An Interview With Father Cyprian Consiglio

New Camaldoli Hermitage is a community of Roman Catholic monks whose life is dedicated to contemplation and prayer. We are a worshiping community, celebrating with our friends and guests the Liturgy of the Hours and the Holy Eucharist. Our monastic fellowship extends beyond the walls of this hermitage and embraces a large and inclusive community of oblates, persons of different walks of life who live the grace of their baptism in spiritual communion with the monks.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Bob O'Haver.

Welcome to the Why Meditate podcast.

I'm asking questions of teachers,

Scientists and religious leaders.

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Thanks again.

Now on with our discussion.

Hello,

I am here with Father Cyprian.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for meeting with me.

I really appreciate it.

And we're at New Camadly Hermitage in Big Sur.

Okay.

And so I'm just going to jump into the question because the storms outside are calling me to get on the road here.

Okay.

Pretty quick here.

Anyway,

The first question is Why Meditate?

Which is a great question.

As I mentioned to you before,

These four principles that the great teacher Muktananda taught,

The four principles for meditation,

He thought the most basic thing was every time you sit down to meditate you should ask yourself why we're meditating.

And I suppose every one of the traditions will tell you in a different way.

But I would say from the Christian perspective,

There's a great line from St.

Paul's letter to the Romans where he says,

The love of God is poured into our hearts by the spirit living in us.

So the most mystical understanding of the Christian dispensation is that God dwells within us as the Holy Spirit.

God is not just in some heaven light years away.

The very ground of our being and the ground of our consciousness and the source of our life is the divine,

Who we call God,

Who we call the Holy Spirit by the power of the Spirit.

So I would say from a Christian perspective,

I meditate,

I borrowed the phrase from 12 Steps,

To have conscious contact with that,

With the ground of my being,

With the ground of my consciousness,

Who is the divine,

The love of God poured into my heart by the Spirit living in me.

I can add an hallelujah onto that.

The next question is,

What is your definition of mindfulness and what does it look like to live a mindful life?

I can have a negative answer to that first.

I think from a secular perspective,

We're usually so distracted by so many things,

Even in my own life as a monk.

I'm the prior here,

So I'm doing administrative work and pastoral work and teaching work and my intercom is blinking with four messages and the IT guy just went by and I've got to preach tonight and I have to do the announcements for Saturday.

And I could be so caught up in that,

That I forget that you're sitting right here in front of me and the sound of the rain outside and the fact that our cook is in there cooking up a storm for the feast tomorrow.

And I think most people in life,

Even outside of the monastery,

Maybe even especially the radio's going and the phone's ringing and maybe the one Buddhist monk I know says,

If your kids are awake,

They're online.

We're constantly drawn outside of ourselves.

So the first mindfulness is that we're not actually mindful of what's happening here and now.

I still think that there's no better book ever written than Ram Dassa's old book from the 60s that sums it up.

Be here now.

Here now.

I could just say that over and over again.

Here now.

Now here.

But also I think from the spiritual perspective,

What's interesting about that is there's a whole other kind of enlightened non-mindfulness.

I think sometimes we can get so caught up in our spiritual practice,

Escaping to heaven or escaping to nirvana or escaping to enlightenment that we also forget about here and now.

So mindfulness to me means being totally awake.

And there's a wonderful Christian teacher of meditation named Martin Laird and he had this great phrase that I use all the time with people and people really like and relate to it.

Usually we're caught behind the wallpaper of our own narrative.

We're trapped behind the wallpaper of our own narrative.

We don't actually see what's going on without our own interpretation of what's going on.

And sometimes we don't see what's going on at all because we're trapped behind the wallpaper of our own narrative,

Our own story.

So mindfulness is also that.

It's like somehow trying to take those filters down,

Take the funny glasses off.

Mindful living I guess is that as well.

That somehow nothing is unimportant.

