This is a conversation between Fr Cyprian Consiglio, Camaldolese monk, musician, composer and Paola (WCCM Marketing). Fr Cyprian lives in Rome where he serves as the International Secretary General for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue for the Benedictine Confederation.Â
You can watch the full conversation or read the full transcripts below.Â
Why is it often easier to find the Divine by looking at 'what’s actually happening in our minds' instead of using traditional religious labels?
Thank you. Glad to be with you. Glad to meet you. Maybe not instead of but in addition to, I like to use real specific language about that. I think what we’ve learned quite often from studying some of the Asian traditions is quite often we’re being taught a method, and we’re actually being taught through the use of phenomenological language rather than mythical language.
And that’s often the language of growth and transformation. Our religious symbols, our religious language, our mythical symbolic language, our iconic language, they’re all very good, and they’re a great entry point. But sometimes we don’t get to the hard, cold facts about what actually happens in the spiritual life.
What we’re supposed to actually do, what our spiritual life looks like, what our spiritual practice looks like, and what’s the transformation we can expect, and even how to make sense of the transformation that’s going on inside of us. I just gave a retreat in Arizona, and I began at that way saying, basically, I’m dealing with here is moving from logical language to phenomenological language, moving from symbolic language to the practical language of what’s really going on in the spiritual life.
Some of that is my own prejudice as a monk, because you could say that monasticism itself is an ascetical life. But I mean, see that word ascetical in the broadest sense, I don’t mean ascetics and penitential. I mean ascetical as in terms of it’s a practical life. What we do matters. Chanting the psalms, fasting, praying, vigils: they’re actually practices. But especially with the practice of meditation, for example, all the benefits we’ve got from the yoga tradition of India, what actually do with the body, exercises with the breath. And, I’m going to say that the, the ancient technologies, for dealing with the mind, I would say particularly out of Buddhism, these are like practical things that are quite helpful for the spiritual life.
And I just find people that are hungry for it and have benefited so much for it that they don’t get a lot of vocabulary like that in the church from their regular parish life.
This August you will be leading a retreat at Bonnevaux, France with the title 'Meditation and Consciousness: an Interreligious Perspective' that includes yoga and movement.
Why is the body so essential to exploring consciousness—and can we really pray deeply if we ignore our physical selves?
Well, this back to that first point about the phenomenal and but we actually do and to what my teacher friends said, the church doesn’t actually give us a whole lot about what to do with our bodies. So much of that has gone over to medicine and to athletics. And, you know, I found out some of the best advice I’ve gotten about the body is from my friends who are athletes who are very careful about how they take care of their bodies.
And really the best of our tradition, the phrase comes from Tertullian: “the body is the hinge of salvation”.
When we look at the Gospels, it starts out with the fact that God became flesh, which is kind of a contradiction to a lot of spiritual traditions, even in a sense a kind of a contradiction to Greek philosophy in which we are embedded, that considers the body the tomb for the soul.Â
The body is just a drag, just a weight that’s going to keep you from being spiritual. Even the Jewish story begins with God specifically creating things and saying they were good and then using those things and also using time as vehicles for salvation, time becomes salvation history, for instance, but specifically in the Gospels, Jesus is word made flesh, heals people as part of his ministry, feeds people as part of his ministry. And then these great events like the Transfiguration, the resurrection, and even the Ascension. The Transfiguration, where the body itself is sharing in the divine glory, that becomes a very important symbol for monks. So many monasteries, and especially Eastern Christian monasteries are named Transfiguration Monastery because this is such an important point for monks.
This belief that somehow the body even shares that transformation. The resurrection of the dead, whether you believe it as science or history, but the whole point of the resurrection, that empty tomb is pretty important.Â
The moral of the story is the body didn’t just get peeled off like a banana peel and throw it away. The body share in the glory and somehow. And even the Ascension, the Ascension of Jesus is the triumph of the flesh. That’s the to me, that’s Christian mysticism at its most refined. But somehow nothing ever gets left behind. It gets sanctified, it can stiffen eyes in some way, and so this can have a great part in our daily lives.
How I treat my body is going to change my kind of change my spiritual life. I consider exercise every day to be a part of my spiritual life. The whole point of yoga is I can sit for meditation longer. My diet affects how my mind is.
The sort of phrase I get from the Upanishads of India training the senses and still in the mind even, training the senses in order to still the mind. That’s really fundamental for a serious practitioner of meditation.
As a musician, what do you think song and rhythm can do for our meditation that words or silence alone might miss?
There’s a saying that comes from Beethoven, the great composer, that music is a language all of its own. And it added that it sneaks into somewhere else in the psyche that that words can’t. It’s what you mentioned there, but it was a relation to silence is very interesting because…
There’s something about music that just softens the soul, I think sneaks in a different place and consoles and comforts and warms things up. Otherwise we get we can get kind of stuck in our intellects, which can be very dry and brutal.
Back to your retreat, Meditation and Consciousness: an Interreligious Perspective' in Bonnevaux. What can people joining your retreat expect?
Well, this is a new retreat. I’ve been doing just for the past two years. It is one of those things that keeps growing and growing. I’m sharing out of my own practice. I think for the first time, I’ve written down a long litany that I use myself to prepare for meditation. And the retreat is actually me explaining that litany, which winds up being both a preparation for meditation and even a kind of a credo, what I believe in, how I believe it, how I express it.
So I always begin with talking about this idea of evolution of consciousness, meaning that our understanding of God, our understanding of the spiritual life, tends to match the level of consciousness that we’ve reached in our own maturity. For example, magical, mythical, rational, integral, pluralistic, those are the phrases I use the most, how we see reality, how we seek out of the same, and how we understand God, who we understand ourselves to be, is going to affect what our spirituality is like. And I do think we really need to mature more and more in our understanding of the Divine and even our Christian articulation of that understanding and that is going to change our spiritual life. Along with that. This phenomenological level doesn’t just go along with the body.
It’s also about these levels of consciousness, which is something I’ve been fascinated with since I began this whole journey more than three decades ago.
And sometimes just to talk about them, just to bring them in a higher release, encourages the journey and makes more sense of the journey and actually makes us want to go deeper in the journey as well.
So that’s what I’ll be talking about, those levels of consciousness that we go through in meditation right there, that would be really helpful to have some vocabulary around that.
Thank you.Â
Meditation & Consciousness with Fr Cyprian
In a world of theory, Fr. Cyprian invites us into the ascetical life—not as a burden, but as a practical path. Using the wisdom of the yoga tradition and Buddhist insights into the mind, we can begin to make sense of the transformation happening within us.
Fr Cyprian will be leading the retreat ‘Meditation and Consciousness: An Interreligious Perspective” in Bonnevaux, France from 25 to 30 August.
