Interview with Erasmus

Erasmus: What provoked you to write A Field Guide to the Soul?
James Thornton: Two things, really. The first is that I had spent four years teaching what I call wisdom practices--contemplative technologies--to social activists and national policymakers. A point came when I realized that my way of approaching things was more removed from theirs than I had seen. So I thought, "Well, time to step back, and frame the way I approach the world in a book, so that others can approach it at their own pace, taking in a little at a time."
The second reason I wrote it was to effect a kind of computer dump. I'd been studying spiritual practices diligently for over ten years at that point, including an intensive 14 month retreat. I needed to put down everything that I had found as a central truth, so that I could release it all, and get on with deepening my own practice.
E: I enjoyed your translation of St John of the Cross, and recall his writings were those of a priest written to educate a group of nuns on spiritual matters. Do you have any personal resonance with St John?
JT: The association is strong for me. I was brought up as a Catholic, and was very devout as a boy, going to Mass every day with my mother, serving as an altar boy. I'd wanted to become a cloistered priest like Thomas Merton, till I found I was gay as a teenager, and the Church didn't like that....but looking back on my boyhood experience from where I stand now, I realize that I enjoyed many mystical experiences of a profound nature when I was young. They were nothing special in a way at the time, and that was good; I just knew that a certain devotional attitude filled me and made me deeply happy.
The connection with St John came later, after I'd learned a grammar for my adult mystical life through Buddhism and Hinduism. I was in a solo retreat for some weeks in a remote house on the Irish cliffs west of Bantry Bay, and started reading St John. It was like meeting an old friend, and talking about shared experience together. He helped reconnect me with my Christian and Catholic roots, because his mysticism is so passionate, real, and gutsy.
E: You say early on that readers who aren't prepared to be happy should put down your book. Aren't we all prepared to be happy?
JT: Most Western educated people I meet insist that they have no right to be happy. Some will get very angry at the idea that they should be happy, and explain all the reasons why they shouldn't.
At the level of the soul we all want to happy; it's the natural expression of the soul's embodied life. But accepting within the confines of our individual psychologies that we can be happy is a great challenge for many. It's a good challenge though, don't you think?
E: You engage us with some mystical autobiography, some clear spiritual teachings, some counsel on life, some prophetic philosophy, some poetry, and some exquisite writing on nature. How would you like to be classified as a writer?
JT: As someone who quickens the soul's pulse in daily life. As someone who blows on the small spark of truth that stays awake within us in our darkest moment. As someone who encourages readers to trust themselves, and offers tips on how to navigate the forests of our heart.
When it comes to genre, it's a harder answer, as the kind of wisdom writing I am trying to do has no clear antecedent. I'm trying to find a voice for our time that rings true, that people without much experience of the traditions can turn to, and that offers guidance for their own journey they can trust.
Of course there are a lot more books I want to write; some of these are squarely within genres: a novel; a book of letters; philosophical essays; poetry. Although I don't know that working in all these genres will help my classification as a writer either!
E: You write of three ways--of the heart, mind, and action. Which of these is calling to you now?
JT: All three, it's always all three somehow, though the proportions mix, and the call changes. Right now the way of the heart may be the dominant way: I'm studying how unloving I am, hoping that gives practical lessons in how to be more loving.
Also I am studying how ungrateful I am. Many years ago I was in a retreat with my Zen teacher, and told him I was feeling grateful for my life. I expected some sort of praise for being sensitive. Instead the old man snorted, "How could anyone NOT be grateful!"
Ever since then I've been watching how often I fail to be grateful; I'd like gratitude to be the resting place of my psyche, the default mechanism, and I'm sure this is very possible. So I've been working with a practice of offering thanks for whatever happens all day long, no matter how difficult. It's a profound practice. It's been particularly interesting to use it while I've been ill recently, with malaria and intestinal parasites that I picked up in the Amazon. When you are feeling really ratty, try to enter gratitude. It's very powerful.

