Thomas Moore: “Curing Our Cultural Lostness”

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.

Thomas Moore: There’s a presence that guides you. For me, a Catholic, it’s a little like a guardian angel who guides you. The presence is real, but not literal. You don’t see it fluttering around somewhere. You don’t see the wings. It’s not that kind of reality. It’s a reality that you sense.

Tami Simon: Welcome friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Thomas Moore, author of more than 30 books, including the classic Care of the Soul. I’ve known Tom for approximately three decades, since we recorded at Sounds True back in 1993 a series of audio teachings called Soul Life. To me, when I hear the voice of Thomas Moore, I’m hearing the voice of someone that feels to me like a trusted friend.

Thomas Moore is an adept psychotherapist. He’s been a monk and a university professor. He’s a very prolific writer. Now at the age of 85, he’s releasing a new book. It’s called The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity. Friends, stay with us.

Tom, welcome.

Thomas Moore: Tami, I’m so glad to be with you. It’s like old times.

Tami Simon: Indeed. What inspired you to write about Thoreau and Walden Pond?

Thomas Moore: Partly, I moved to New England in 1985, quite a while ago, and he’s a neighbor. He’s about an hour drive from me, so I’ve been there many times. I’ve been interested in all the transcendentalists — Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and others. And I’d read Thoreau for many years, but never really seriously. So I decided to give it a try, and I was shocked when I first really read his journals and lots of his words. I was shocked, first of all, that he didn’t strike me as primarily a naturalist. I thought he was doing something else.

So that interested me. And the other thing was that he had such insight into human life, fresh with new language. I thought I’d like to explore that, and maybe eventually write a book about it and try to put in my own words what I thought he was doing.

Tami Simon: You mentioned that your experience of his writings was that he wasn’t primarily a naturalist, but that he was doing, quote-unquote, “something else.” Describe that something else to us.

Thomas Moore: Well, he says it pretty much himself in his journal, before he went to Walden Pond. He says that he wanted to discover how he could live so that when he came to the end of his life, he wouldn’t feel regret. He wanted to know what to be. And I know from his biography that he wanted to be a poet, and he tried to be a poet, but he failed at it.

People were rejecting his poetry right and left. He realized he was not such a great poet. I think he went through a period of anxiety, trying to figure out what to be. His language is pretty strong that way. And so I thought he went to Walden to cure himself — to have a cure in the sense of how he could live his life. And what I think he can tell us is not so much how to literally be in nature, in the woods, going down rivers, but how to find yourself, how to discover how you should live your life.

Tami Simon: One of the early chapters of the book — and there are 50 chapters, where you explore different aspects and elements of Thoreau’s writing — is called “Flutterings.” And in it there’s this sentence I pulled out, because I found it really meaningful: “We don’t choose our life plan. We are chosen by it.” Flutterings being almost like these guiding breezes that come into our lives. That was so interesting to me. How, for you, Tom, have you experienced your life not as something you’ve chosen, but as something that has chosen you?

Thomas Moore: Well, that’s a long story. That’s happened to me many times. The first time was when — first of all, I was born into a very pious Irish Catholic family, and went to a Catholic school, and spent a lot of time around priests. And I developed this strong desire to become a priest myself. So I left home when I was 13 to pursue that, and that really took a lot from me, because I didn’t want to leave my home. I loved my family so much. I was tremendously homesick for a long time — I think years — after I left home.

But on the other hand, the other side of it is that I had a wonderful family, but they had rather restricted views on life, a restricted vision of things. And as soon as I got to this monastery — I went from Detroit, where I was born, to Chicago, where this monastery was — as soon as I got there, I began studying Latin and Greek. And those languages alone opened me up to a big world, and a love of study and of books. I don’t think I would have had that at all at my home.

But anyway, that was a big call for me. I had to respond to it, because I wouldn’t have decided to do that on my own. It’s just that the feeling for it, the desire for it, was so strong. That to me was a sign of the rustling of the branches, the breeze coming along.

And then, when I was in the monastery for 13 more years, I woke up one morning and realized that I didn’t want to be there anymore, that it was over. And I didn’t have a good reason. All I could say was that I didn’t have it anymore. The person in charge of the monastery asked me, he said, “Why don’t you take a year and sort it out?” And I said, “No. I woke up this morning, and it was clear.” It was clear it’s time to move on. So it was that same feeling, that something had shifted, had changed.

That breeze idea was there. I left, not because I had reasoned it all out, but because I got the message.

Tami Simon: What would you say to someone who’s not clear in their own life whether they’re receiving, you could say, these flutterings, these breezes, soul messages, versus their own ego agenda — and they can’t quite sort that out?

