Dialogue 3: Hope

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Jim Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

Jim 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 philosopher, Gabriel Marcel. And I'm here with Jim to dialogue about his third session on hope. Welcome, Jim.

Jim Finley (0:38)

Yes, good, I'm looking forward to our dialogue.

Kirsten Oates (0:41)

Jim, your session on hope was so beautiful, and I'm looking forward to dialoguing about hope. But I find it helpful to reground us in Marcel's vision before we move into the path aspect of hope. So, if you don't mind, I'll take a pass at explaining Marcel's vision, and then you'll add to it. So Marcel's helping us understand that we can experience reality in two different ways. We can experience it as the realm of the problematic, where we recognise problems to be solved, we analyse things, we're trying to understand things. And then we can experience reality in the realm of mystery. And this mystery opens up on to things like love, like faith, and ultimately what Marcel calls being. And we might experience a sense of this oneness with being, and through that relationship, our oneness with all beings. So Jim, what have I got right there?

Jim Finley (1:47)

He's inviting us to reflect on the interior dimensions of our own experience, of our life, and of our self, reality. And so the problematic is everything that is dualistically other than our self, where we seek an answer or a solution. So the examples that we use, if my car won't start, or if the roof is leaking, these are problems. And whenever there's a problem, we look for a method to solve the problem, or we look for someone who has expertise in how to solve the problem. And then once it's solved, or a math problem, once we get the answer, we move on to the next problem. But he said, but mysteries are different in the sense that when we turn toward a mystery, we realize that we're included in what we're turning towards. So when I ask, what's it mean to be human? It's always, it's myself as a human being that's asking.

What is consciousness? It's me in my consciousness is asking what is consciousness. We're asking what is love. It's me in my capacity for desire for love and what is love. So these are mysteries and that I'm turning towards, and not to myself in a reductionistic sense, like everything back to my opinion, my feeling, but the opposite is true. That the mystery of myself, and this is the vision from Marcel, is that the mystery of myself is that the very mystery of myself extends out into and is woven into and is an embodiment of the mystery of humanity, the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of love, and ultimately to the mystery of being, which he sees as infinite, sublime. And really, Kenneth Gallagher points out it's really God. But here he's looking at it from the standpoint of religious consciousness of the ultimate, outside the world religions. Later in his life, when he became Catholic, he lived as a devout Catholic until his death, as lineages of religious consciousness. But here he's trying to see that somehow God's present in reality itself, in consciousness itself. And so the mystery then is that the mystery of myself is that I extend out into and am woven into and I access the infinite mystery of God, that's giving itself and manifesting itself and giving the mystery of itself to me as the mystery of myself. So it isn't just that I have or we have a relationship with God, we are a relationship with God. We are an interpersonal, communal, unitive mystery. And that's the vision of Marcel. And he calls it the ontological mystery, naming ontology meaning our very being. So then the question is, being aware of how we tend not to be aware of that, trapped in the ego. And it would then lead to moments where it comes shining through into consciousness. That is, there's a moment where we become conscious of this unitive mystery of ourself. And that's what he's interested in, of these moments. And then how, in becoming conscious of this unitive mystery, how we can then, as these moments, these grace moments fade, how we can cultivate the habit of being ever more habitually established in this consciousness of the unitive mystery. Because the intuition is that it isn't as something more is given to us in these moments, but a curtain parts that we fleetingly taste the abyss-like, depth-like divinity of every moment of our life, including this moment. So how can I, then by meditating very carefully on moments where it shines into consciousness, how can I, in my remembrance of that moment, find a path where I become habitually more established than like the divinity of my day-by-day life? So that's Marcel. That's one way of putting it.