E: What training do people need in order to get the most out of your book?
JT: No training. I wrote it to be a field guide to the soul for people who have had no training. I hope that it offers something also to those who have been training may years.
E: In the final chapter you speculate about Homo gaians, suggest that the best way Gaia has to regulate the global atmosphere is by impinging directly on human consciousness to effect change, and that meditation or what people see as a "personal quest" can thereby have a global impact. Is my reading of the Chapter correct, and how have your thoughts developed since writing the book?
JT: Your reading is certainly right. For years my deepest puzzle was this: If it is right to say we get enlightened for the sake of all beings; and if global climate change and other environmental problems are the most serious in the world now; how does awakening affect these problems and make a difference in the real world?
The answer usually given is that when we awaken, we make the world a slightly better place, and inspire those around us to be better. Well, that is not wrong, but it hasn't worked so far--the world, despite advances in culture, is in a far worse state than it has ever been. So awakening one at a time through our own efforts just won't happen fast enough to make a difference. I am assuming here that if everyone were awakened, we could change policies and live sustainably; I'm not very interested in anything that would be called awakening that did not allow this.
So, in holding onto my puzzle for years, it finally dawned on me: we will get help in awakening, and therefore there is a chance. Why? Where will this help come from? It'll come from Gaia.
E: What's your definition of Gaia?
JT: The intelligence inherent in the natural living systems of the Earth. Life regulates the conditions on the planet in a concerted suite of activities most scientists would have denied just a few years ago, but that we are discovering very quickly now. All the life on Earth acts as if through a giant mind, regulating the atmosphere, rainfall, and so on. What I saw into deeply is that we are part of this Gaian organism, and more amazingly, our minds are part of it as well as our bodies. Gaia uses all parts of the system to self-regulate: it uses the rainforest to cool the globe, for example. Once you see that our minds are part of the system, then you can see that Gaia can change our minds. Just like that: our collective minds can be pushed to an edge where we grasp that the life of the whole Earth is more important than our own. And this is the awakened point of view. When we see this we become greedy for all of life, not just ourselves. If we were all greedy for all of life instead of our own, we could solve all our global problems in a week. Gaia, I believe, has the power to change our minds. The help is already there, we need only ask sincerely to awaken.
E: For many years you worked as a top environmental lawyer. This book, however, doesn't seem a loud call for the type of direct action you once effected through the courts against the major polluting corporations. What is your take on "deep ecology."
JT: In a way this book is a preparation for direct action, a program for how to grow personally to the point from which you can go beyond anger to a vision that will allow action that heals. Direct action is still vital. But I came to feel that all the direct action in the world was not enough, and would not change things fast enough. I came to feel that the environmental crises that are growing worse all the time are both symptoms and opportunities.
E: How so?
JT: Symptoms because they show us the consequences of our human state of evolution--we still act in the short term way, consuming as many resources as we can, that bacteria and all other creatures do. Nothing wrong with this, except that we have a consciousness that gives us the chance to evolve beyond this way of behaving. It requires going beyond our deep biological programming, however, to do so. What all real spiritual practice does is help the individual to go beyond the instinctual biological programming we carry, evolving as we do so. If we can do this together, we evolve as a species.
That's the opportunity that the coming ecological crises provide: unless we evolve in this way, evolve consciously, putting our individual cry to consume aside, then we are doomed either to extinction as a species, or to a form of life degraded beyond the depictions of science fiction. We can evolve in this way, and the coming crises are our opportunity to do so. About deep ecology--generally my feeling is that it is well intentioned but not very deep. It suggests that other animals are superior to people, which is a bit naive, and often gets confrontational in a way that is unhelpful. Nonetheless, I applaud all sincere efforts to connect with the natural world.

E: I like the way you say "other animals." As an animal, what other creatures do you feel especially related to?