Thomas Moore: Well, I think you do have to work at it. I don’t think you should just do whatever comes along, whatever you think you’re inspired to do. I think you should use your intelligence at it, too. Use your brain. Think about it, and maybe talk about it to some people. I didn’t do that much, for two reasons. One is that the message was so strong to me. It was very clear, and I could trust it, I felt. And the other thing is that all my life I’ve been kind of an intuitive person. I’m really not someone who reasons things out and sorts them out too well. I have a tendency, if the message is strong, to follow it.

Tami Simon: One of the ideas in The Cure at Walden Pond is this notion that we can live daimonically, and that Thoreau’s writings point us in this direction. This notion of being connected to a daimon, living daimonically — this is something that’s really interesting to me, Tom, and quite honestly, I don’t fully get it. I don’t know if I understand it the way it’s been written and talked about in the tradition, or if I’m just sort of making parts of it up. “I heard a voice — oh, that’s the daimon.” What does that mean? Tell me more what it means to you, and what you think it meant to Thoreau.

Thomas Moore: The word daimon has been around for a long time. Socrates talked about it in Plato’s writings. That’s going back BC, 250, 300 BC, about living daimonically. Socrates was very much in favor of it, and he did it. And then throughout history, many people have said, “Well, if Socrates did it, I can do it too.” So there have been a lot of imitators who have used the word daimon.

The way it is used, going way back in time, is that there’s a presence that guides you. For me, a Catholic, it’s a little like a guardian angel who guides you. The presence is real, but not literal. You don’t see it fluttering around somewhere. You don’t see the wings. It’s not that kind of reality. It’s a reality that you know is present to you. You can feel it inside, or you can feel it outside yourself.

I’ve had moments where I felt a daimon was speaking to me in the voice of somebody else. Someone says something to me and I hear it: oh, that’s a message for me. I’m going to follow that. It doesn’t have to be life-changing, like the examples I gave. It could be something simple, like, “What should I do today?”

Thoreau gives this very good example. He says, “When you decide to go for a walk, and you leave your house, don’t decide where to go, which direction to go. Just go.” In other words, trust that inner guidance rather than your head. Don’t think it through. I think that’s a pretty good example of a very minor way to follow your daimon. Go for a walk. Don’t decide where to go. Just go. I think that’s a good practice for the more serious moments, when you have to follow that presence.

The Romans called this daimon — well, they didn’t use the word daimon. They used Latin words for all of the Greek words, and they called it a genius. So people today talk about their genius. The Romans would say, “The genius told me what to do.” And they created little statues sometimes to put in their environment, on their lawn or somewhere, to make it clear to them that they are following a daimon in their life — that they are not making the big decisions in their head, not reasoning them, but following this inner guidance.

It’s created my life. I know that. I have other examples, too, but it’s created my life. I know enough by now, for sure, that I have to follow that presence, that guidance, that voice. If I don’t do it, I’ll be in the wrong place.

Tami Simon: Now, you said statues. What kind of statues? I’m trying to imagine that.

Thomas Moore: It might just be a rock. You put a big rock on your lawn or in front of your house, and you know it. Other people may not know why it’s there, but you know that it’s a reality, a certain kind of presence, to your daimon, to the genius. The Romans called it the genius loci, which means the genius of the place, and that’s why they wanted to have that statue or a rock. Sometimes they made it into the form of a face or a head, something like that, because they heard the daimon as a voice, so they wanted it to have a face and a mouth to speak. That gave them a way of relating to the daimon concretely, by having the statue there.

Very much like some people in different religions — like a statue of the Buddha. You have the statue of the Buddha to give you a way of connecting up with all those teachings, the dharma, the whole thing. And statues of saints in Catholicism, and so on. So it’s not too unusual to have a statue, but we don’t normally think of a statue to the daimon. That’s what the Romans did.

Tami Simon: We talked about how here you are at 85, and you could give examples of this voice or presence guiding your life. Have there been times when you’ve listened to the voice and you’ve been like, “Oh my God, no, I think I want to go — this is bad instruction”?

Thomas Moore: Yes. Well, certainly there have been times for me when I have doubted whether this was just some strong desire coming out of my past, or somehow through my psychology — not a daimonic voice. The first question you asked today was about how you decide it’s real or not. All I can say is that some of it is risk. You take a risk. You try to figure that out the best you can — is this real or not? And if you decide it’s real, I think you take a risk. That’s what I do. And maybe later on you’ll decide, well, it probably wasn’t really the daimonic voice, it was something else, so you change course. But most of the time, for me, this has felt like the real thing. So I think you have to develop a habit, and do it in small things first, and then in big things.

