Dialogue 2: The Hidden Ground of God

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

How do you tell the story of your inner journey? Join James Finley for the Healing Stories Online Retreat, Saturday, August 26th, from 9 to 5 Pacific. Inspired by his memoir, The Healing Path, Jim offers guided reflections to help you become more conscious of the thread of your own sacred journey. The event will be recorded and all registered will have access to the replay.

Register today at cac.org/healing-retreat. That's cac.org/h-e-a-l-i-n-gdashr-e-t-r-e-a-t.

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James Finley (0:49)

Greetings. I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:52)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:54)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (1:04)

Welcome, everyone, to Turning to the Mystics. We're in season seven, and we're turning to Meister Eckhart. And I'm here with Jim, and we've got our fabulous producer, Corey, in the background supporting us.

And we're going to be reflecting on Jim's second talk on Meister Eckhart. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (1:25)

Yes, yes, good, good to pick this up again and move on together in Eckhart.

Kirsten Oates (1:31)

Well, you covered a lot of ground in that session. And I hope that if I don't delve into an area that someone's interested in, that they'll send in their questions, because we do that special session at the end of the season, where we take questions from people who have listened to the season. And so there's just a lot of good stuff in this session. So I'm sure others will add their own questions and help us all delve deeper into this topic.

So the frame we're in, you're guiding us through aspects of Meister Eckhart's teaching. And I just wanted to kind of feed back to you, what I'm hearing is the frame and just help me understand it. So there seems to be four aspects to Eckhart's teaching. The first one is the ultimate or divine nature of our existence that we can experience. And then he's, what you described as diagnosing a dilemma that we're estranged from experiencing this reality.

And then Eckhart offers a path where we can be delivered from this dilemma, which you've named as the path of detachment. And then Eckhart talks about the birth of the word in the soul, which I think you describe as a conscious state, what life starts to look like when we experience this divine nature of our existence, kind of coming full circle back to that.

James Finley (3:02)

Yes, that's right. He starts out by bearing witness to the divine origins of our very existence and to God, infinite reality giving itself to us as our very reality in our nothingness without God. So that's the God-given, godly nature of our situation.

Next, he talks about that we're exiled from the experience of that because the powers of the soul are faculties are to think, to remember, to love, to see, to touch because they're a strain from the ground. They're exiled from it. And therefore, in our experiential, day by day self, we're not aware of this ever-present divinity of ourself that alone is ultimately real.

So that whole image of the person looking in a mirror, and that's our predicament. So then he says, well, once we see this predicament, then what's the remedy? Like what's the path in which we're healed from all that hinders us from living in an habitual state of the divinity of our life, which is the birth of the word and the soul? And he's charting out that path. And this is his language for what each mystic in his or her own way marks out that same path. You know, this is kind of the mystical, spiritual worldview of the mystical traditions of the Christian faith in Christian terms. It's also continuous with the mystical traditions of all the way great world religions. It's a universal insight, understanding of ourselves.

Kirsten Oates (4:45)

And he's going to offer us a method, which you'll go over in the next talk. So I'm not going to focus. I'm going to follow where you went in this talk.

So the method is this idea of the path of detachment, which is you're going to go into detail about in future talks.

James Finley (5:02)

Yes, and I'd say this too. I'm spending time where I said, with all these mystics, there's a vision aspect, which is the spiritual worldview of mystically awakened Christianity.

And then the path is a kind of a method in a way like, how do I concretely stabilize myself in that? So I've been spending a lot of time in the vision aspect, the kind of the poetry of it, the insight of it, such a broad and rich understanding. So in the next session, we'll get into the concreteness of a day-by-day practical thing that's open to all of us that we can practice that.