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Pitts Theology Library
The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
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thurman.pitts.emory.edu
394-358_B.mp3
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
And so that one part of my life in this dimension began when somebody down the peninsula
came up with this Ampex-- I think it's Ampex-- was the first one of these things, from the wired
tape recorder, which I couldn't stand because I always got the wires tied up. And Joyce, then,
came into life out here just at the critical time, and all the boxes of tape-- I had an instinct to save
every little bit of anything. And there must've been, oh, I don't know how many big boxes of
tape.
And she was persuaded to let me take 15, 20, 25 boxes of tape over to the apartment where she
and her family lived. And since she was not working, she would spend the day listening to all
these tapes. And her mother would share in it, and that gave a certain kind of weightiness-[LAUGHTER]
--to it. And out of it came all of this material. Fortunately, during the days in Boston, because the
services were broadcast, the entire service was taped and then-- given live in the morning-- taped
so that at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, those people who wanted to hear the morning service could
hear it over the radio, so you had this.
And then for seven years, I had a meditation over the channel five-- whatever that thing is-- and
the university agreed to give to the city my services, with my permission, of course, hopefully.
And the only compensation for this thing every Friday morning-- I insisted that I would be given
the tape, so that when I would go to the studio on Friday, I'd pick up last week's tape.
And I did that because I could not have any conferences or anything growing out of the
meditation-- this because I had no time to give to anyone outside of the university. But anybody
who wanted transcriptions, the broadcasting company would have transcripts of the tapes made
and mailed out. So we had a mailing list of 6 or 700 people. And that's how we got those up
there. Those are the original ones.
I say all of this because I think it's important. Something happens, you know? And whatever
your skill is, if you can find a way by which this skill is your offering to God as your
Thanksgiving. Because of all the people who are dead, you're still living. And this is in a way by
which you can read God's mind so that you're ever sure that you're not living on borrowed time.
And it's this marvelous sense. Once you get there, you don't have to worry about it. So that's how
we got this set, and I'm very glad. Now before we start, Ms. Simmon, you-You need some light.
I will. Yes.
I'll get this one on here, right?
Now, I don't want-- now, but is that bad on anybody?
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Lucille has the difficulties over-[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I'm legally blind and the light is a little hard for me, but-[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Well, no, look, look-But it's fine. You know we-Shh!
--do it every year.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Now wait, wait.
I need a glass of water. Does anybody else need a break before we proceed?
Now is this any better now?
Fine, thanks for asking. It really is just-Well, I don't-That other one really glowed but-Oh, well, don't you just-We were just about-Probably.
Over here?
Thank you.
Pitts Theology Library
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Oh!
I want to give a feeling about our journey, even revving up our motors and that sort of thing. At
the end of the-- thank you, my dear-- of introduction to why I'm involved in this, I want to say a
word about the technique-- how we are going to do what we are going to do. When I finish the
preliminaries, opening up, we will listen again as a group to the tape. I hope everybody received
the tape.
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The procedures is very simple. You listen. At any point that you want the tape to stop because
you want to say something, react, contribute, raise a question, affirm, deny, but let the quality-the meaning of the tape-- flow through you, your mind and your spirit. One of the things that I
enjoyed very much as a boy growing up in Florida, I had my own little private oyster bed. That's
where I learned to fight and to experience defending your territory.
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And the thing that I loved most about my oyster bed was when the tide rose. That's the time the
oysters did their feeding, because they in a bed. They can't swim around. They can't chase any
food. So I would sit quietly and I'd watch the valve. You've seen oysters. I mean, everybody
knows, oh, well, it's something you eat, and it's a seafood. And they can't move because they are
all attached to each other. But when the tide rises and overcomes the bed, the oyster valve opens
like this.
And then, now and then, it does this. It can't pursue any food, but whatever the tide brings and it
recognizes-- this is my meal-- [CLAPS] it closes. And then after a while, it'll-- that's how it
feeds. So this is what I want your minds and your spirit to do. And it doesn't matter whether it
closes on what was perceived to be something you need to digest.
That's your only clue. We hope that when you stop the tape, you do not feel that you are
imposing on anybody else, but it is your moment to get a morsel. And it may not be a morsel that
anybody else sees, but that's not your business. Because nobody like you has ever been born and
will ever be born. You are the only you in all of the existences of existence.
And whatever life ultimately means, no one can find what it means for you except you. And
whatever the Creator of existence has to say to you-- other people may guess about it, but no one
can hear it except you. So as we move along, if you want the tape to stop, Joyce will stop it. And
you do whatever it's doing in you as if you are in this room by yourself. Because in a sense then,
this is the point.