Tami Simon: Okay, one more question here about this whole notion of living daimonically, because this obviously is something that’s important to me. It’s something I really care about in my life, and in my own kind of inner compass of things. In The Cure at Walden Pond, you write, “For Thoreau, humans are daimonic creatures.” He stated that we’re not biologically defined, but have an otherworldly component — as if we ourselves are half human, half angel. Almost like we are these mythological creatures, and that thinking of ourselves as only biologically human is some type of limitation on our capacities. So I was really curious about how you see this.

Thomas Moore: Oh, yeah. That’s the way I see things, and that’s the way I live. I learned a lot of this, by the way, from another source, too. In my days when I was doing doctoral studies in religious studies at Syracuse University, I got hooked up with certain writers in Florence, in Italy, in the 15th century, who were reading the ancient Greeks. And of course, they understood this whole idea of daimon. So I followed them, and since then I’ve been much influenced by those people.

They said — some of them, actually most of them said — that we are not only part angel, part human beings, but we are also, in a certain way, part divine. We have divinity in us somehow. One of my favorite writers — not many people have ever heard of him, Nicholas of Cusa, but a brilliant, wonderful writer — he used the Latin term deus humanus, which means human-God. We are human gods, or we’re divine humans. And he didn’t mean that literally the way maybe a contemporary American might, that we’re God in some way, but that there’s something about human beings that have a foot in eternity. Part of our lives are in the eternal, the timeless — not just in time, what can be measured, what the scientists can tell us. And we’re not just psychological beings. We are also spiritual beings, in the sense that part of our existence is outside of time. I think that’s right.

That’s how I live, and so this daimonic living is part of that. It doesn’t have to be. I think you probably could take it, if you want to say this is deep intuition — that’s rationalizing it, but I wouldn’t do that. I think that takes away something from it. I think we should be religious people, all of us. I don’t mean by that following a religion. What I mean is that we should be people who take the eternal and the timeless into account, who see ourselves as more than just beings determined by time and by what can be measured by a scientific method. We are more than that. Otherwise, why even use the word religion or the spiritual? So I take those words very seriously, and I live that way.

Tami Simon: When you were describing being part human and part angel or divine, I was starting to think about people that I know and looking at them through that lens, instead of just thinking of them as a time-bound human being. And I noticed it shifted in a pretty dramatic way my appreciation of the person. It’s not like really saying everybody’s a superhero — that would be one way — but that everybody has this powerful presence beyond just the limited human. Now, I wanted to ask you, Tom, what you meant by a part of you being outside of time, and how that experience informs you.

Thomas Moore: What I mean is that I am not only my childhood, or what my personal history has made me. I believe that I have some sort of — the language is so difficult — some sort of purpose or design in life that is mine, that I have to discover. I don’t know where it comes from or what it is.

I don’t pretend to know that. I think it’s better not to make guesses about that. I do feel clearly that when I look back on my life, things have developed in such order, one thing after another, that I didn’t know was making me into who I am. When I look back, I see that.

Nobody could explain who I am — I couldn’t — just using childhood, or my development, or my history, or influences in my life. It’s more than that. I think that my existence has a dimension that is outside of time, outside of human control. But I don’t know what that is. I’m not interested in limiting that explanation.

I don’t want to do that. I think many people have done that. They come up with all kinds of explanations for what that is. I think it’s better to leave it nameless. So that’s — I love that kind of life myself. I’m in touch with something outside of the personal, and it gives my life dimension, and I’m not trying to pretend I know what it is at all. That helps, because I’m not making things up. I do what a lot of people have done in the past, and I’ve studied all this. I’ve studied so many people who have thought this way. They use language for it, but it’s not factual language. It’s more poetic language. So I really believe that we need poetic language for spiritual or religious realities. That’s why I like Thoreau so much, because he uses poetic language all the time. And if it — can I go on a little bit?

Tami Simon: Of course, please.

Thomas Moore: The most important thing I think Thoreau says about all this, he says over and over again, things like this. He says that when he goes canoeing down the Assabet River, which is the river that he often was on in Concord, Massachusetts, he says, “I’m not on the Assabet. I’m on the Ganges,” or, “I’m on one of those rivers in paradise.” And he’s not just speaking poetically. I think he really understands this, that he lives in myth. There’s a part of his life that is timeless, and mythic and poetic language are appropriate for that timeless realm. He says this all the time, that he’s someplace else. He says that he really thinks that Walden Pond was there in the Garden of Eden. He really thinks that.

