Brother David Steindl-Rast

brought to you by the Fetzer Institute helping to build a spiritual foundation for a loving world. It's such a great honor to be with you today because will I hear your gratitude video recording that you did with Gary Malcolm? It's just really touched my heart and sent me on a journey of sharing the gift of gratitude with everyone. In fact, we did a video together and they got over 25 million views. So let's start off with a really tough question. Tell me your name and what you do. Well, my name is David. I'm a brother David, I'm Benedictine Monk. I celebrate my 60th anniversary of my monastic profession at the end of this month. So I've been a Benedictine Monk for quite a while and the first dozen years or so I was in the monastery. I spent good Benedictine Monk should be already alive and then somehow I got invited to meet with Buddhist Zen Buddhists who had just come at the time and then I had the opportunity of studying Zen with different very wonderful Japanese Zen teachers and from then on I've been involved in interreligious dialogue and traveling a great deal. And during much of that time I was traveling say half the year and the other half I was in a hermitage to recharge my batteries again and now I am mostly in the monastery. Partly in my own monastery but more often in an Austrian monastery, a small monastery in Austria because I very much to prepare with German publications and that's much easier in Austria. I know you've been through many difficult things growing up especially in a warrior's of Austria. So how is the practice of gratitude revealed itself in your life? When you have very little you are very grateful for what little you do have and one of the difficulties with us today is that we have so much we can't catch up with being grateful for it. We are overwhelmed by it all. And so I grew into this habit of being grateful for everything, for life, just for life. That I'm alive today is for every one of us but I would say from from my point of view for me particularly it's just a total miracle because all my friends when I was a teenager I would say the highest percentage of them killed in the war killed by bombs and so we were constantly surrounded by death and to be alive that in itself is just such a great gift. And then the Benedictine life is also actually you would see the central practice is living gratefully moment for moment by moment. You could also call it mindfully, mindfulness. That is, we practice for all monks, Zen monks, Christian monks, all other monks, living mindfully and gratefully living is another form of living mindfully. It's living mindfully in a sort of dialogically way. Mindfulness has a bit of a problem sometimes because it gets turned in on oneself. I'm mindful of myself and so I'm getting more and more involved in myself. That is a danger. And if you emphasize the gratefulness aspect of mindfulness then you get this dialogic relationship and not only to human beings of course but to animals, plants, how much reason many many many people have to be grateful to their pets. You know, they are our greatest more than friends. They are angels, they are messengers and to their plants, people who live in the midst of the city, how grateful they can be for those little parted plants and so on. And for all things, when you take anything from a toothbrush to a coffee mug to your shoes and you look at it long enough, you could never in your life make yourself a toothbrush. You need probably thousands of people to work on it. To invent it, to manufacture it, to transport it, everything where you look is all a gift and to live with that makes you both mindful and related to it. That's so important today. As a Jesuit priest, in some ways you must be an expert in the world of spirituality and religion. So I'm curious, like what are the virtues that you believe contribute to gratitude? One of the great Roman philosophers, Seneca, said that gratefulness is the mother of our virtues and I think that one could make a point of that. The main virtue that I would see in grateful living is trust in life. Trust in life. We are all born with that openness for mystery. And by mystery I mean very specifically that which you cannot grasp, you cannot grasp it, you cannot, but you can understand it. You can understand it by putting yourself into it, by letting yourself be touched by it. And most people experience that for instance with regard to music. You can know all about the person who wrote that piece of music. You can know all about music, theory and so forth and instruments and so forth. That doesn't help you a bit when it comes to enjoying music and when you enjoy music it has to grab you. And that is what we, music an example for what we have to do with life. And life is a total mystery to us. We cannot grasp it. We cannot grasp it, but we must interact with it. We are thrown into this world. We are thrown into this life. And if we interact with it we'll live fruitful lives, lives that make others bring a certain joy to other people. That is our task in life. And so life is more than a symbol on expression of that mystery. Life is that mystery, that so passing mystery. And we are dealing with that same mystery. And you can have two attitudes. You can trust it, you can trust yourself to that life, or you can refuse to trust. And always question, always be skeptical, maybe. And we know the difference in the outcome. We know that people who trust life will be surprised by life, not always presently, but always surprised and creative and ultimately joyful. And people who this trust life or actually it's in each one of us for five minutes with trust life. And the next minute we distrust it again, we go back and forth with that. So trust in life, that is the greatest, the most important virtue, I think. And unless you have that, you can't be grateful, but when you have it, you become grateful. And as you live gratefully, it increases your trust in life, because you see step by step, that life is trustworthy. If you can't say, "Prove it to me, then I will trust." That's not trust. It's just like learning to swim. You have to get into the water and entrust yourself to the water. No matter how many books you read about swimming, unless you get wet, you won't swim. So that's also with life. And I think this is the most