Yesterday we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Matthew Fox.

Matthew Fox is a pioneering spiritual theologian, author, and perhaps the only man alive who has had this theology systematically singled out and denounced by two successive Popes, only to see a third Pope incorporate it into Church doctrine. His stance on issues like the sacredness of our relationship to the environment, the divine feminine, gay rights, and others has sparked a spiritual revolution in the United States and around the world. While his life has been full of innovation in work, worship, and education, his heart has been anchored firmly in fidelity to service and mystical reconnection, even in the face of opposition and resistance from prevailing dogma. Along the journey, he’s been consistently regarded as one of the most spiritually influential living people, and received numerous awards, including the Abbey Courage of Conscience Peace Award, whose other recipients include Rosa Parks, Mother Theresa, and The Dalai Lama.

I need to say that -- although I'm posting some nuggets below that stood out for me -- there was so much in this conversation, that these nuggets barely scratch the surface! So if you're interested I highly recommend checking out the video or audio recording. You'll also find below links to Matthew Fox's websites, and excerpts from his transcript -- which we encourage you to review in full.

• When I was growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, my parents would invite students from the university to have dinner with us. They were from many backgrounds and cultures. I grew up learning that the world was not all Catholic, not all Christian, and not all White. Dinner at our house was like being in the United Nations!
• My family was practicing Catholic — and we all went to church every Sunday.
• I went more. I also liked to go to church on Saturday mornings, which were dedicated to Mary. And Mary after all is a goddess. There were profound readings, which opened to mystery. Now I know this as the Divine Feminine. Then I just knew it was something I needed. I was experiencing something that I didn’t yet have the language for.
• In school, my friends came from diverse backgrounds: Jews, Lutherans, Atheists, and more. So while I was discovering a connection with the depths of Catholic mysticism, I was also learning broadly about how the world looked to others.
• When I was 12 years old I got polio. I lost the use of my legs, and didn’t know if I would ever be able to walk again. Up until then I had taken my legs for granted. As I gradually, slowly regained the use of my legs, and the ability to walk, I never again took my legs, or my ability to walk, for granted.
• I later learned to connect this with meditation. Usually we take our breath for granted. But as we start practicing meditation, and we learn to be aware of our breathing, we become aware of what a great gift and miracle breathing is.
• This was also true here in Northern California, with the recent wildfires, the worse in the state’s history. When we had to go through those awful days when the air was black with smoke and we couldn’t see the sun, and we couldn’t go outside and breathe. And we learned in a whole new way to be grateful for the simple gift of good air to breathe.
• Today we have to take in a whole new creation story: how fragile and special this earth is.
• What is mysticism?
• Julian of Norwich [(1343 – 1416), an English mystic during the time of the Bubonic Plague, the subject and inspiration for Matthew Fox’s new book, and who wrote the first book written in English by a woman, Revelations of Divine Love ] defined mysticism as “inning,” a word she invented. It can happen anywhere — in communion, in study, in contemplation and meditation, in loss, in creativity, in giving birth — where the divine and the human meet.
• “Inning” can also happen in working for social justice. A Catholic sister once told me that her greatest prayer came when she was hauled away in a paddy wagon after protesting against nuclear weapons.
• It can come to us in any circumstance. The important thing is that we open up to it, and yield. The essence is that you have a breakthrough that allows you to see the connection with all things. And the inter-connectivity and the beauty. These are unitive experiences.
• In high school I became aware of the strong intellectual traditions of the Dominicans. In my senior year, I took a retreat with the Dominicans. I liked the community aspect, the intellectual aspect, and chanting the offices. Those three things moved me. i said, I’ll give this a shot.
• I wound up going to a hermitage, even though my Church superiors advised me that this would not get me to the priesthood. But for me, the priesthood was secondary to the experiences of divine contemplation.
• Then I met Thomas Merton who advised me to go to Paris. So I went to Paris!
• My mentor was Gustavo Gutiérrez. The Liberation Theology movement was based on his teaching. What I learned from him, and from Liberation Theology, was how to bring together the mystical and the prophetic. The mystical is yes to life. the prophetic is no to injustice.
• In 1968 I was in Paris and involved with the great social justice protests going on there.
• I was up for an appointment as Sub-Prior. The young Dominicans were on board with the protests, but the priests were not. I got all the votes from the students, and none from the priests. So i was not appointed as Sub-Prior.
• The Dominicans were very supportive of me for many years. It’s just when Rome turned on me that things changed.
• I wrote a book called Original Blessing. The Dominicans were very committed to the doctrine of Original Sin. The problem with that is, Original Sin is not from Jesus. Original Sin is from St. Augustine. “Original Blessing” is about the blessing of the 13.8 billion years for the universe to bring forth the earth, and us.
• It seems to me that, for many fundamentalists and right wing Christians — someone tore out the first page of their Bible, the story in Genesis of God creating the world.
• In Julian of Norwich’s world, during the time of the Bubonic Plague, people understandably saw Nature as bad. Julian said that nature is good. For me her teaching is a source of Creation Spirituality.
• A century later, during the Protestant Reformation, the theology was all about salvation and redemption, not creation. But Jesus wasn’t into salvation and redemption. He was all about about creation and goodness here.
• My first four years of teaching were in a women’s college. I was amazed at hearing the struggles of the women, the obstacles they faced.
• In the educational institutions of the West, historically run by and for men, it’s been all about the rational. And the spirit, intuition and mystical have tended to get ignored.
• The intuitive is where values come from. If you focus only on the rational, you leave out values!
• We’ve been living in a world of: I think therefore I am. I buy, I win, I control — therefore I am.
• Wisdom is different from knowledge.
• We have knowledge factories, but very few wisdom schools.
• I push against traditional educational institutions as much as I have against the Church. And a big part of that is bringing in the leadership of women in balance with the leadership of men. And the values of spirit, intuition and beauty that have been culturally associated with the feminine and with the Divine Feminine.
• Julian was a feminist and a mystic 700 years ago. The church teaches me that God is angry. But I see no anger in God. Mystics follow experience, rather than theology.
• If you’re a mystic — Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. — come out of the closet! We’re at a stage in our species where we need all the help we can get!
• I believe that one of our greatest tasks today, what we need to address to bring together our nation, our nations, and our world — is to address the question: What is a human being?
• There’s a saying from a Meso-American tradition: to be human, you must make space in your heart for the universe. It’s saying, open your heart up, and you will realize your place in the universe!