There's a song by this wonderful songwriter,

Pete Mayer called Everything is Holy Now that I've adopted as one of my theme songs.

I'm a musician as well so I sing it sometimes as if it were my own song.

And that's kind of the definition of monastic life.

And St.

Benedict says in the Rule that all the tools of the monastery should be treated as if they were sacred vessels for the altar.

That's mindful living.

Nothing isn't holy.

One time when I first took on this job as prior here,

Some friends of mine took me out for dinner up in Santa Cruz and one guy said to me,

So what's going on down there on the mountain?

I said well today I've been dealing with sewer lines in the leach field out in front of the property.

And he said,

I thought you were up there doing holy things.

And if I had thought about it for a second I might have had a really subtle answer and I kind of blurted out,

What's not holy about a leach field in a city?

If this is what I'm supposed to do in service of my brothers and to protect our life,

Everything's holy now.

Even working with sewage,

It's all holy.

That's also mindful living I think.

If meditation doesn't lead us back to that,

It's a waste of time.

Right.

That's great.

The next question is what is the difference,

Or what do you see the difference between meditation,

Contemplation,

And prayer?

Or do you see a difference?

Maybe I've been in semantics.

I would make a distinction between meditation and contemplation only in this sense that from my understanding anyway,

What the Asian traditions call meditation,

The Western Christian tradition calls contemplation.

And what the Western Christian tradition calls meditation,

I think the Asian traditions call contemplation.

For us,

Meditating is expansive thought,

Is discursive thought.

We mainly know it through St.

Ignatius of the Loyola.

Their meditation style is you would read a passage of scripture and you would imagine what Jesus was wearing and what the roads looked like,

What the air smelled like,

What the people around were like.

So it's expansive.

And when we do our practice,

It's called Lectio Divina,

The first stage is Lectio,

Reading,

And then Meditatio,

Which means actually kind of chewing on that reading,

Meditating on until it expands into more images.

The third stage is Oratio,

Prayer.

So that meditation is supposed to lead you to prayer and inform your prayer.

So the reading will teach you how to pray,

Focus your prayer.

And the final stage of it is called Templazio.

So for us,

Contemplation comes after meditation.

And in my understanding,

It's the simplification of that meditation,

It's bringing it down.

When I teach that to groups,

I say now take whatever meditation you had on the reading and make the smallest prayer,

The shortest prayer possible out of that.

There's your Oratio and I'll use that as your mantra.

Let's go beyond the words,

Let's go back to the silence,

Let that lead you to the ineffable,

Let that lead you to the mystery.

That's like an active site of contemplation,

So we would call that contemplative prayer if you wanted to be strict about it,

Make people play with those words back and forth.

Yeah,

That was one reason the question came up because I was hearing meditation contemplation being used almost synonymously.

I think that's why people go back and forth with it.

But I think more or less we would call that contemplative prayer,

Going to the single pointed,

Going to simplicity,

As you learn from the cloud of unknowing that uses just a monologistic practice or the Jesus prayer that leads you to contemplative prayer.

But one little nuance there that I think is really important in the Christian tradition,

And you'll see this mostly articulated through the Carmelites,

The 16th century Carmelites,

Ultimately contemplation is a gift,

Not something we attain.

So the Carmelites talk about infused contemplation.

It's something that's given to us.

We can set ourselves up.

Right.

To receive it,

But we can't get it.

Yeah,

And it's just a subtle little thing,

But I think any of us might study Zen or yoga and think that we got the formula down,

We just got to climb up that ladder,

And at the top of the ladder we're going to run smack dab into divinity and turn ourselves into these little gurus and gods.

That's insidious.

There's a trap there.

I don't believe that even Hinduism and Buddhism with which I'm the most familiar,

And even Taoism and the Muslims have said,

I don't believe that they are without their own notion of grace as well.

That there is something to that.

Aurobindo,

The great Indian philosopher says,

Within there is a soul,

Above there is grace.

That's all you need to know.

