater peace and greater harmony, working together as a global collective.

Teilhard saw evolution up to this point as following a process of divergence. As humanity fanned out around the planet, we evolved divergent cultures and divergent languages. But because of the limited spherical surface area of the planet, eventually the process of convergence would happen. We’re essentially at the beginning of that global convergence right now.

And we know that we have enough planetary resources to end world hunger if we chose to organize as a global collective, rather than to continue thinking in tribal-national terms.

Rick: You said, “Divergence would reach an endpoint and a second phase of evolution would begin: convergence. Convergence of diverse peoples, cultures, and religions would result in the emergence of a global consciousness and what Teilhard called ‘creative unions,’ new arrangements of higher-order complexity that would bring in entirely new and unprecedented evolutionary tiers into being.”

Matthew: For Teilhard, a creative union opened a new evolutionary playing field. Every time a creative union happened, a new possibility, a new tier, was opened in evolution. It starts with atoms joining together into molecules, and an atom gives up something of its autonomy to create a higher level, a higher order of complexity, in a molecule.

Now, atoms in a molecule don’t merge into sameness. It’s not that now they’re all the same. You still have two Hs and an O in water, but the autonomy is given up for that higher order to emerge.

And this is what turned Teilhard off to some forms of what he would have called “Eastern mysticism,” which saw the mystical journey as sort of returning to an uncarved block, returning to a primordial oneness, an undifferentiated primordial oneness. He instead wanted us to move forward to a fully differentiated oneness. Can we achieve oneness that is diverse and yet unified, as opposed to erasing diversity and differentiation into the primordial soup?

He imagined that the juncture we’re at now is that we’re being offered the opportunity to open a new evolutionary playing field through creative union at the next level, and it is through a union of human intelligences.

We’ve grown accustomed to looking for evolution in what he called the “biosphere,” in the sphere of organic life, but the next leap, he says, is actually what he calls the “noosphere”—from the Greek nous for consciousness. It is evolution in consciousness; that’s the next step.

And so we won’t reach unity through a merging of physical bodies; it will be a merging in consciousness. Those qualities, like love and will, have to come together at that level and form a new higher-order being. The language is that we will become a single being, a single organism, in a way.

And he imagined that as the mystical body of Christ, as the human family working together as a single mystical body, in which diversity and differentiation are maintained. Again, it’s not that we’re going to lose all of our diversity and differentiation and melt into a soup; we’re going to find unity within and through that.

We’re going to find unity within and through diversity and differentiation.

Rick: Since we’re in a hot political season right now, it’s interesting to evaluate the various political stances and candidates in light of what you just said. Are they into divisiveness and isolationism, and not caring about what our neighbors are experiencing or deprived of, or are they into helping everyone achieve some kind of quality of life and happiness?

Matthew: When you look at the candidates that are into divisiveness and nationalism, the impulses that are motivating that are often fear. They are working with and manipulating fear. And we know that contemplative practice actually has the possibility to evolve consciousness, to evolve our minds.

When neuroscience looks at what contemplative practice does, very often we operate on autopilot. Some experience comes into our reality, into our field of perception, and very often we move into the lowest part of our brain. Our sort of lizard, reptilian brain governs our fight-or-flight responses; it’s all fear-based response.

Contemplative practice actually creates enough inner spaciousness so that when a stimulus comes into your field of experience, rather than immediately routing that through and interpreting it through your lizard brain, it can actually be routed through the higher, more evolved parts of your brain, through your prefrontal lobes and through your neocortex. And it opens you to a capacity for creative intelligence that isn’t accessible to you when you are operating out of fear.

And so, anytime I see a political candidate using fear, I think they are essentially trying to devolve us or limit our evolutionary capacity.

Rick: There’s actually physiological research on that sort of thing with meditators, showing that experienced meditators are much less reactive, as measured by things like galvanic skin response, to stressful stimuli.

And that also was where the whole PTSD thing is such an issue these days—people’s nervous systems have been so stressed by traumatic situations that they remain in that state of fight or flight, and the whole biochemistry is always upset. They are so easily triggered by this or that. And that can all be kind of reversed and healed through contemplative practice, as you would put it, or various meditative practices.