MATTHEW FOX WEBSITES:

Main Website, Events Calendar, Videos, History
http://www.matthewfox.org

Direct Link to Online Bookstore
https://www.matthewfox.org/donation-store

Free Subscription to Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox
http://www.dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org

UPCOMING EVENTS:
Free Video Event with Matthew Fox and Mirabai Starr: Finding Hope, Course & Joy in the Truth-Telling Teachings of Julian of Norwich
https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/rhMF/spiritua/

7-Week Course with Matthew Fox and Mirabai Starr begins Dec 2: Julian of Norwich: A Bold Gentle Visionary on Living in a Time of Pandemic
https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/jnMF/spiritua/

November 19 7:00pm PT: Book Launch Event: Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic---and Beyond
https://www.eastwestbooks.org/events/julian-norwich-19nov20


Lots of gratitude to Rahul, Preeta, and all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

Aryae

EXCERPTS FROM TRANSCRIPT

Early exposure to diverse cultures: My parents were very, what should I say, conscientious about exposing us to the world. For example, when I was in high school, my brothers would go off to college and there's an extra room in their house, so they would invite a University of Wisconsin Master's student to live with us. It was always someone from another country and very different cultures. I mean, there's one fellow who was there from India, who was a Singh. He would cook wheat germ, I remember, at 2 or 3 in the morning in his room and he didn't smell good. But he taught me a lot, including how to tie a turban. In high school we had to give a talk to explain something. So, I tied a turban on someone and I got an A+. There was an atheist from Yugoslavia. There was a fellow who was sure the atomic bomb was going to drop. He had skis in the trunk of his car cause he was going to head for Canada as soon as the atomic bomb was going to drop. There was a fellow from South America who used to pull up a shirt to show where he had been gorged in a bull fight and so forth. So, I grew up learning that the world is not all Christian and not all Catholic and not all white [chuckles]. And, I think it's one of the finest dimensions to my parents' parenting. And, it was just done organically. These people would eat dinner with us and it wasn't a big deal.

