I am so inspired by this gentle, compassionate man. James speaks with such humility and understanding of our human condition. He radiates peace and tolerance. I have learned so much..... thank you
As ever, James Finley shares with us his gentle wisdom. However, my interpretation was that this talk is about our sense of "unknowingness" rather than a talk on unitive consciousness.
In the last few minutes James Finley quoted Thomas Merton as saying that "we are all dopes but we're loved dopes", after saying he did not know how his father got so smart. In his book Seven Storey Mountain before television, Merton wrote of seeing the Marx brothers and even the three stooges as a sideshow. Once the three of them were wearing pin buttons and a man was reading them puzzled? And he said: "The Amalgamated Association of Morons? And Moe replied: "Yeah, but we're organized!"
I looked briefly at a video on James Finley made by a group calling their videos "Tuesdays with Merton", and at about 2:00mins in the Sister reads two entries from Thomas Merton's journals about James Finley. The first one is of James Finley's making his profession, his assigned religious name was Finnbar, and the second entry said that the Abbot was getting rid of Finnbarr's pigs. What was that supposed to mean? Or was it a reference to the man named Legion in the Holy Scriptures, whom Jesus cured from demon possession?
The way I see it unitive consciousness is the conscious that we all share we have awareness without thought but I look at it coffee cup and you look at it coffee cup its the same. So I assume unit of consciousness is awareness without thought. Our minds May differ which brings us to the false self the true self is Christ consciousness obtained in the moment with love
Pns p. 189 “bliss awaits those who can possibly make it through the tragedy of what has happened to Christ in the Church.” Ws p. 64 “As I now see it Christianity has perpetuated a shortsighted view of Christ and, consequently, a shortsighted view of the rest of us. Christ’s passage was the revelation of the passage of every human being, and any misreading of him is a misreading of the whole of humanity. Investigating Christ’s human experiences in terms of consciousness or self opens up a whole new dimension of his Truth and revelation, and not only his, but our own and that of the whole of creation.” Rc p. 282 “The mind can find no definitive satisfaction or fulfillment with mere concepts and hearsay. What man is seeking is the living experiential reality of the Truth, his own immediate experience of this truth. Until he does, he will go right on questioning and being dissatisfied. Even if man knew the truth, he could never be fulfilled by merely ‘believing’ it. He is only fulfilled by experientially living it - knowing it firsthand.” Ws p. 107 “To say that Christ’s self or consciousness was eternal gives an entirely different picture and meaning to Christ than if we say his self or consciousness was not eternal…I think the West will come upon its own set of problems when it faces the impermanence of Christ’s self or consciousness, but, at the same time, this will reveal an entirely new dimension of Christ’s revelation - of this I am certain.” Ws p. 156 “But who can understand death and resurrection coming after a life of union and oneness with God? Who can understand the true nature of this death and what the resurrection reveals of Christ’s divine nature? Because of this mystery I regard Christianity as the most difficult and mystical of all religions; Christ is the most unbelievable and unknown Truth there is - and the most difficult of all Truths.” Rc p. 78 “Sometimes the impression is given that Christianity has a monopoly on forgiveness, salvation, savior, eternal life, God’s Spirit, grace, and so on, when, in fact, Christianity took all this straight from Judaism! The revelation of ‘Christ’ had nothing to do with any of this and changed none of it.” Rc p. 83 “Basically, there is no such thing as ‘Christian mysticism’ because Christianity - transformation into Christ - is the essence of mysticism.” Rc p. 140 “To think the anthropomorphic biblical interpretation of God ‘generating’ or ‘begetting’ an Uncreated ‘Son’ could have justified a transition in the Church’s whole understanding of the Trinity and Christ, can only be put down as the most flagrant wrong turn in the entire history of Christianity.” Rc p. 144 “There has to be God (Logos) before there is any incarnation of the Logos - before there is any Christ and before there is the created man Jesus. No question, the Creed must be totally restated, Christians today are not the semi-polytheists of yesterday.” Rc p. 157 “To my knowledge, however, the Greeks never agreed hypostasis meant persona - and indeed it does not. In time, however, in the West at least, hypostasis and person were used as synonymous terms. So due to this error, there occurred another switch from the original hypostasis to person - a monumental wrong turn as regards a true understanding of the Trinity and Christ.” Rc p. 170 “Like the fathers, Christians would be horrified to think they were polytheists or believed in three gods. But this is why the Trinity is kept at a distance, declared a ‘mystery’ incapable of the human mind to grasp. This is also why the Trinity means relatively nothing to the average Christian and plays no part in his spiritual life.” Rc p. 201 “Sometimes we wonder how Western civilization ever became so self-oriented compared to other civilizations that were more oriented to the benefit of everyone over their individual selves. Well, who invented the individual and particular ‘person’ or self, and who gave it ontological priority over everyman’s common human nature? Christianity!” Rc p. 242 “What few people realize, however, is that the official Church or Christian language is totally premised on this use of idioms instead of on the truth of Christ.” Rc p. 248 “No question, the C of P is the most deceiving ruse in all of Christian history a ruse responsible for totally wrong views of Christ, the Trinity and the man Jesus.” Rc p. 249 “Yet the more divine one makes the Logos’ human nature, the more Christ fades from the picture and the more Christianity deteriorates to a Jesus-cult.” Rc p. 257 “But who knows what people think they are praying to or worshiping? We can probably say for certain they are not praying to the dual natures of Christ!” Rc p. 279 “Eliminate the term ‘person’, and how is Christ to be envisioned as a single being? Without theology’s absolute dependence on person as an individual being, its Christologies would go down like a row of dominoes.” Rc p. 291 “this is exactly what the Incarnation is telling us: not only is mankind not that bad, but rather, it is of greatest worth to God.” Rc p. 300 “Even the best of theologians are reluctant to admit any radical existential change in human nature - much less an ontological change. Instead, they assure us everyone will go on just the same - only better, of course.” Rc p. 318 “The day Christianity lost this understanding of deification as the way man is saved, is the day it lost Christ.” Rc p. 323 “That down the road, Christianity was turned into the narrow, naïve and childish view we have today - i.e., only the man Jesus is Christ, only Jesus could ever be eternally one with God - is the inevitable loss of the whole revelation of the Incarnation, and, consequently, of Christ and Christianity…Christianity’s exclusive, boxed-in view of Jesus and Christ, not only aborts man’s spiritual journey, but will be its own undoing - why? Simply because it is not the Truth of ‘Christ’.” Rc p. 335 “To say Christian theology is ‘complicated’ is the understatement of all time. It is an unadulterated mess. It so defies common logic as to require man to forfeit his intellectual integrity in order to ‘believe’.” Rc p. 465 “What is unfortunate, however, is those who write the history of the early development of Christian thought and doctrine, consistently rely on the present-day Aristotelian rendition of it. It could be said this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate any possible ‘Platonic’ understanding of Christ as a universal in order to make Christ solely one particular man - Jesus, of course.” Rc p. 486 “Loss of self is the very foundation of Christianity.” Ecc p. 82 “The primary purpose of my writing, however, was less the subject of no-self than to put into the field of Mystical Theology a whole stage of the spiritual journey presently missing.”