Matthew: Perhaps it is helpful not to think of contemplative practice as only sitting cross-legged on a cushion. There are lots of practices and experiences that can cultivate contemplative awareness and spaciousness, whether it is a daily 20-minute sit or taking a walk in nature.

I remember hearing Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, once saying, when he was asked if he could recommend one practice from his tradition, and only one, what would he recommend. And he said, “Spend long periods of time in nature.” Being in nature has a way of slowing and stilling. So, anyway, “contemplative” can look like different kinds of things.

Rick: And it’s interesting also that certain political factions would tend to want to commercialize nature and destroy it in various ways for short-term gain, which again makes it seem like they are trying to devolve us.

Matthew: The question, I think, when we’re voting or doing anything else is: Where is fear? Where is the movement back towards tribalism? And where is love and a movement towards a more universal appreciation of the human family?

Beyond religious exclusivity

Rick: I’ve often run into a certain mindset in religion where one tradition claims to be the only way. How do you deal with that?

Matthew: The sort of sense of Christian exclusivity—that’s what you’re getting at?

Rick: Yeah, which is not exclusive to Christians. There seems to be a certain mindset in every religion of that nature.

Matthew: You get it everywhere. It’s just part of human nature, it seems. And, of course, there are ways to interpret those verses within the Christian tradition.

Rick: Like, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) How would you interpret that one?

Matthew: You can use it in the most limited, exclusive way, or you can hear it as the most universal statement: anyone who is coming to God, in whatever way, is coming through Me because I am in all ways.

If you hear that in light of the way the Gospel of John opens—“In the beginning was the Word,” the logos—it’s this universal, cosmic reality that is one with God, through which God creates the worlds and interfaces with the worlds. If Jesus is speaking with that cosmic voice, you can’t hear it exclusively.

Rick: Wasn’t that thing, “Before Abraham was, I am?” Or something.

Matthew: Yeah. These are all lines from the Gospel of John, which New Testament scholars would tell us is the latest of the four canonical Gospels to be written. So the words here are probably not the words of the historical Jesus. Jesus probably didn’t go around speaking in these lofty, sort of declarative statements: “I am this,” and “I am that.” That language isn’t present in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. So it is probably better to see John as this sort of poetic rumination on the meaning of Jesus for the Christian community, that early Christians said, “In Him, we have found the way, the truth, and the life. In Him, we have found the true vine and bread from heaven.”

But those statements, again, even if we believe they were literally spoken by Jesus, I think the call is to hear them in the most universal, inclusive way possible. I think that is the call for all our religious traditions now. What is the most universal, inclusive, and beautiful vision of our traditions that we can each step up and offer to the world?

Because again, I think the traditions are needed, their treasures are needed, and so how can we offer them in the most all-encompassing way? That’s the only way forward.

Belief, faith, and experience

Rick: You hear religious people saying, “Well, I believe this and I believe that.” And my answer would be, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what I believe; it matters what I experience, and if I experience it, then I believe it.”

Ultimately, when it comes to spiritual matters, in my opinion, it’s really about experiencing it. You can stand on the sidewalk and believe that the food in a restaurant is really delicious, but you’re going to starve to death if you don’t go in there and eat it.

Matthew: This understanding, what you’re talking about as “experience,” is much closer to the early Christian conception of “belief.” So in the Nicene Creed that Christians recite week after week in congregational worship, credo comes from the same word as cardia, which is “heart,” and it was understood to mean, “I give my heart to.”

Belief was something that involved your whole self. Post-Western European rational Enlightenment, belief has become something that is cognitive and intellectual; it is all about intellectual assent. I think belief in the early centuries of the Christian Church was about practice, it was about giving yourself, it was about experiencing, and it is only in the last few hundred years that we have actually divorced it into this very cognitive, mental-based kind of thing.

Rick: It almost seems that there’s a fear associated with this cognitive, mental sort of thing: “If you don’t believe this, you’re going to be in big trouble. You better believe this.”