JT: Birds, insects, and spiders, and the plants they use and love. For me, birds, insects, and spiders have always been captivating and still are. Of everything in the landscape these are the ones that call to me; the ones that appear most in my dreams; and when I am in a city too long I know it because I miss experiencing a diversity of them.
E: I was touched by a chapter in which you listen to a sequence of bird calls at dawn, while on a Zen retreat, and so learn something you call 'deep listening'. Your book starts with a voice, perhaps the voice of God, thundering down from the heavens while you are solo backpacking in the High Sierras. Could you pass on any recent lesson from 'deep listening' to nature.
JT: When I was in the mountains, the voice of God thundered down and changed my life. That experience has not repeated; instead of that commanding voice, I've been hearing the inner voices of things. The strongest experience of listening this past year came from listening to malaria. I picked up the fatal sort of malaria when I was in the Amazon working with shamanic medicines. The malaria came on, and stayed for a month of high fevers 16 hours a day, before it was cured. That time became one of hearing the lessons of the malaria.
The first was admiration for the extraordinary life-form that malaria is--it goes through 12 different stages, really living as different organisms at each one--in order to fool the immune system. There were lessons in tenacity here, and also the clearest experience I have had of being part of nature: I was the ecosystem in which these creatures were multiplying.
The second and strongest lesson is the importance of love. As I watched my system sink, my brain was affected, and I was unable to think--just watch. What I saw is what I have always known but never accepted as fully: that love is the most important thing in life, and that a life in which we can receive love and give it is a miracle. Receiving love was a strong lesson, as I saw the many ways I had guarded myself from receiving it.
So listening to the inner voice of malaria, I saw more deeply into the interconnectedness between myself and the living world, and experienced that the simple interchange of love is the sine qua non of everything else we might want to accomplish in life.
E: Hearing of the Amazon and knowing the ethno-botanical reasons for going there, prompts another question. I notice you're the Executive Director of the Heffter Research Institute, promoting scientific research on consciousness by means of psychedelics. Psychedelics get no mention in your book. Are they helpful, or ever essential, to a person's spiritual quest?
JT: Human religions seem to have grown out of the use of psychedelics, in association with mountains. Psychedelics are very out of fashion in our culture, which is fighting much of its own shadow in fighting what it calls a drug war.
It's stunning to learn that what's best in Greek civilization, which we see at our roots, came from the Eleusinian mysteries, in which all the famous folks we know, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and so on, participated in sacred ceremonies in which they took a form of LSD and a group trip. Why have people throughout history used psychedelics? We have what I call The Transcendent Instinct, which is as strong as the instincts for food and sex. As human beings we need to open and expand our consciousness and visit other realms, have other experiences that let us see our ordinary life in new ways.
Used in an appropriate setting, and with a sacred purpose, as Socrates used them, psychedelics can offer that opening into the realm of the sacred which we crave, and which makes sense of our lives. Once you have an experience of that realm, you can also get there through practices of the kind I share in Field Guide.
E: Did you have any particular audience in mind when you wrote the book?
JT: Yes, I wanted it to open a window on the sacred for literate Westerners who are skeptical. Skeptical of both the standard religions, and the New Age alternatives. Also, I wanted it to offer insights to those who have been searching a long time, and are ready to hear the message I want to share.
E: Placing A Field Guide to the Soul in a tradition, which titles would you like to see it set beside?
JT: I have high ambitions for the book; I believe it offers a canonical guide to soul work for the Western mind, and that it shows the contemporary mind a way to connect with the natural world, that no other book does. I wrote it after looking for books that said what I thought needed saying and not finding them. If I had found them, I wouldn't have written them. One friend read it and told me she consults it like she used to consult the Tao de Ching, finding the guidance she needed each day, by opening to a page at random. This is an amazing thing for me to hear, as it's exactly what I was hoping to bring forth: something that could offer such help. I would hope to see it on someone's shelf with, then, the Tao de Ching; Rumi poems; The Dark Night of the Soul; The Seeds of Contemplation; The I Ching; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; The Tibetan Book of the Dead; and I Am That.