Early experiences of the mystical and the divine feminine: I sold newspapers outside of church on Sunday mornings and made some living there. Often, when it was cold, as it is in Wisconsin, I'd go in for every mass to get warm again. So, I would have like seven masses on a Sunday morning. So, I learn a lot about preaching. I learned how not to preach. I knew what bad preaching was and a few good instances as well. I especially loved Saturday because Saturday mornings in the Catholic church, back then were dedicated to Mary. And Mary, of course, is the goddess in the West. No Pope ever admits that but that's what it is. And the scriptural readings were these beautiful cosmic readings, like from the Book of Sirach, "I walked on the vaults of the sky and I walked on the sands of the deep." That stuff really moved me as a teenager. Life is more than just football and cars and all those things that just said "me too," but there was this other thing going on, a mystery kind of thing that now I know as the divine feminine. But then I just knew that it was something I needed, that it balanced something else that was going on in my cultural experience.

Mystical experiences and learning not to take anything for granted:  I was experiencing, but didn't have the language for it and it wasn't only in church, but also in nature, just canoeing and ice skating and sports too. Yeah, I just felt mystical all the time. Now when I was 12 years old, I got polio and they couldn't tell me if I'd ever walk again. But when I did get my legs back after, I don't know, a year or so, I remember saying to the universe, I'll never take my legs for granted again. And to me, that's a very mystical statement, even though I was 12 or 13 years old. And that is not to take for granted. So, that's what meditation is about isn't it? When you meditate on breath, when you pay attention to your breath, you're no longer taking it for granted. ...

And, gratitude is the same thing as not taking for granted. Really it's all part of the via positiva that the mystics talk about. Awe, wonder, gratitude. And, I think we as a species today, we have to ingest this in a deeper way. I think during previous moments in history or eras of history, we were more grateful. I think our secularizing of life has taken things for granted. However, science and the new creation story from science -- I mean, 13.8 billion years has brought us here, each of us and all the species that we know -- ups the ante on gratitude to know that this is a pretty surprising event that we call the Earth, and the human species, and the rest. So, yeah, I think when that really seeps in, the new creation story from science, I think a lot of awe, wonder, and gratitude will rise. But we don't have much time for that seeping to happen. So I think that's part of the rattling of the cages we have to do today.

What is mysticism? I like Julian of Norwich's definition, if you will. She uses the word oneing, O N E I N G; she invented that word in English in the 14th century. She was the first woman writer in English, actually. And a great mystic. And so for me, mysticism is our experiences of union and communion. And they can happen as you say, in nature, in friendship, in experiences of beauty and truth, in study, also in loss. When I lost my legs for a year and they couldn't tell me if I'd walk again, (Meister Eckhart says, the soul grows by subtraction, not addition) that subtraction shifted my view of the world, and at an important age, 12 or 13 years old. So, and of course in creativity, in giving birth of any kind, I think there is very often a union and a oneing. I wrote a book called Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet and I think when we're in creative states that the spirit pours through us. And I think there, too, people have deep experiences of union, also in working for social justice, eco justice, racial justice, the struggle. ... So, life in all its dimensions contains this invitation to connect to all things. ...

It can come to us in any circumstance. I think the key is that we be open and yield to the experience. Often it's a very positive thing which the mystics call the via positiva, but sometimes it is a dark thing. The dark night of the soul, the letting go of patterns of operating and so forth, and as Eckhart said, to sink eternally from letting go to letting go into the one. There's a sinking process too.

So there are just so many angles on mysticism, but the essence is that you have a breakthrough (Eckhart actually invented the word breakthrough in German) that allows you to see the connection with all things, and the interconnectivity of all things, and the beauty of all things.