Matthew: “We’ve got to protect the truth, we’ve got to guard the truth, and we’ve got to protect it.” I remember the old saying that, “Belief clings while faith lets go,” and I think there is perhaps some truth in that. Belief, at least when we understand belief in this cognitive, protective kind of sense, has to clutch and grab onto something, whereas faith is really this open stance, opening to the universe, surrendering to what is.

Rick: If you think about what Jesus was, who He was, or Buddha, or any of these great teachers, it’s not that they were just guys who had these tremendous beliefs and were really gung-ho about these beliefs; they were guys who were living a very profound level of experience.

Matthew: Right, and calling people into their experience, calling people to participate in that reality that they were embodying themselves.

Rick: If Jesus said, “Well, if you believe this, then such and such will happen,” I don’t think he was saying that it’s adequate just to believe it, but rather that belief is maybe the first step. If I believe that there’s a road that will take me to California, then great, but that doesn’t mean I’m in California; it means I can confidently get on this road and start driving, and I’ll end up in California.

Matthew: We have to place our trust in something in order to move forward. So if we’re going to take on a practice without yet knowing what the fruits of that practice are, we need to trust that the practice is efficacious so that we will actually give ourselves to it, and that trust usually comes from having seen the fruits of the practice in the one who gives you the practice.

So if Jesus says, “Do this,” and you see the fruits of mercy, gentleness, love, and compassion embodied in His being, then you think, “Okay, I will do that because it looks like it works!”

Rick: Worked for Him! And He said, “You shall know them by their fruit.” (Matthew 7:16)

Matthew: Right, whereas we have turned Christianity often into not, “Place your trust in this and then set your foot on the path and walk and embody it,” but into, “Believe this! Here is the Nicene Creed checklist: believe this, and then that’s it, you’re done!”

Rick: I’ve often thought that the reason fundamentalists get so defensive is that they don’t actually believe the things that they are supposed to believe, because they don’t have an experiential foundation to their belief, so they’re kind of on really shaky ground. And a lot of things can seem very threatening to beliefs that are just hanging in the air without a foundation.

Matthew: This is the situation that I think so much of Christianity has found itself in postmodernity. One of the reasons fundamentalists are compelling to a lot of people is because often, real progressive, liberal forms of Christianity tend to water our narrative down because we want to be inclusive, we’re a little embarrassed about our past and our exclusivity and colonialism, so we tend to water the whole thing down, and what is left isn’t all that compelling or forceful.

Whereas the fundamentalists have a really compelling narrative. If you are able to step into its confines, it explains everything; it gives you black-and-white answers, but it’s at the cost of forfeiting everything we’ve learned over the past century or so. You have to give up all that information.

And that is why someone like Teilhard de Chardin is so helpful. He steps into a traditional religious system; he doesn’t water down the dogma or the doctrine. Instead, he looks at it anew, within an evolutionary context, and he sort of links it up to that so that it carries forward.

Rather than throwing out the religions, we need people with second axial consciousness to step into the religions and take their treasures and resources and carry them forward in a second axial way, rather than take them backwards into the fundamentalist roadmap or just throw them away altogether.

Rick: Henry David Thoreau said something like, “It’s okay to have castles in the air; that’s where they belong. Just put foundations under them.” So you don’t have to water it down. All the most marvelous aspects of the traditions can be taken seriously and literally, and it’s very profound and inspiring.

But there really needs to be a foundation, and I would say the foundation is to actually experience what these guys were talking about when they said all the things they said. To have it be a living reality rather than an intellectual, conceptual reality.

Matthew: Christianity somewhere along the way installed the glass ceiling in relation to what is allowed for the individual Christian to experience. You have Jesus in the Gospel of John praying something like, “I and the Father”—I and God—“are one,” and then He goes right on to pray, “May they all be one, as You and I are one.”

And so there’s a call for the whole body of Christ, the whole community of believers, to step experientially into that oneness. “May they all be one just as I am one with God.” But very quickly Christians sort of drew the line and said, “We will let Jesus say that, but no one else can say it!” And so we isolate that experience, put it on a pedestal, let Him experience it, and then we stop stepping into the experience ourselves.

Rick: So the fundamentalists just kind of cherry-pick and ignore the things you’re just quoting?