And then there's that great song to the guru that starts out,

The image of the guru,

The root of meditation is the image of the guru,

The root of mantra is the word of the guru,

The word of worship is the feet of the guru,

And it ends with the root of salvation is the grace of the guru,

Guru kripa.

So that notion that there's grace in there is really important for us.

It's not a self-powered climb to God,

To divinity somehow.

And that actually ties in with what we understand about Jesus.

St.

Paul's letter to the Philippians has this beautiful canticle that it opens up with that we sing every Saturday night.

It's called the kenosis hymn,

And the word kenosis in Greek means emptying,

Self-emptying.

And it says,

We can have the mind of Christ,

We can partake in divinity.

And this is what the mind of Christ was like.

He did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at.

He emptied himself.

Even Jesus emptied himself and took the form of a slave,

And therefore God raised him on high.

And so beautiful.

Our own tradition,

The Kamaladlings Benedictines were a very small branch of Benedictines with this unique feature of the hermit aspect.

And our founder,

St.

Romeo,

Left us only a paragraph of supposedly his own words.

And in the middle of that little paragraph,

Which is called the brief rule,

Is empty yourself completely and sit waiting,

Content with the grace of God.

To me that's a summary of Christian meditation.

That's what a Christian does,

Not in that discursive sense,

But in the contemplative sense.

Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,

Content with the grace of God,

Like a chick who eats nothing and tastes nothing but what the mother hen brings it.

That's what I do when I sit on my zafu.

I try anyway.

That I can do,

Is I can empty myself.

That is,

From my experience,

What the Buddha's teaching is telling you the same thing,

To empty your mind and allow it to fill you.

I agree.

I think that short-term goal of all the practices,

We really do agree across traditions.

That's why we have such wonderful conversations between traditions.

We may not agree on the ultimate end of the why,

But the nature of the self and nirvana and God in heaven.

That doesn't matter because most of us are at base camp anyway.

That's very true.

That's very true.

Emptying yourself of the small self,

Emptying yourself of the phenomenal self.

This is wisdom that we share.

That's the whole purpose for the podcast,

To find these things.

The last question is,

How do we promote compassion in ourselves and the world around us?

How do we promote it?

Well,

First,

We have to find it in ourselves.

I know for the Buddha,

It was one of the most attractive things about the life of the Buddha to me,

Is that wisdom and compassion always go together.

When he understands the four noble truths of suffering and permanence,

It's because of this clinging to self or clinging to selfish clinging.

That immediately becomes compassion because he sees why others are suffering.

He wants to relieve them of their suffering too.

I just love that.

I assume that's the whole basis of the Bodhisattva principle,

Based in that own sentiment in the Buddha's life.

I see that as one of the links to the life of Jesus,

Who is mentioning the gospel,

Saying he had compassion on the crowds because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

I don't think we can conjure up compassion.

We can't force compassion.

The root of even that word in English is to feel with.

Pathaya,

Kom pathaya,

To feel with somebody.

In a sense,

I want to say compassion is also a gift.

We have to actually find the passion in ourselves.

We have to find the feeling in ourselves.

We have to understand that nature of suffering,

Which is pretty evident in the Christian tradition too.

This is why Jesus has compassion on the crowds.

He sees their suffering like sheep without a shepherd and wants to feed them and wants to heal them and wants to give them a sense of the benevolence of the universe and the one who is in charge of the universe.

That's why I think we almost can't promote it.

What we can promote is actually finding that within ourselves.

So is that something we're realizing?

That's a grey word,

Realize,

Because it means two things at once.

It means becoming aware of something and making it real.

I think those two things are connected.

Things don't become real until we become aware of them.

When we become aware of something,

They suddenly become real to us.

So we open ourselves up to compassion and then realize we are being compassionate?

Or is it something that you're not really realizing?

You're just doing it.

I think the Buddha would talk about the interconnectedness of all things,

Independent co-arising.