Even better, though, people are telling me that it is the book on their bedside table. To be the bedside soul companion--what better thing could there be?

E: Your book draws from different religious traditions. How compatible are the standard religions and the practices you recommend in your book--do you have points of conflict with any of the standard religions?
JT: What I offer are practices that bring you deep into the mystical heart of all the great traditions, with a difference. All of the great religions have forgotten the way to harmonize human beings and the Earth, present in earlier indigenous religions. Why? Because when the great religions--Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam--were founded, human impacts on the Earth were minor and localized. Therefore they developed no explicit doctrines on relating to the natural world. They speak of loving one's neighbor, and forget about loving the Earth. So my book brings you into contact with the core living truths of the spiritual life present in the traditions, and supplies the connection with the Earth they lack. My deep belief is that relationship with the living Earth has got to be at the center of spiritual life today. A spiritual motivation to heal our relationship with the Earth can move us to action in a way that politics and policies never will.
E: Who sets a good example for us to follow?
JT: There aren't many public heroes of the soul these days. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Thomas Merton were all soul heroes. Of the people I have met, I'd say the Dalai Lama embodies the qualities of compassion and hard work for the welfare of others as well as anyone can. His moral force, though, is largely directed at helping his people; we don't have a Western personality who is widely respected as being beyond power games, honest about the truth, and dedicated to helping people awaken to it.
Moving from the public to the private, however, we all meet unheralded saints. People who try to be loving, people who work to better themselves every day. One of my favorite stories in this line comes from a book done about 10 years ago by the pollster Louis Harris together with a minister. They did a survey to try to find out if there were saints among us. Without using that word, they did a national survey asking questions like, "do you know anyone who puts others ahead of themselves, dedicates themselves to helping even when it hurts," and that kind of thing.
The answer that they got surprised them: there were many such people, but by far the largest group of them was comprised of single, middle-aged, overweight black women in the South.
E: You noted that environmentalists work from a basis of anger, and that the Dalai Lama gave you a mission of instilling "radical confidence" into them. What is "radical confidence?"
JT: Radical confidence is tough faith, tough trust. It is seeing all the problems in the world, looking into them deeply, and being driven beyond despair into the trust that each person's efforts to make a difference do count, and that together we can change the course of history, so that the human beings who follow us can live more harmoniously with each other and the Earth. Radical confidence is not pretending that everything is okay, but being clear about the ways that things are not okay, and doing something about it.
E: When something is radical or new, it often takes time for it to be appreciated. What is most radical about your book?
JT: Perhaps the most radical thing is the way I find hope. I start with the perception that we have come to a cusp of history where human beings must radically alter how we relate to the Earth if we are to survive. I then look at all the religions, and come to the conclusion that they will not be enough--if they were we would not be at the impasse we are. Assuming that it is possible to get through the coming troubles, I ask by what other mechanism we could change quickly enough.
The answer is radical: that we are poised to evolve quickly into another species, and this will be brought about by a pressure focused on our consciousness by Gaia, the living Earth. When you deeply perceive that our consciousness is part of the living system of Earth, just as our bodies are, you see how Gaia can force this change, just as it can change patterns of global precipitation and so on.
E: Does this idea stem from any tradition?
JT: This awareness is very far from the current perception of things. Human beings do not now generally see themselves as a species of animal that is one species in the Gaian web of life. Seeing our consciousness in the same way is a far step beyond. But it becomes clear as you study it that both our body and mind are part of the web of Earth life, both capable of rapid evolution.
E: If you are right about this transformation that is about to happen, what can we each do?
JT: We can each open, each call out for awakening for the sake of all beings. The coming push on our consciousness is going to make awakening easier--it has to if we are to change course. In the past awakenings were fairly rare. If I am right, awakening is about to become much easier; and that is as it should be. The awakened state is the natural state for the human being, after all.