Matthew: Well, everybody cherry-picks, fundamentalist or otherwise. You take your framework and then you read things through the limitation of the narrative that you impose on it. If you start with the fundamentalist framework and narrative, you’re going to try to read everything in that light. If you start with the contemplative, progressive, evolutionary framework and narrative, you’re going to read it in that light.

The Divine Feminine and moving beyond binaries

Rick: Another thing you talked quite a bit about is “the Divine Feminine, the Mother, she who is; this is her time, that she is coming forward in the spiritual landscape, and that we must work to honor and cultivate her presence.”

“What is wisdom?”—I think this was from The Wisdom of Solomon—“She is the mobility of movement, she is the transparent nothing that pervades all things, she is the breath of God, a clear emanation of Divine glory. Although she is one, she does all things. Without leaving herself, she renews all things.”

A bit more here: “Early 18th-century Roman Catholic Saint Louis de Montfort believed that for the fullness of Christ to come into our world, Mary must shine forth more than ever in mercy, power, and grace. Indeed, whether we call her Mary, Tara, Kwan Yin, Kali, or Sophia, the time of the Mother is upon us.” Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Matthew: Part of it has to do with the second axial map we were working with, that in pre-axial spirituality there was a strong sense of the feminine, and of the earth, and of the mother, and then in post-axial spirituality there was much more emphasis on the transcendent, on “God as Father,” and the emergence of the patriarchal cultures that have really dominated the world for the last few thousand years.

And now, as we sort of turn the spiral again, we’re waking the feminine back up. But I almost think that it’s not helpful—there are sort of two lines of development here: we have to uplift the feminine, which has been suppressed, but we also, I think, at the same time, have to move beyond the binary altogether because it’s a period of integration.

And so it’s not now an “age of the feminine trumps the age of the masculine.” Instead, we need an integration that moves beyond binary identities.

Rick: It was kind of like you were saying earlier: each new teaching and teacher is building upon the previous things. Newton said he stood upon the shoulders of giants. So we’re building upon the previous things, not wiping them away and starting afresh.

Matthew: Right. So reclaiming the feminine, reclaiming the earth, reclaiming the Mother—all that seems important. But if we just focus there, I think we miss the point and we stay stuck in binaries.

And it seems to me that just the concept of “masculine or feminine” as sort of archetypal, this essentialist conception of the masculine and feminine, is actually deeply problematic because it is so culturally constructed. What is feminine or what is masculine varies from culture to culture, and so to uplift one set of qualities as the archetypal feminine, well, it’s just not true, or it’s culturally relative, in that sense.

Ideally, we’re moving into an era in which we don’t see people as masculine or feminine; we see each individual as a unique combination of human qualities, moving away from binary gender identities. This is one of the great things that is happening because of awareness around gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender minorities: they are helping break us out of binary thinking altogether.

Rick: So just to have you elaborate a little more, you hear a lot these days about the Divine feminine. What does that actually mean, and what impact might the enlivenment of it have on our world?

Matthew: On one level we’re talking about not the suppression of the feminine, but the suppression and the oppression of women. And we can talk about uplifting women, but to fall into gender language of feminine and masculine, it seems to reinforce culturally constructed ideas of what those are.

I think that whole gendered, binary language is problematic, but to say that there are qualities that perhaps culturally we have associated as feminine that have been suppressed, that we want to raise those up, is important.

Rick: I don’t think you are suggesting that in an enlightened world we would all be androgynous.

Matthew: I think we would all be our utterly unique selves, every one a unique expression, every one a unique combination of these qualities that we might call “masculine” or “feminine.” They manifest in different degrees and combinations in every person, but there’s not perhaps an “ideal.”

We often talk about moving toward a kind of balanced, integrated equilibrium of these qualities, which seems like an erasure of diversity, that everyone is supposed to come to a sameness, whereas I would rather us celebrate the diverse range of human qualities in all their combinations and possibilities.

Rick: Look at nature itself, how diverse it is, how many species there are, and just the incredible diversity. Even human beings—no two faces are the same out of eight billion people, although there are people who make a living because they look like George Clooney or something. But basically, we are all distinct and unique.

