Dialogue 1: Core Themes

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season 11 of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. And I'm here with Jim to discuss his first session. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:36)

Yes, good to be together again.

Kirsten Oates (0:39)

I loved the first session, thank you so much. And you were really trying to set the tone and offer up the vision of Marcel. You always help us understand these mystics tend to have a vision aspect and a path aspect. And in this first session, you're really helping us get an insight into the vision of Marcel.

James Finley (1:02)

That's correct, that's right.

Kirsten Oates (1:04)

And where you started was you said what makes Marcel accessible is that he's inviting us to become more aware of the quality of our awareness. And I wanted to just dig a little deeper into this idea of awareness. Because when I think about awareness, I'm thinking about, like right now, I can be aware of what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, the temperature in the room. I could be aware of, you know, I'm a little hungry. What is this awareness that Marcel's talking about?

James Finley (1:38)

Yes. He's making a distinction, the way he phrases it, is between primary and secondary reflection. So primary reflection, it's just we're just aware of what's consciously, factually obvious and true. You know, so for example, right now it's five minutes till 10, or right now it's a certain date, or right now I need to turn the heat up in the room, or right now my cell phone just, there's that awareness. Secondary awareness is the awareness of realizing the inadequacy of primary awareness, as being adequate to live by. And we become aware of its inadequacy by being established in secondary awareness of presence. The depth of our presence is not reducible to a set of facts. So it's in that meditative, reflective interior state that we acknowledge primary awareness, which is the proper realm of science, is the problematic, the objective, it's real. But in terms of the quality of my sense of who I am, about life, about presence, about the beautiful, about the things we seek to live by that gives meaning to our life, the quality is this secondary awareness, which is a reflective, meditative state of being more present to ourself and to others.

Kirsten Oates (3:03)

That's helpful. So the awareness he's talking about is this reflective, meditative state, and that state reveals the inadequacy of this primary consciousness.

James Finley (3:15)

That's right. So even right now, even what we're doing right now, we could just say, he talks about the awareness of our awareness and just move on.

Kirsten Oates (3:24)

Yes.

James Finley (3:25)

And we say, no, that doesn't work. What did we just say? Yeah. So he's constantly inviting us to slow down, to experientially step into the depth of the actual presence of ourselves here, exploring the quality of our awareness. So he always has this experiential immediacy about him that opens out onto mystery.

Kirsten Oates (3:49)

That's helpful. And so this is the tricky territory, because the more I ask you to define awareness, I'm actually inviting you into primary reflection and the problematic. So this awareness he's talking about is in the realm of mystery.

James Finley (4:04)

That's right. It's like asking a poet to define or to explain in conceptual terms what the poem means. Or again, the example that we used earlier, when two people love each other, one says to the other, I love you, they don't say, define your terms.

Like, where did you read that? Let me write that down. I had no idea. And so this interior language of lovers, of poets with a child and so on, like Richard wrote, how to turn information into transformation. And the transformation is the qualitative deepening of our attentiveness to the presence of ourselves in the moment that we're exploring, which is really sheds light on the interior depth dimensions of ourselves, of others, really the depth dimension of life itself.

Kirsten Oates (4:50)

And this isn't to say the realm of primary reflection isn't necessary or it's just inadequate to give us access to meaning, to the discovery of who we really are.

James Finley (5:04)

That's exactly right. So it's not irrelevant what time it is we started this session. It's relevant because I wasn't aware of it. I would have shown up to be here.