Now-- one other thing-- it's very important that I must give you a feel of, if I can find how to do
it. One of the things that I have been searching for all of my life was to find a way by which I
could have a naked exposure to raw religious experience. And by that I mean the elemental
experience of religion before the mind tackled it and classified it.
The year-- the marvelous year I spent with Rufus Jones way back then, and I thought I was-- I
knew I was on the center of it. And I thought that-- and we would go along, particularly out in
the Tuesday night wrestling with Eckhart. And that's what they were. If you wanted to get a good
first-class headache, just sit down with Meister Eckhart's tract tapes and think you're
understanding them. It's a marvelous experience in humility and rage-- [LAUGHS] together.
Well, anyway, Rufus would-- I would be on the center of it, and then right at the critical moment,
he'd become a Quaker! And I was right back where I was. Now, and this is not a judgment or
anything of that sort, but in your spiritual journey, it is so crucial to have a sense of the
experience of religion which becomes the raw material that you use to get your creeds and your
doctrine and your dogma, but it's prior to this.
So this is what I'm on the search of, and been on the search of all my life. And this is a part of
why we're here. And I'll stop talking in a minute, Joyce. I feel you. It is like-- there's something
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so vital and alive about elemental experience before you try to interpret what it means. Don't
worry about coming just what I'm talking about. It'll get clearer. You see, before the mind can
tackle it-- no, now that's wrong, that's wrong.
Pitts Theology Library
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As soon as the mind begins to deal with the raw materials of experience, the mind has to make
sense out of it. Particular meaning-- say you get doctrine. You get dogma, because the mind has
to think about it. So that if someone asks you, you couldn't tell them in language that fits into
categories of thought and meaning, all of that sort of thing.
But the moment that happens, the dynamism of the experience evaporates. It's-- well, I can talk
for the rest of my life and not say what I'm trying to say. So we proceed. We listen with whatever
listening apparatuses we have, and then give yourself over to the movement in you that reacts or
responds to what you are hearing with your outer and your inner ear. And that's what I'm
concerned about. And feel free to stop it at any point. Now I think that's everything, Joyce,
really.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- I really, really do feel confident I will lay the foundation for our thinking this morning. The fact
that this is a-Is that too loud?
- --living world. Oh, it has wonderment. That is the Bible. Every level of our experience in life, it
is to grow outwards. Go up! That the import of it is missed. The life that is in you and in me, life
which we share, is alive. It is pulsing, throbbing, beating. It has no beginning that the mind can
grasp, apprehend, or comprehend-OK, I got it.
- --and no ending.
[END PLAYBACK]
Joyce.
Excuse me. Do you think that life is actually coordinated in ways that we have no knowledge of,
no hint of?
No, I don't-- I think this is the way it seems at any point that we relate to it. That's all I mean, that
it-- because you see, the way the mind works, it works in terms of some kind of logic-- a
beginning, an ending, some-- it cannot measure. No, no, that's wrong. That's not right.
In order for a thing to make sense to the mind, there has to be something that has to do with
beginning and ending, some context, so that you just don't slide off the universe. This way it'll
slide off the universe. That way it--
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And so that's why it seems to me that whenever we think about life, the only way that makes any
sense, you think of it in terms of beginning and ending. But we know that what we are calling
beginning simply means the point at which we became aware of it. And ending-- we can't think
open ending, so we have to box it in.
Pitts Theology Library
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And that's why I think that as a concept, we cannot-- the mind can't wrap itself around a notion
that life itself is alive. And I'll get to that as we go along because-- I can feel it. I can experience
it. But I really can't comprehend this, because there's no logic in it. I can't think of something that
has no beginning. It has to start somewhere. There's a jumping-off place, some--
But you start by saying no, and now you're agreeing. Listen, I wanted to know if you thought that
life was coordinated in some way that cannot be-- that we don't have comprehension. We don't
have mental understanding.
Right, I agree with that.
Oh, I thought you started off by saying it wasn't.
No, no, no.
You do think that?
Yes, you see, because that's the only way we can deal with it. I'm not sure that this is
characteristic of what life is, but it's the part that comes down my street that I can handle. But
where it's been before it got to me and where it's going, it's a part of my guessing. And somebody
comes along who comes from regions that I cannot even imagine.
And we have to give a name to it so that whatever the infinite means to us, that's the name we
give this. And that's all right. It's the handle. May we go on now, Joyce?
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- How does it live?