Even from the Christian tradition,

It didn't take me a whole lot of research to figure out that we are organically intimately connected at a material level and at a psychic level.

And certainly our scriptures teach also at a spiritual level.

So I mean compassion,

Yes,

For other human beings because they're suffering,

But even compassion for the earth because whatever we're feeding mama,

We're taking into our own selves.

Of course.

Whatever we're doing,

We're not feeding with mama.

Whatever we're putting into the air,

We're putting into our lungs.

Whatever we're doing to our own selves,

We're doing to everything.

If we could feel that link,

First of all,

Our intimate link with all material reality,

Then we'd find some compassion right there with the earth,

With plants,

With animals,

Because we are actually affecting our own bodies.

Of course.

This is somehow an extension of our body.

It's harder to get to at a psychic level,

But I think especially in the post-9-1-1 years here in the States,

This idea of there being a kind of a collective consciousness and a collective soul and a collective mood is pretty obvious to Americans.

Also in Donald Trump's America,

You can get a sense of a collective consciousness,

A collective anger,

One side or the other.

Us being attached to each other at a psychic level and how a wave can go through a crowd or a wave can go through a whole state or a whole city.

Certainly in a community like this,

You can feel a wave,

A psychic emotional wave pass through the home community.

Yeah,

And hence that's kind of where the whole question came from,

Is just seeing the world around me and realizing that all sides need to realize the compassion that they have.

If there's a promotion to compassion that has to happen,

I guess I would lean on the side of overcoming the ignorance of people not realizing that we are interconnected,

Like a web.

There's that little bumper sticker version of,

Is it Black Agnes says,

Earth does not belong to us,

We belong to the Earth.

The whole version of this beautifully talks about this web of interrelated realities of how we're tied together,

What we ever do to one strand,

We're doing to the whole strand,

Including to our own selves.

That I would say overcoming the ignorance of not realizing that intricate web of relatedness,

Interconnectedness,

That would be the thing.

You just run smack dab into compassion.

It washes through you.

That's great.

Lastly,

If there's anything else along these lines that I've missed or something that we were talking about,

I'd be open to hearing that if you've got something final to say.

Just following in on what you've been doing with these podcasts and why meditate,

I think that though it doesn't look to be materially profitable or even like the corporal works of mercy,

As we would say in our tradition,

Feeding the poor,

Clothing the naked,

Teaching mindfulness,

Teaching meditation,

Overcoming the ignorance about our interconnectedness,

This is a great thing to be doing for the world right now.

I think the only way we're going to survive and thrive is through an evolution of consciousness.

The consciousness is not going to evolve until we dig deep and find this deepest core of our being.

The transpersonal transformation is going to happen only if we reconnect with the ground of our being and the ground of our consciousness.

As I tell everybody and any of my students,

It's one person at a time.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

I'm not trying to change the masses.

I'm not trying to change anybody's beliefs.

I want to reinforce their beliefs through meditation,

Whatever they believe.

Because I've found so many similarities in all of these that they can come together.

We can be one person out of many one.

Anyway,

I appreciate your time.

Thank you so very much.

Good.

I'm glad I was able to get the two of you and actually get up here.

Did you have a good talk with Thomas too?

Oh,

Yes.

Thanks for listening today.

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Reviews

Interesting! Loved it.
Ty to both of you.
🙏🏼👑👼🏼💖👑👼🏻💖🙌🏼

Beautiful interview

Great interview, good questions, answers rich with insights. I bookmarked this one to be sure to listen again. Thank you!

This was a wonderful interview and I wished it had gone on longer. Deep understanding of the convergence of paths and the awakening of bodhicitta.

Incredibly grateful to have found this today and I will definitely have to listen to again. I will also look to follow your podcast amd see what other information about this very special topic of meditation I can learn more about.

What a treat...i have been to the monastery many times but not for years.the spirit there was certainly reflected in the prior's words..thank you so much..