William James says one of the marks of mysticism is ineffability. So you can't talk about it, it is bigger than words. And this is why we do art. This is why we like music and dance and color and painting because there have to be expressions of these unifying experiences that go beyond words.

Religion as secondary to spiritual experience:  I left the priesthood before I was ordained a priest because I went to this hermitage and I loved it. I told a friend that I ran on that energy for 25 years. And they did eventually ordain me a priest. But to me, the priesthood was secondary to the experiences. And that's why I wanted to study spirituality near the end of my training. After about 12 years, I said to the head people at the seminary, "My generation is going to be less interested in religion and more interested in spirituality. You don't have anyone here with a doctorate in spirituality, so you should send someone on and I'm glad to volunteer."

Relation of mysticism and spiritual experience to social justice:  The question I brought to Paris [for my doctoral studies] is really your question. How does mysticism relate to social justice and action? Is there a connection? That's a question I brought, and that's what I loved about Pere Chenu [my doctoral mentor]. He is really the grandfather, not only of creation spirituality because he named that tradition for me, but also of liberation theology. ...

I was able, with his help and the other professors in my doctoral thesis, to bring together the connection between what I call the mystical and the prophetic. The mystical is about a yes to life, and the prophetic is a no to injustice because injustice is what kills life. So that dialectic is what I wrote about in my first book, and it is basic to everything I do. And when I talk about the four paths of creation spirituality, the first two paths -- the via positiva and via negativa -- are about mysticism. The next two paths -- the via creativa, creativity, and the via transformativa, the work of justice and compassion -- that is really about the outer work. So you bring the inner work to the outer work, and then you return. And it's a spiral, really. One feeds the other.

Falling out with the Vatican over original sin doctrine:  The book that most upset the Vatican was my book called The Original Blessing. What I learned in their opposition was how committed they are to original sin. What I prove in my book, is that original sin is not a Christian category. It is not in any place in the Bible. Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish philosopher says that, original sin is alien to Jewish thinking. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus never heard of original sin; no Jews ever heard of original sin.

The fallen is one thing, and we all know our species is fallen. It has problems. The concept of original sin is totally “other,” and it came in the fourth century from St. Augustine and I prove this in my book. Not from Jesus, not even from Paul. Augustine mistranslated parts of Paul to prove his point. What else happened in the fourth century was that Christianity took over the empire. When the empire collapsed, Christianity was there to pick it up. Those two things, to me, really ring a bell and raise red flags. If you are going to run an empire, original sin is a great idea because it gets everybody in line to follow a leader. But “Original Blessing,” which is the phrase I came up with, is just saying, 13.8 billion years of the universe bringing forth this amazing Earth and our amazing species is a blessing. Blessing is just a theological word for goodness. ...


Check out chapter one, page one of the Bible. It is not about human sin. It is about cosmology. It is about how the universe began empty, and then the sun came, and the moon came, and the plants came, the animals came then came the humans. It is not unlike the current story from science. I cannot believe so many of these fundamentalist and right-wing Christians, I swear, tore out the first page of their Bible because they want to live right in this sin.

God was creating the Earth and the universe 13.8 billion years before sin happened, because only humans sin. Thomas Merton, the great mystic, says every non two-legged creature is a Saint.

Julian of Norwich and the plague:  So, the sacredness of creation just gets ignored. Now, this is where Julian of Norwich comes in, in my latest book. She lived her entire life through the bubonic plague in the 14th century. Thomas Berry says that’s what killed creation spirituality. People became afraid of nature because of bubonic plague. Without science, without a promise of vaccines, we who are going through a plague now can understand that. A human response is to freak out and they really did freak out.

For example, many people said, “Oh, it's because of our sins that God is punishing us.” So, these men gathered in clubs and they went around beating themselves. Flagellants. They tried to go to three villages every day and beat themselves bloody because it was their sins that were killing people.

But Julian of Norwich was just the opposite. She stayed true to what she called the goodness of nature. She says, God is in nature. God and nature are the same thing. She goes on and on about this creation spirituality that everyone else was fleeing from. By the time the bubonic plague ended, you had a decimated church and population. Between 35% and 50% of the population died from the plague.