important virtue that I connect with gratefulness, that trust in life. And the religious name for it is faith. Faith isn't believing something. Faith is trusting in that great mystery, in that mystery that we are surrounded with. Some people call it God. And I'm very careful in using that word, because it's so off misused, but if you use it in the right way, that's it. It's that mystery in which we are totally submerged and which is all in us and with whom we have our deepest relationship. There's so much polarization today between science and religion. Do you think gratitude could be a bridge between science and religion? There has been so much talk in the past, and sometimes even today still, about a certain tension between science and religion or science and spirituality. I do not see that tension. I see some of my most treasured friends are great scientists, and I make a real point in spending time with them. And I just came back from a whole week. Through this once a year, I spent a whole week with scientists from the University of Zurich, Einstein's alma mater. And we spent a whole week just going for walks and talking about the real great questions. And so what I see that scientists and anyone who wants to live spiritually have to have in common is that trust in life. The scientists may not reflect on it, but to do science, we suppose, is a great trust in life and in nature and in everything. That's the basics. And the same spirituality, trust life. And then you go, and science explores the outer things, or speaks about the things that it explores in the third person. And spiritual teachers explore the inside. Everything has an inside and an outside. That's what life is. That's how life begins. And spiritual teachers explore the inside of life and speak in the first person. Certain things you can only experience and express in the first person and certain things only. One of my favorite stories is about a little scientist, a little boy, great school, who has ordered the mind of the scientist. And he has this tooth egg in one of his milk teeth. And then the tooth comes out. He says, now he will make an experiment. And he puts the tooth on the plate. And he puts a little piece of sugar on it, because when he had sugar on his tooth, it always hurt. So he puts the sugar on his tooth and wants to see how it hurts. It's absolutely correct scientifically, but it shows that hurt is something that you can only talk about in the first person you can't watch it. And there are many things like that. And so we have to put the two together. Science, absolutely important, external exploration, spirituality, whichever way you call it, exploration of the inside. We're going through a psychedelic renaissance right now. I'm just curious, do you believe that the consumption of a plant or mushroom could be a portal into a divine experience? As a monk, I would say, what for has given us these plants but to use them? It says even on the first page of the Bible that in the Garden of Eden, all these plants and fruits are given to us to use and to enjoy. So this is also something of which we should make conscientious use. And people for millennia have made conscientious use of it. And so we should also find our own ways of doing that. And it is obvious and it has been tested and proved that these experiences can, say, taking any of the psychogenic plants, can lead us to experiences that when you describe them and when you have them, we can only check what people say about it and write about it. What they write about it cannot be distinguished from what people write about their mystic experiences. And for instance, Euston Smith, who is in the whole world, really one of the great teachers for religion and history of religion, compared to religion, this book is used in all the schools and universities. And he participated in experiences like that. And he wrote about them. And he said absolutely no way of distinguishing. And he gives texts. And he says, which one do you think comes from a mystic experience and which one comes from a drug-induced experience? No possibility, cannot. However, what is really important in both cases is not what you experience but what you make of that experience. It expands your mind. That is true. One can see that, one can test it. But what you do with your expanded mind, what you're putting this expanded mind to, if it's really expanded, it ought to embrace all other people. So what you experience in those moments is oneness with all creation. How do you treat your environment? That will show me whether you have an authentic experience. And whether that comes now from plants that are given to us for this use, or whether it happened to you in a peak experience, or whether you spent 20 years meditating and got to this point, I'm not particularly interested how you got there. I'm interested what you do with it. How do you treat your neighbor? Can you really say, "I love my neighbor?" Ask myself, not even like myself, ask myself, "We are only one self." That is the decisive thing. In your peak experiences, you experience that. You become aware, we are one. Now, how do you now put this into practice when you no longer have that peak experience? That's what interests me. I'm curious. What is the experience of Benedictine monks using sacred medicine? In Austria, Vanja Pynmas, who is also here at the conference and I, together have founded a Christian Buddhist center of meeting center and joint meditation in Switzerland. I went one in Austria and one in Switzerland. And in that center in Switzerland, scientific experiments are being carried on and have already been a lot carried on to compare the experiences of people who do this meditation practice under the influence of psychedelic substances and also don't. And it's a double-blind experience and professor fornebiter, who is also here at the conference as one who conducts that primarily. And I think Vanja Pynmas and Franz Fornebiter would be in a better position to report on it. But I have neither participated nor am I too well informed, but I am informed that it's going extremely well. And giving the results that we hope to find expected. And they show that these certain substances, psychedelic substances, can lead us to a much deeper meditation, can create something like peak experiences. And those are the most important