Oh, scared me.
- It lives by feeding on itself! Life feeds on life. And it continues to be. Now the creative
encounter in the lodge is that moment when the barrier between the individual and the universe is
engulfed. That's a freeing moment.
When the customary experience of being shut up in your little world in Brooklyn is interrupted,
is ruptured, and you are no longer the prisoner of your own life. You are no longer the prisoner
of the events of your own life. Now that's the basic proposition on which, when you are feeling
bound, a few days.
[END PLAYBACK]
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Could you stop now?
Joyce?
Yeah.
Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
When he said life feeds on life, and the physical dimensions of life supporting life, I think we
think of. But it crossed my mind just now- it didn't when I listened to it before-- of the level in
which we share in another dimension, a spiritual dimension, and feeding on life maybe in
another dimension.
If I understand you, I think this is how life nourishes itself in us. I think, for instance, that
whatever walls are built between human beings, or between forms of life, so that this expression
of life cannot be available as nourishment for some other form of life.
When that happens, in terms of conscious-relatedness, then the sense of isolation and being cut
off from nourishment that we need-- let's see if I can illustrate exactly what. One of the things
that I enjoyed doing when I was a boy growing up in Florida, in the spring of the year, early
spring, I enjoyed going down in the swamp with-- do you know what a swamp is?
Spell it out.
S-W-A-M-P. I mean, everybody looks so-- yeah. And I enjoyed going early in the spring and
before there were any signs of spring, even in Daytona, Florida. And you go into the swamp, and
you were pretty sure that the moccasins and so forth were on holiday somewhere.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'd get in the center of the swamp, and it's smelly, but it doesn't stink. It's dank, but it isn't
damp. And everywhere you look, all the mosses and the little pale green shoots. And you look up
at the trees, even the old oak trees that are old as God have little pieces of green things shooting.
And that's where I learned to be still-- not quiet. There's a great difference. And I would get still
enough, and I could hear the swamp breathe. And for hot minutes, as I would say, the life barrier
of little Howard Thurman and all these other things sort of slipped. There was just this sort of-and I didn't know which was the swamp and which was I.
And I'd come out of that place, and this is very cruel, but when I went fishing after that, any kind
of bait I put on my hook, I could get a fish. [LAUGHS] Bad on the fish, but ha!
[LAUGHTER]
Because I had temporarily moved into the flow of existence and had a religious experience. Now
I'd get into trouble, but yes, and when I start trying to name it and label it, then I've read it. If you
disagreed with it, I'm ready to kill you, because you would dare-- and all that sort of thing, so I'd
become very defensive. And that's why I feel that the spiritual dimension-- you catch it-- you
don't learn it. You catch it.
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Pitts Theology Library
Emory University
[INAUDIBLE] doing John R. Mott-- does that name mean anything to anybody in this room?
John R. Mott? Yeah. He was at one time-- well, his father did not want him to be contaminated
by religion. So he sent him to-- but he wanted him to have this profoundly wonderful education,
so he selected Cornell University. But it's Cornell University at that far-off time had-- was a
great stronghold of philosophy and metaphysics, science, but nobody bothered much about
religion. That was sort of out, about.
So this is where John R. Mott's father sent him and would protect him from all the
contamination. And his roommate in this house where they lived was a man whose name was
Wilder, who was the father of the World Student Christian Federation. Well, everybody here is
so young, but-[LAUGHTER]
At one time, the whole Protestant, particularly, missionary movement was nourished and
supported by young college people and young medical people who were sent all over the world
to teach and so forth as missionaries taking the gospel, and healing, and so forth.
Well, Wilder-- I don't remember his first name-- was the first secretary of this World Student
Christian Movement-- I think that's what it was-- anyways, and John R. Mott says that the first
night he spent with Wilder as they're roommates at Cornell, he caught religion as he catches the
measles.
[LAUGHTER]
And what his father was sending away from, he unwittingly sent him to. Now there's a-- and you
remember when Schweitzer went out the first time as a missionary? It was the London-- sent out
by the London Missionary Society, and he just finished his doctor's thesis of psychological
analysis of the personality of Jesus, one of these way-out things.
And he just finished the book on the historical Jesus. At the end, he gives us that great paragraph,
after debunking the whole thing, he says that very last paragraph, He comes to us as One
unknown, without a name. He speaks to us the strange words, "Follow Me," and to those who
would obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, and in the
sufferings, and the sorrows through which they shall pass in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable
mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.