A century later, you had the Reformation. If you look at the arguments between Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and Protestants, in 16th and 17th century it is all about redemption. There is nothing about creation. So, religion has shifted from a love of creation and experience with God in creation and the sacredness in creation to “how am I going to be safe? How am I going to avoid hell?” Which is not Jesus’ teaching at all. Jesus does not get into that. In fact, one great Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl says that the question, “Am I saved” is a neurotic question; it is not a biblical question. It is not in the Bible at all, he said. This is what has dictated the majority stream of Christianity since the 15th century.

Then of course, and this is really scary, in the late 15th century, just as Columbus was about to sail the ocean blue in 1492, two Popes created three papal bulls giving permission to, first, the Portuguese king and then the Spanish king and queen to go and raid Africans from Africa or indigenous people from the Americas -- anyone who was not a Christian. These Christian empires had the right to steal from their lands or to wipe them out. I have just learned about this in the last several years, that this was behind these horrible encounters between the West, the East, the Americas and Africa through slavery.

So again, it was all about redemption. When the Christians landed in America, they did not say, “Wow, you people have a beautiful way of communicating with God, and nature, let us talk about it. We will tell you how we do it.” No, they said “You're not saved, you're going to hell.” These things did not even make sense in the minds of the indigenous people. We had all this genocide.”

Failures of Western education model -- need for intuition over rationality:  the whole educational system -- and it's still true -- is off whack in the West because it's all about the rational. The intuitive, the mystical and the creative are ignored for the most part. I learned that  even in music, conservatories and art institutes it tends to be all techie, all about craft and not about the imagination and the spirit and the rest. ...

Einstein says that we've been given two gifts: rationality and intuition. He said “The first should serve the second, because only in intuition, do we get our values. You don't get values from rationality. You get method, but not values.” He also said we live in a culture where we honor the first gift, rationality, and we ignore the second. Now to me, that nails it. ...

this explains a lot that's going on in American culture and politics today. If you're not teaching values and getting people to think in terms of values, then what you're doing is you're accepting the status quo, whatever that is. And that's not the way to grow up, spiritually or intellectually. I've been fighting the educational system at least as hard as I've been fighting religion in my time. ...

I think academia is at least as corrupt today as religion is; they failed us. Thomas Berry says the two greatest failures of the 20th century were religion and education.

Wisdom v. knowledge: the divine feminine, art and creativity:  We're losing wisdom. We have knowledge factories, but very few wisdom schools. And it's showing. When you don't have wisdom, everything's about yourself. Everything's about your salary. Everything's about your small world. Whereas wisdom looks to the future, looks to future generations. What is life going to be like for our children's children's children at the rate we're going, in terms of climate change, destruction of forest and soil and oceans and rivers? And of course species are going extinct at never before levels. ...

wisdom is different from knowledge. It doesn't exclude knowledge, but wisdom is bigger. First of all, she's feminine. Over here [gestures to a statue behind him] is Kwan Yin, the feminine Buddha. She's about compassion, not about competition. The reptilian brain comes in here. You don't compromise with a crocodile. You win or you lose. That has been running things for centuries. It's patriarchy, too. Patriarchy and the reptilian brain are very aligned, maybe something to do with testosterone.

The divine feminine is so important to balance things, which is one reason I love Julian of Norwich. She was a feminist 700 years ago. Before anyone had the words, she was deconstructing patriarchal religion. She was substituting God as mother, Christ as mother, Spirit as mother for what she was given in terms of patriarchy in her day. At one point she says, "The church teaches me that God is angry, but I see no wrath in God. I see no wrath." [Laughs] Well, that's a typical mystic. They listen to their experience and they want to share it. That's why I love Julian. She's so appropriate for our time, in addition to the fact that she lived through a pandemic herself.  ...

there is wisdom in all creative works. So when we get into the right side of our brains -- that hemisphere that is about intuition and creativity -- that balances the rational. Then you get a healthy dynamic going on there.