Matthew: Before we can move toward that celebration of our diversity, we have to uplift all those voices and expressions that have been oppressed, suppressed, and silenced. So that includes women, that includes gay and lesbian folks, and that includes transgender folks. There has to be a healing before there can be an integration and celebration.

Rick: When I think of that whole Divine feminine and having that dawn in the world more, I kind of think of feminine as nurturing and caring, and how that is so critically needed in terms of our environment and the fact that we are killing off 150 to 200 species every day, going extinct, and destroying our home planet, the only one we have.

There is just sort of a lack of feeling inherent in the way we treat animals and the planet, and so on, that it seems to me is the antithesis of motherliness and femininity.

Matthew: I agree with you, and I think that the qualities that you’re naming as “feminine”—nurturance, for example—have perhaps been suppressed, and it has allowed us to destroy the earth, commodify the earth. The question I’m raising is: Is also part of the problem the gendering of that quality to begin with?

Rick: A good father is protective of his family and providing and caring, and so on, so there’s a nurturing quality there too.

Matthew: So there’s a quality that we’ve suppressed, by and large, as a species within patriarchal cultures, and then there’s half of our population, which we have suppressed—women—and we’ve associated the quality with the sex. And I’m saying we need to uplift women, and we also need to free the quality, in a way.

To continue calling it a “feminine quality” is to continue to gender it, and gendering means we walk into a binary: masculine/feminine, male/female. If we could break out of the binary gendering altogether, there would be as many genders as there are human beings. To free and liberate those qualities for all of us seems to me like that’s a helpful direction to move in.

Rick: I think I get your point: that we’re just all an infinitely complex mixture of qualities, and that we just need to blossom in our fullness, in our unique fullness.

And if you have really rich soil in the forest, then each of the plants is going to thrive fully as what it is, and the whole thing will look much more diverse and alive and rich. So the ground in this metaphor would be consciousness itself. As that awakens in the world, the diversity—when we think of consciousness, we think of sort of unification and oneness—but the enlivenment of consciousness is actually going to enhance the diversity, because that’s the “life stuff” of all of us, and it’s that which enables us to be fully what we are.

Matthew: Right, that consciousness is the ground of all potentiality that holds all qualities, all potential qualities, and that if each of us are a name of God being spoken into being, that is a unique combination of qualities that only we can manifest individually.

Rick: You used the phrase “Buddhist Christian,” and you mixed a number of other ones like that—“Muslim Hindu,” or whatever. There seem to be a lot of people who are mixing traditions, and the symbiosis of the different traditions is really helping them.

One person, for instance, said, “Jesus tells me to love my neighbor and the Buddha tells me how to love my neighbor.” So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Matthew: That was a friend of mine in college who identified as a Buddhist Christian, and she had said that Jesus told her to love her neighbor and the Buddha told her how. Buddhism gave her practices and teachings on contemplative practice that, at the time, weren’t as available or accessible to her in Christianity.

And I think that is often what happens: someone finds that some facet of their soul, a longing of their being, isn’t being developed, cultivated, or spoken to within the tradition that they were given in childhood, and they go to another tradition to find resources to develop that part of themselves.

And that can go in different ways. Sometimes they go and find that in another tradition and then they come back to the original tradition. Having found it in that tradition, now they can locate it in their original tradition and sort of awaken and enliven it there. So they maintain a primary identity as a Christian, but their Christianity has been enlivened by an encounter with another tradition.

Some people then forever maintain a dual identity: “I’m a Hindu-Christian,” or a “Hin-Jew,” or a Jew-Bu, or all these different combinations that people are claiming. And it’s all good; it all belongs. This is part of that process of convergence that Teilhard talked about: as religions meet, their nests are going to mix, mingle, and fuse with one another. And I think it has to be discerned on a case-by-case basis whether or not that’s a distraction for someone on the spiritual path, or whether it is a deepening for them on their spiritual path.

One possibility that a lot of spiritual teachers warn against is flitting from tradition to tradition. They say that every time you start coming to the hard work in one tradition, then you just bounce over to another one, and that you have to choose one well in order to dig deep to holy water; otherwise, it is just shallow surface-skimming.