Well, the London Missionary Society said, we'll send you out, support you. Heal people, but you
can't talk to them about religion. So his first service-- term of service, in the heart of Africa, as
the representative of the London Missionary Society, he was under a ban not to talk religion. So
the people to whom he ministered had to catch it. He was not permitted to preach-- to do
anything but heal.
And there's some people who've written about him who say that his most effective work was
done when he had to rely on tenderness, gentleness, on the imagination that comes from a trained
mind geared to healing human diseases, and when he had to speak the whole truth that he had in
that kind of sacramental expression of the healing art. And many people feel it was his most
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effective years, not after Lambaréné was built and all this, but then, when he wasn't permitted to
beat his gums-[LAUGHTER]
Pitts Theology Library
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--but he had this manifested through-- all right, Joyce, I'll be here all night, so just leave, and I'm
sorry.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- There are at least four levels of this kind of experience. I'd like you to think a bit about it. That
is the kind of food of inner stimulus, the inner zeal where we have what is called a momentary
flash-Aah, yes.
- --of profound inspiration maybe, however human. When suddenly there is an opening, an
opening, and you see beyond the moment. You get a quick, fleeting glimpse of a possibility in an
idea with which you have been working. And you go round and round and round and round, and
suddenly, what was a wall opens up, and then closes. Paracelsus talks about this.
Yeah!
- I was a wanderer so long, the way I sought lay hid. And then, he says, the clouds broke. And as
the clouds broke, they revealed the spires of the city, and the clouds came back together again.
But Paracelsus says, I have seen the city that I glimpsed. And that view, no darkness can
obscure. This is one kind of encounter. It is fleeting. It is temporary as far as the time interval is
concerned.
It is exciting. Sometimes it is devastating. Sometimes it causes the whole mind and spirit to
tremble like a leaf in the wind. It passes. The barrier between the individual life and something
wider is removed, and then comes back. We've all had it. Then there is the kind of an experience
for when the life-- this distractions are the memoria.
When the life-- your life or my life-- seems to be anchored in a certain direction, what the poet
sometimes call a set of the soul, what we may call on in other language the way in which the life
seems to be focused towards an end. And then you look back upon your life, you see that ever
since you were aware of yourself, it seems as if all of the details of your life, all of the
meaningful experiences of your life, all of them have been moving in a certain direction.
And that at times, when you were not even aware of it, it seems that this direction happens. And
they-- you know they moved the cable car from California Street-- because I lived in San
Francisco. Always you could hear the cable moving. The cable was under the ground, but it's this
very wonderful sight.
So that if you went to sleep before 1 o'clock in the morning, and when the cable stopped, you
woke up, because the movement of the cable has lulled you to sleep. And then you thought all
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The Howard Thurman Digital Archive
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was not well because the cable wasn't moving. Now how did the car move on this cable? The car
was anchored with a trap of some sort onto the cables, and it--
Pitts Theology Library
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[END PLAYBACK]
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Time Period
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1980s
Original Title
Title as transcribed from tape cassette
Conversations with Howard Thurman (parts 1 and 2) (80-9/19-20-21), 1980 Sep 19-21, Side B
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394-358_B
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Thurman, Howard
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<a href="http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/rp8k9">MSS 394</a>
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audio
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<a href="http://pitts.emory.edu/">Pitts Theology Library, Emory University</a>
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"><img style="border-width:0;" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc/4.0/80x15.png" alt="80x15.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License</a>. 2019.
Title
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Conversations with Howard Thurman, September 1980, Parts 1 and 2, Side B
Date
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1980-09-19
Description
An account of the resource
This recording is a part of a wider series of conversations from September to October of 1980 where Howard Thurman met with a variety of young men and women who were discerning their calling to ministry. Thurman poses the intent of this group as an opportunity to "open up for one's self the moving, vital, creative push of God, while God is still disguised in the movement of God's self." In this recording, Howard Thurman reflects with the participants what it means to live into one's calling as an offering of Thanksgiving to God. At the center of navigating his sense of calling, Thurman indicates that life feeds off of itself, and that it is in one's recognition of life's innate interwovenness, that the only response one's mind can have is making sense of one's lived reality.
Contributor
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Description by Dustin Mailman
Albert Schweitzer
Brooklyn
calling
conversation
Cornell University
creative encounter
doctrine
dynamism
historical Jesus
John R. Mott
journey
life feeding upon life
light
meaning making
meaning of life
meditation
Meister Eckhart
mind
mysticism
Oak Tree
oyster bed
Quakers
religious experience
Rufus Jones
San Francisco
swamp
tape recorder