And I took my pedagogy to an inner city high school in Oakland, because 64% of black boys in America are dropping out of high school. What I learned is they're dropping out because they're bored. They're not dropping out because they're dumb. They're dropping out because school is dumb, because it does not honor the creative and the intuitive brain. So I had this pilot program for two years. We had the kids making movies, but we also developed a value system. ... Well, I tell you, after two years, a hundred percent said they wanted to stay in school. Why? Because they discovered the joy of learning, the joy of learning! You don't get that in most education because it's about knowledge.

Rabbi Heschel puts it in a wonderful way. He says the human race will not be saved by more information, but by more appreciation. This is what we were talking about earlier -- gratitude. Information -- what computers do for us -- is useful. It's facts. Good, but not good enough. To be human, you need appreciation, you need this mystical dimension: appreciation, savoring, loving, gratitude. And we have to make room for that in our schools and in all our training. ...

think of creativity as the primary language for mystic things. I say there are two responses to mystic experience, one is silence and other is art. Those are the two languages`for sharing mysticism. ...

What I've learned primarily is, that creativity and joy are missing [from education]. There is a wonderful teaching in the Upanishads from India that says that there's joy in all creativity and all creativity brings joy. And that's what I found in teaching inner city teenagers when they could make their own movies and tell their own stories. First of all, there's joy because they're working in a group. There's laughter and all the rest. But more than that, there's pride.

Julian of Norwich -- theology of goodness, divine feminine:  Her basic theology is extremely joy-oriented and goodness-oriented. Aquinas talked about original goodness and she comes from that tradition. Julian says, “The first good thing is a goodness of nature. God is the same thing as nature. The goodness in nature is God. God feels great delight to be our mother.”

Her emphasis is on going beyond patriarchy to reinterpret the entire biblical message in terms of the divine feminine. Not that she's throwing out the father, but she wants to bring the balance there. I think we need that desperately today as a species. I don't think we're going to survive without the feminine reasserting itself and the masculine cleaning itself up. I think that we men have been deceived with pseudo versions of masculinity, and we need to get more real. After all, the people we admire -- Gandhi or a Mandela or Martin Luther King -- these people have dealt with their inner selves. They've dealt with fear, disappointment and enemies; not by lashing back like the reptilian brain does, but by processing and trying to turn anger into love.

So, Julian is a champion for bringing alive the divine feminine. ... She says in a time of pandemic, we have to return to the goodness of nature, not flee from nature, but return to the goodness. She's so timely for this moment in history, I think. We're ready for her.

Nonexclusive spiritual tools:  There are many practices. This is one of the great signs of hope of our time that all our spiritual traditions have marvelous practices for taming the reptilian brain, for cleansing soul and body and starting over, for learning generosity versus hoarding and feeding just the ego. This is what's so wonderful about our time that you don't have to convert one another. We have to just look deeply into all of our traditions, bring them all to the table and say at this critical time, what do you offer as a Buddhist? What do you offer as a Hindu? What do you offer as an atheist? What do you offer as a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, et cetera? indigenous people: bring it to the table. We're desperate, all hands on deck! I think that's the level that John Lewis was talking, that deep wisdom we have to bring to the table. Quit hiding in the closet as mystics. Quit hiding in the closet if you've experienced angels.

Reformulating ritual:  Yet I feel a lot of our ritual today is boring, it's modern and it's text-oriented. The Modern Age began with the invention of the printing press. The Post-Modern Age, I think, with electronic media and all that. But so many churches are stuck in the Modern Age when we’re now living in a Post-Modern Age. And so bringing in VJ’s and DJ’s and rap and even B-Boys to lead us, is integral to the spiritual experience.

It’s not that different from the 12th-century revolution of stained glass in Europe. The invention of stained glass was absolutely stunning. It was a technology and a craft, but above all it was a reinvention of architecture. The Gothic architecture allowed so much more glass, for so much more sunlight and so much more color. And these geniuses who came up with stained glass at that time were amazing in being able to create such beautiful experiences, because that's what they were, those cathedrals. The sun keeps moving and that means that the colored glass keeps taking different shape and form and so forth.