moments in our life. How does art, anthropology and psychology shape your outlook about gratefulness? I started studying art. I was never really gifted enough to make it a lifelong pursuit. To do that, it must be the most important thing in your life. I liked it. I still love art in all its different forms. But I'm not really in the most being an artist. So I started to provide. And then my professor, who was, we were in danger actually at the academy during the time the Nazis were there, because they called us a nest of resistance. He was really a center of resistance. But to protect him and us, he joined the party. Everybody knew that was absolutely fair. But after the war, those who were the real Nazis made him a scapegoat. And it broke his heart. And it broke my heart because he decided no longer to teach there. And so I couldn't really find any other teacher that I liked, any other painting. I was studying painting. So I started, continued at the academy and studied restoring paintings. And that was very interesting. And there I got very interested in folk art, restoring folk art. That's also where I got my diploma in. And in children's art, because at that time I still met Professor Franz C. Shek. And he is the one that in the whole world reformed art education. He was a painter and the children of his landlord lived in a very poor, little shack, poor artist. And the children were always disturbing him. So he brought big roads of brown paper and let the children paint with his paints, paint brushes. Ben. He took these paintings to his friends and that was at the time of the secession. So in the early 20th century, Kokoskashil, Klimt, those people, they were just falling over what these children produced. And up to that time nobody had ever allowed children to paint like that. They did it very, very, very, but I don't think they had the tools. So it reformed our education completely. And people would come to Vienna and ask where is Professor Tsisiek? They would ask a cop. In Vienna he was the prophet whom nobody knows, knows in his hometown. But people in Australia were the household world. So I met him and that made me still more interested in education, child development and so and that's why I then studied psychology and anthropology because of primitive art. That was always my interest. And how this feeds into gratefulness at the record count, like I cannot tell you, except that when you do study anthropology or when you live together with children, you find it without saying thank you or without reflecting on gratefulness, simple people, original people, aboriginies, and children when they are small enough simply express their gratitude by their joy. When you bring children up present and they are saying thank you and put it away and play with somebody else, you will say they were well trained but you won't say they are grateful. But if they never say thank you, they just take the gift and play with it, they were really grateful about it. So what we do with gifts, that is the decisive thing. And that is the same with us. What do we do with that wealth of gifts that we are surrounded with and that we receive every day? So it's more on the big picture that I see in this gratefulness. Gratefulness was also here, even in America I know, up to the time of our grandparents, these spirituality before anybody used the birth spirituality, that's how you lived spiritually, you were a grateful person. And that made your happy person, our grandparents, people who lived here, the pioneers, they were very poor people, they lived very rough lives, but they lived happy lives, joyful lives because they were grateful. Why is gratitude so important? Do you think about even be critical for the survival of our species? All people want to be happy and joyful. Make a difference between happiness and joy. Joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens, so that's what we really want. We want the lasting happiness and that is joy. And that comes through gratefulness because even when unto what things happen to you, very difficult things happen to you in life, you can still be joyful because you don't look at the gift, you look at the gift within each gift and that is opportunity. And even when you experience terrible things in life, they contain opportunity. You can't be grateful for sickness, you can't be grateful for exploitation and violence and thousands of things for which we cannot be grateful. But whenever we are confronted with one of those experiences, we have the opportunity to be grateful for the opportunity that this gives me, to learn, to grow, even to protest, to expand my experience, all these are gifts. And so that's what people are long for. They are longing for joy and don't find it. Another way of speaking about it is, but then you have to start with your experience of gratefulness. When we experience gratefulness, when something is given to us, that is valuable to us and is freely given, those things have to come together, then it feels, and I think most people can empathize with that, it feels like something was expanding and expanding and filling up there, your heart is filling up and then it overflows. And as long as it's filling up, it's sort of a quiet joy and then, "Ah, and it overflows and you sing in the shower and you rejoice." And it's like a barrel that is filling up, filling up and then that's still very quiet the water and then it runs over the rim and then it sparkles and it makes noises and that is also those two phases of being grateful. First, I call it gratefulness, it's kind of filling up and then thankfulness when it overflows. And those are two aspects of gratitude. And in our society, in this affluent society, affluent, that means flowing in, not flowing over. Whenever the moment comes when it just wants to flow over in joy, advertising comes and says, "Oh, your neighbor has a better model, a bigger model, a newer model, and you make the bigger and bigger and it's always flowing in and never flowing out." And in other societies where they have very little, one top in this overflow is already, and that's why we come to other countries where people are really, really poor and we have so amazed to have more joy for them, they have everything. So we can learn this what we really want but we don't know that but we really want this not