And I think that sometimes this is true, but the thing that blew that open for me was when Ramakrishna Swami said to me, “There is a difference between digging 15 shallow wells and using 15 tools to dig one well.” And so that is the other possibility: that you gain tools from different traditions that help different parts of your own spiritual unfolding.

I still think for most of us it is probably helpful to have a primary tradition that gives you a container or framework and practices, so that you can dig deep. But again, I think it is on a case-by-case basis. Some people certainly, I believe, are being vocationally called to stand in two or more traditions as an act of healing and reconciliation, and as a way of speaking some new reality into the world.

And I think some people are also being called to stand outside of the traditions altogether, that they are not going to hold a traditional religious identity and they will cultivate spaces outside of the religions. And I think conversations need to be happening between all of those different groups.

It’s like how we have fusion cuisine in some restaurants: sometimes it works really well, and sometimes it’s not very good at all. So again, case by case in how the traditions meet in individuals—it’s an area of discernment.

Rick: I wonder if things continue to converge, to use Teilhard’s term, if we’ll not only end up with kind of a one-world civilization without all kinds of separate countries, but also a one-world spirituality, perhaps with various streams and variations within it, but just a sort of a unified thing where it would seem absurd to say, “My thing is better than your thing,” and, “My way or the highway.”

Matthew: Maybe it is a both-and scenario again: if traditions dissolve their claims to competition and superiority and conflict, they can become transparent to each other. The diversity of the traditions need not be lost in that process, just like the diversity of human beings need not be lost.

And so you can still have people holding the Buddhist current of spirituality into being, the Christian current, the Sufi-Muslim current, as unique streams. You also can have people mingling streams; you also can have people representing something universal. It can just be all of it.

Closing remarks

Rick: Well, I don’t go to church, but if I lived in Woodstock, New York, I would go to yours.

Matthew: Oh, I would love to have you there. If you are ever up there, feel free to stop by.

Rick: I’m sure it’s really an enjoyable service to participate in. I’ll probably see you coming to SAND this year?

Matthew: I don’t know if I’ll be at SAND this year. I think I’m going to miss it this year and maybe hopefully be there again next year. But my good friend and teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault, I think she may be at SAND this year as a Christian voice.

Rick: Oh, that’s right, and Richard Rohr is going to be there too. And I’ve been having a hard time landing both of them for interviews, so maybe I’ll snag ’em there.

All right, thanks. So let me just make a few concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Matthew Wright, and there will be a page on www.batgap.com about this interview, with links to anything Matthew wants us to link to, and which will lead you to ways of getting in touch with him.

Do you do anything remotely, like Skype consultations or anything, or do you just pretty much serve a local congregation?

Matthew: It’s mostly local. Sometimes I meet with people for spiritual direction one-on-one here at the monastery, and serve the local congregation. We’ve got a weekly Gospel of Thomas discussion group and contemplative Eucharist, but I’d be happy to connect with people through email or possibly Skype now and then.

Rick: I don’t think you’ve written a book. Have you written a book?

Matthew: No. A thesis and articles online.

Rick: Yeah, maybe at some point you’ll glom it all together into a book.

Matthew: That would be nice, one day if there’s a time.

Rick: All right, thanks. Let me make a few concluding remarks in general about BATGAP. It is www.BATGAP.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. Go there and you’ll find a number of things. It will be pretty obvious, like a place to sign up for the audio podcast, a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, an index of “Past Interviews,” a page where it lists all the “Upcoming Interviews,” and a place to suggest a guest if you have someone in mind or to vote for someone who has already been suggested.

And a new thing which just developed or evolved significantly is this “Geographical Index” page. For instance, if Matthew registers for it and you were to type in someplace—let’s say you typed in “Newberg, New York,” which is not where he is located—you would then see, “Oh, X number of miles away there is this guy in Woodstock, New York doing things,” and you would also see New York City and everything within a certain radius, maybe 500 miles, that is happening there.

Matthew: Oh, wow.

Rick: So that’s the “Geographical Index” page. It is under the “Resources” menu.

So, that’s it. Thanks for listening or watching. Thank you again, Matthew. I really enjoyed this, as I knew I would. Take care. And take care to those who have been watching, and we’ll see you next time.

[BATGAP theme music plays]