Today, we have this new language that we call electronic or whatever it is, so why not employ it in worship? So I've been doing this since I left -- since I was booted from -- the Dominican order. I became an Episcopal priest in order to stay in the tradition of Christianity, but also to work with young people to create what we call the Cosmic Mass, which as you say, brings rave into the liturgy and the results have been amazing. ...

And so creativity should be at the heart of all ritual; not a frozen form, but a flexible form. Dance is at the heart of our prayer. We do circle dancing. We dance to DJ music and live music. And we also do spiral dancing. Getting the body involved is so important. You don't have a Hindu body or an atheist body or a Buddhist body. You have a body. We're all human there, so we can all dance together and look each other in the eyes.

Need for judging injustice:  I think it's very superficial to throw out our capacity for judgment. In fact, it's not only superficial, it's destructive. Jesus talked a lot about love, but he also took on the powers that be and strongly, calling them vipers and snakes and hypocrites. So, the third chakra -- which is our chakra where we ground ourselves, center ourselves -- also contains the element of moral outrage. There's a fire there and moral outrage should move us to good action, not to destruction. And that's what nonviolence is about; about taking that outrage, but steering it into an effective strategy. And this again is what Gandhi and King and so many other people have done in the last century to show us the way; that there is a difference between right and wrong. Right and wrong is not the whole picture. That's true. I love Rumi’s teaching: “Out beyond right and wrong, there is a field and I will meet you there.” So right and wrong morality is not the whole picture.

Spirituality and wisdom embraces the whole. But in the process of living, in the process of serving, in the process of work and citizenship, we have to make judgments all the time. As long as you don't think your judgments are final or that your judgment is the only judgment. ... [I]n the name of truth, you do have to stand up. But we are not God so our versions of truth may not be right so we always have to be self-critical. We have to judge ourselves. But in the big order of things, well, Julian of Norwich says, “All things will be well. All manner of things will be well.” That might even apply if humans destroy ourselves and we go extinct, which is very possible. We are on that path now. If we destroy ourselves and go extinct, nevertheless, Earth will continue on. So that part will still be well.

Need to fall in love with the world again:  there's so much beauty inside, but it doesn't come out in our schools because it's not invited out. We're so busy stuffing them with exams and foisting on them a value system of what college you're going to get into, that we forget these moments of adolescents are tremendous opportunities to fall in love with the world. And are we allowing them to do that? Are we giving them the skills to do that? There's a wonderful teaching from a Caribbean poet who won the Nobel prize for poetry in 1972: Derek Walcott. He says, “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.” I think we're living through a time like that. History is very dour. Today is very dour. We need to fall in love with the world and the world is bigger than human history. That's the whole crisis today. It's all about what Pope Francis calls our narcissism, as a species: anthropocentrism. We reconnect ourselves to the world and you will be amazed by how much imagination flows and how much energy, to reinvent education and law and economics and business and politics and religion, and all that can happen if we open ourselves up to the world. And I think today's creation story from science really helps us to do that. We realize now that we're part of a 13.8 billion year journey and that's the world, that's the world. ...

if everyone on the planet lived the lifestyles of North Americans, we would need six planets. [laughs] This is where numbers matter. Obviously we have to slow down a bit and drink in more of the wisdom and more of the fun, more of the joy. Aquinas says you don't change people so much by argument as by delight. By delight. If we can demonstrate to ourselves first of all, and then our children and the people we work with, that delight and joy are part of living a simpler lifestyle, and less of this racing and squirrel cages to make as much as possible. That's what we have to undergo: this letting go.

Staying with his western tradition:  the Western soul is more messed up than the Eastern soul. So I find it necessary to go to my own DNA and to try to bring out what's worthwhile. I think that religion as a formal institution is dying. I think that what we want to do is take the treasures from the burning house. And I think the treasures include these: the wisdom of the mystics, but bringing alive the mystic in all of us. I've had atheists get on board with what I'm teaching, as well as Christians and Catholics and Protestants. I just think that we're in a new time and we are facing extinction. Let's just tell it like it is.