E: Awakening doesn't sound that easy in your own account. You write of a fourteen month period of intense retreat, sustained periods of practice in different religious traditions. Someone might say, "You're lucky. I'm so consumed with daily concerns I can't give that much attention to a 'spiritual life.'" What's your answer to such people? Is your book beyond them?
JT: My book was written for them. Few people can take the time I have to investigate all these practices. That's why I did it for them. I'm a lawyer, and a good lawyer goes off and does exhaustive research to answer a clients' pressing problem, coming back with the most apt answer. This is what I have tried to do with spiritual practice: I staked my whole body, mind, and soul on it. I found what works for the Western heart, mind, and psyche at the beginning of the new millenium, with the particular concerns we now have. Like a lawyer counseling a client, I offer practices suited to both the concerns of daily life--there's a long section of the book called "How to Get Up and Get Through the Day"--and the big questions like, "What is my life about?" and "How can I find happiness in a world getting ever more chaotic?"
E: If you could choose just one single effect for your book to have on a reader's life, what would it be?
JT: That they begin to trust their own life completely, and study it deeply. If we only study the lessons our life reveals with absolute sincerity, everything is revealed to us.
E: Even the bad things, it seems. You speak eloquently about "meeting beasts in the forests of the heart." Do you think we all have such things to face, our own 'dark night of the soul' to go through?
JT: Yes, if we are to grow. Every life has inscribed within it some pain and suffering. When we go to meet these, we learn from and release them. If we ignore them, we can achieve a sort of superficial happiness, but we will come across as lacking in depth and sincerity. We all have beasts in the forests of our hearts, and when we release them, we not only gain in happiness, we also learn about the pain that others feel, for to study how anger or lust affect this one psyche is to learn much about the human psyche. We achieve compassion only by experiencing within ourselves all the things that bring pain and suffering to the world, and touching them with love.
E: And maybe by actually expressing that love with our voices? I sense a story voice in your book--it almost begs to be read out loud. Could you tell us something about how you found your writing voice?

JT: The sound has a lot to do with it; I love with a passion the sounds and rhythms of speech and text. I learned as a boy how scripture read out loud creates a spell that can open the heart. I wanted to cast a similar spell. In writing the book, I prayed before I wrote, and only wrote when I felt the Spirit moving powerfully through me, transporting my understanding and giving voice to the intuitions of my heart. Then when it was complete I did read it aloud, twice in fact, all the way through, and edited it for felicity in spoken presentation. I would love for people to read it out loud, to each other, as meditations, for pleasure and encouragement. It's meant to be a verbal book, read out aloud in public.
E: Your title suggests that there are many aspects to the soul. What do you see the soul as being?
JT: The soul is a sweet mystery we can enter any time. It is beyond intellect, for it is larger than the mind, and has aspect wholly beyond our mind's ken. It is patient, loving, ready to open to us always. It is who we really are. It is what moves this mortal clay, and connects us directly with the Presence of the Divine. We cannot care for our soul any more than we can care for God. We open to it, feel the urgings of love it prompts within us, and come to know God as real, present, and intimate. Much more so than another person in the room.
E: It makes me feel small, knowing God is so powerful to you as the other presence in this room. Should we feel small before God? Is that what spiritual humility is all about?
JT: I didn't mean to make you feel small! It is surprising that mystical experience happens in the body, but that's the way it works. We all have an opportunity to know God in our own bodies and minds. They are set up for it, even seem designed for it. Knowing God is having a love relationship with someone really there, and you can feel it and know it. Like any real relationship, it goes through many changes, deepening all the time. It doesn't make you feel small, it makes you feel loved, and you know that everything is all right. Perhaps knowing that everything is all right is where spiritual humility comes from, since when we know this, we know that it is not up to us alone to save the world.
The best we can do is to start over again afresh every day, as if for the first time.