A portion of your book, surprisingly, talks about therapy and emotional healing. Can you go into the value of that, in terms of developing one’s own religion?
TM: Yes, I am a therapist myself and have studied psychology, and I’m especially interested in Jung. I’m very aware as a therapist that a person’s spiritual life is part of who they are, but their deep psychology, their emotional life and their relationships and the influence of the past, these are all very important, as well — and they intersect.
I refer to these as soul and spirit, the psychological side the soul and the spiritual side the spirit. I think they go together and they are interlaced always. People may turn to religion under deep psychological need. A lot of contemporary forms of churches are heavily psychological and people are getting psychological benefits from participating in them.
It seems to me that if someone wants to be a real spiritual person today, complete as a person and develop a spirituality, they have to explore their psychology, as well, and that would be a therapeutic enterprise. I thought it would be appropriate in my book to have a separate chapter on therapy, because of my experience as a therapist. I thought to myself, “I don’t think everyone has to go to a therapist. There is a way in which a person can think therapeutically about their own life. That would benefit their spiritual development.” So I called this chapter “Self Therapy,” because of that. I wanted to suggest to people that there are things they can do that would address their emotional life and their relationships and so on, as a foundation for their spiritual life.
Can you give us an example in your own personal life of ways that you have integrated religion more deeply into your everyday life? Does it go beyond ritual? Is it mindfulness? What can take us into the realm of thinking about our religious path every day?
TM: I’ve done so many things in my life that are part of my own religion. For one thing, you can really be concerned about the ethics of your work and you can try the best you can to make a contribution to the world. I imagine you do this, and I certainly do it. I choose to write about certain things that are really going to make a difference to the world in a small way, but, nevertheless, make a difference. That’s a spiritual thing.
I have a relationship to Nature. We have moved recently and now live beside a small lake in New Hampshire. They call them ponds here. So, we are by this lake and near the woods. I don’t think you have to do that in order to have a spiritual life. You can do it in the city, but there is something special about being so close to Nature. Nature becomes an intermediary between yourself and all those spiritual issues that are important.
I have a chapter in this book on monks and monastacists, mainly because I was a monk and that experience over 13 years had an impact on me. Today what I do is use my experience of being in a monastery as a model for how I can develop my own religious life, my own religion. Part of that involves setting aside time to be contemplative, to be quiet at times. I mean, this is a very raucous house at times, with people having a great time. On the other hand, there are a lot of moments of quiet and we try to create a home that looks more like a monastery in some ways. I’ve always liked that model. I always have books around me and I play the piano every day as a kind of meditation in my own way. And, we eat carefully. We eat food that is grown locally as much as possible. Just this week we renewed our membership in a local farm cooperative farm where we get vegetables from a local farm. That, too, is kind of a spiritual practice.
There are so many things you can do, and they’re individual. I don’t expect everyone to do those things, but each person could find their own way to be contemplative and meditative and connected to community and live an ethical life and having some beauty around them, and you put it all together for yourself. I think it’s a great pleasure to do that in your own way.
You said the spiritual path may bring us back into a deeper and creative chaos. How has disintegration revealed itself along your religious path?
TM: Well, it’s happened to me many, many times. The story I’ve been telling as I talk about my book is when I had just graduated with my Ph.D. in Religion, I got a position at a university. I loved teaching, I really enjoyed it. I thought everything was going really well, and one day after seven years of doing this, the chair person called me in and told me they weren’t going to give me tenure. I knew the main reason was that I just couldn’t bring myself to write academic papers. To me, they are wooden and there’s no joy in them. I didn’t like it. I love to write, but I just couldn’t write that kind of stuff. And my teaching was rather experimental and they thought my grades were too high. You know, I was interested. I would get football players into my classes and I would pass them if they just showed up. I thought they would learn something about religion by just being there.
Faculty members can be very fussy about things, and strict and tough and all that, and I’ve never been like that, so I knew I didn’t fit. So, as soon as he told me that they were not going to give me tenure, at that moment I was thrown into chaos because it was my whole life. It was my way of making a living, I got a Ph.D. with the purpose of teaching, and I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I didn’t have a clue, and I was in that state of chaos for about three or four years. That was only one time in my life, but that was one time when I was thrown into chaos — and out of it came a new life for me, but it took me a while to find it. Of course, I am very glad for what happened. I love the life of a writer, but I never thought I would ever do that.
Having a religion of your own as a supportive foundation must be very instrumental when you are coming out of chaos into something else.
TM: Oh, absolutely. You can’t rely on an organization for that. I mean, I guess you could go to a minister or priest or rabbi and get some counseling if you are in that time of your life, but it’s much better if you have thought things through. When that chair person told me that I was not going to get tenure, he also said, “You know, you can dispute this if you want. You can appeal.” And I told him right away, “Oh, no. I got the message right now. Your voice is not just your voice. I am hearing the voice of fate for me telling me I have to change. I have got to turn a different direction.”
That was my theological view. It wasn’t something that I necessarily learned from a formal religion. It was my way, and it’s always been my way. When I hear those pronouncements like that, I hear them in a special way, and I just go ahead and adjust to it, a new life developing. It’s happened more than once to me. When I left the monastery was another example. I just heard this voice telling me I had to go in a different direction. I tried it and there was chaos, but it was my own religious vision that got me through it. It wasn’t an external church or anything like that.
What are you working on now? Do you have another book in mind?
TM: Well, I do. I’m not exactly sure what direction it’s going to go. I can tell you that it will be similar to my other books, to the things that interest me. I am aware that a lot of people have a vague kind of contemporary depression. They don’t have much purpose in life and they don’t feel very much alive. They feel pretty dead. So, the title that I’m working on at this moment is “The Spark of Life.” I thought I might write about this particular issue of people feeling that they are not fully alive and what it would take to really feel alive to life and have experiences more often where you feel like life is really worth living.
You wrote in this new book that depression is a symptomatic way of remaining in touch with our soul. I thought that was a way I’ve never thought of depression before.
TM: Yes. I’m not sure that all depressions are that. Just imagine that you are going along in life and everything is fine and you feel like you’re active, but when you stop to look, you know you’re not doing much and time is going by. When you get depressed, it forces you to look at yourself. You say, “Oh, I’m not feeling good now.” I always say, as a therapist, that nobody comes to me when life is going great. They come to me when things are bad. Depression is like that. Depression wakes us up in a way. Depression makes us feel bad about what’s happening and that causes change. It causes reflection.
Is there a final message you would like to leave with our readers?
TM: I think the main message is that the religion that I am proposing here, A Religion of One’s Own, is a pleasurable one. A lot of people have an experience of formal religion where they have suffered or they have been taught that it’s good to suffer or that you should do things that you really don’t like to do. My approach to religion is just the opposite. It’s based pretty much on pleasure, and my book ends with the discussion of bliss, which is pleasure and being in the right place of living the life that you want to live and living with people in a way that is satisfying and deep.
For more information on Thomas Moore, visit Careofthesoul.net.