quantity, it's quality and we constantly lose quality because we want more and more quantity. So there isn't enough for everybody that we live on a limited planet that is no room for unlimited growth. That's just crazy. But we haven't learned that yet and when we learn that, we will not need to deprive ourselves of anything. Yes, we will restrict our quantity but we will improve our quality. We can't do that and that is what the world needs and that is one of the main reasons why gratefulness is so important. When you are grateful, you learn through grateful living, you learn to replace increasing quantity by increasing quality. That's what we need today, that's what our society needs and the very human being needs to be joyful. You know for me, Wondrenau is that magic moment we become present. How does mother nature play a role in your belief in practice? I believe that mother nature is our teacher, as our guide, as our model. We need and many people, especially the most successful ones, for instance, in business and have discovered that, designing harmony with nature. Nature does not have this pyramid. We imply that, we impose that on nature. We speak of the lion as the king and then we imagine that this is kind of a pyramid or we put ourselves on the top and this pyramid, we are the crown of creation or something like that. That's all in your mind. If you look at what this nature is doing, we can't run as fast as many creatures. We can't cry, we can't, as well as monkeys can, we can't cry at all except with machines to do the pyramid. We can't swim like fish. We are limited but one helps the other, one eats the other up, that belongs to it. We eat one another. It's a big banquet, it's a wedding banquet and we eat one another soon a little. I'll be eating up too and that's all right. I come for a while and then I go again. On this level of the body and of time and space we come and we go. But we also touch and that is our privileged position as human beings. We touch around that is beyond time and space. The transcendent round, we touch that and that also belongs to nature, of course. It's what drives nature. And that also we need to learn from the ethical, it's an ethical imperative that's implied there. And maybe the main image for the difference between working with nature and against nature is that, as I mentioned, that is not that pyramid in nature. Nature is a network. It's a connected system, one big system of networks within networks within networks. And so in society too, we have to learn to replace that pyramid of power and of fear, fear rules everything and out of fear we are violent and out of fear we are competitive and out of fear we are greedy because there isn't enough for everybody. We have to replace that by a network of replacing violence, first of all replacing fear by that trust in life, replacing violence by non-violence in peace, which is a lot more than the absence of war. It's fullness, it's cooperation instead of rivalry and sharing instead of hoarding. If we reach that, we will survive. If we don't reach it, the pyramid is crumbling and that pyramid is very old. We have had it for maybe 6000 years. We need something new. And again and again, in this history there have been people who have shown us that it can work, that this networking can work. The Buddha with his song Jesus with his little group of Kingdom of God, Saint Francis with the first Franciscans and thousands of communes in our own time, they have shown it, it came back, but now we need to put this art together and change the whole civilization. We live in a pretty scary time of change, but we have to face it. It is quite alright to feel anxiety about it. It is alright, but fear is not. Being anxious, if you have open eyes, you are free like anxiety in the world in which we live. But the difference between meeting this with courage and meeting it with fear is that encourage you go through with the anxiety. Yes, remain anxious because if you are not anxious you can't be courageous, who goes together. But when you are fearful you resist it. The very word anxiety comes from the same root as Angustian narrowness in life. We come into this narrow spaces and we come into this world through a very narrow space. And that is the prototype of anxiety, being born through this birth canal and nature gives us the instinct to trust in life and no matter how hard it is, to go through with it. And if we continue that as grown up people, we will go through one birth after the other and every time we get to one of those narrow spaces and trust and courage goes through, we will come to a new level of awareness and to a new life. We are going through some really difficult times now, a breakdown breakthrough. Do you still have hope in these really difficult challenging times? You have to define what you mean by hope. There are hopes and there is hope. The hopes are things that we can imagine. In the religious sense where you speak about faith and hope and love, hope is different from hopes because hope is openness for the unimaginable. And I want to have that. Hope is openness for surprise. And the great things in life always come as surprises. You can prepare, but even when you have prepared for it, it's a surprise that you are not the one that happens. And if something else happens, it's a surprise and you will take that surprise and do something with it creatively. So hope in the full sense is always fulfilled. You are always, life always fulfills our hope, but it may shatter our hopes, the things that we imagine. So I do have hope because this world has gone through, I think, scientists count five or more periods where it looked. We won't get much further. Everything was at its end. And even the human family, I think here in our European part of it, has reached a period once, I think, about 10,000 years ago. So when there were only four females left, we go back to these four mothers of maybe five. We have God's group, really tight spaces. So there's room for surprise. But we are in a very tight spot and I think people ought to open their eyes to it and admit it. And only when we admit it can be renewing ourselves that trust in life and have courage. And we need a lot of courage together with hope. Brought to you by the Fetzer Institute, helping to build a spiritual foundation for a loving world.