Tami Simon: Well, it’s interesting that you bring this up, because when it came to the pond being there in the Garden of Eden, and the waterways being the Ganges, that was a moment, Tom, when I have to say I kind of rolled my eyes a little bit and thought, okay, this is too far. This is taking me too far. And then I thought, well, okay, there’s something I’m not understanding. I was fine with the half human, half divine personhood, but when it comes to “this is not like the Ganges, I am on the Ganges,” I was just like, no — you’re deluded.

Thomas Moore: Well, yes, it does sound like that, but it only sounds that way from a modernist, fact-based mentality, which is the one that we live by in our world today, for the most part. Thoreau — I think one of his great contributions is that he was able to live in a more complex world, in a world that has more dimension, you might say more layers.

In that regard, he’s more like a shaman, like a Native American spiritual leader who is able to live on more than one level at the same time, and can move between one and the other. The shaman often carries a drum with him that has lines on it that indicate the levels of reality, and that shaman is able, by use of the drum, to move in these different layers, different levels. Those are real. They’re not factual, they’re not physical, but they’re real. It’s a real level of being able to achieve a level of awareness, a way of living for yourself that is not the factual one.

So I think that’s what the real religious teachers do. Black Elk, the wonderful Sioux Native American, says that we need to see in a sacred manner. That’s the difference. We have to be able to see in a sacred manner. It’s different from seeing factually. It’s real. It’s not crazy. And so when Thoreau says, “I’m on the Ganges,” that’s what he’s doing, in my mind. He’s doing what Black Elk is saying we need to do. We need to be able to see in a sacred manner, in a timeless way, a way that is not factual, that is real but not factual — and that gives huge dimension to your existence.

Tami Simon: Okay, let’s move directly into your multidimensional lived experience here at 85. You mentioned that there’s a part of you that’s in a timeless dimension. What are the other levels, if you will, that you’re in touch with regularly, when you describe this multidimensionality for yourself?

Thomas Moore: Another one that I am very much in tune with is that I have been a musician all my life. And I live with a painter — a very serious painter. My daughter is a musician and a painter, and brilliant beyond me. My stepson is an architect, who also understands a lot of this. Maybe not quite as much as my daughter does. She’s really way, way, way gone. But there’s a real intelligence with it.

And I have spent my life studying theology, for God’s sake, and philosophy, and religions of the world, and so on. I’ve got a PhD in religious studies. That’s not just an academic degree. It represents many years of very serious study that was personal as well as academic. So I have spent my whole life, really, from the beginning.

I remember, before I left to go to that monastery, I was an altar boy in the church, and I remember holding that holy book on my forehead so the priest could read it. I was in another place then. I was in another place, with incense all around me and Gregorian chant being sung. I was learning then how to gradually leave this world of fact and be someplace else.

And in music — I play the piano every day. I played this morning. I usually play a piece by Bach every day, some piece of his, because I think Bach understood this. I think he understood how to live on different levels, and he was able to make music that can help you reach another level. So that’s part of it for me. It’s a spiritual practice — my own practice, pretty much. Art, poetry, music especially.

Tami Simon: Thoreau only lived to 44 years of age, and I’m curious what you think happened in his life that formed him such that he had so much wisdom to share at such a young age.

Thomas Moore: Well, John Keats died at 25. Schubert died at 35. On and on. There have been a lot of people who didn’t live long. You read the letters of John Keats to his brother, who was in the United States when Keats was in England, and you can’t believe this guy was in his 20s. Some of the letters he wrote even when he was 19, to his brother, are amazing in their depth of understanding. Tremendous.

So what is it? I know in the field of music, I’ve known people who are geniuses and could do amazing things in music before they were 12 years old. I don’t think that when we’re talking on this level, age is so critical. Time itself is something that we put too much attention to — the clock and the calendar and so on. Timeless means not living with time, not living in a condition of time. It doesn’t mean just lasting forever.

So if you can reach that point — I think Black Elk and so many other people did reach it, they could live in a timeless way. Or, as I feel listening to Bach, even when I play it, because my fingers are there making this — to me, that’s such an amazing experience. It’s like it just fills my whole being, because it’s coming through my fingers. That is an experience of the timeless that fills out my existence, my life, and helps me understand things. It helps me think more positively about dying.

My dad lived to be 100. He thought he would die in his 80s, or maybe 70s. He told me that, but he said he was surprised as he kept living. And he celebrated his 100th birthday with a very sharp mind, enjoying being with his friends — maybe 100 of his closest friends at his 100th birthday party. So I have that model, and I don’t know how long I will live, but I’m not worried, in a certain way.

I’m worried in some ways. I don’t want to abandon my family. But living in a timeless way helps you deal with the time of your life. It helps you put it in perspective.

Tami Simon: I didn’t quite understand, Tom, when you said it gave you a more positive view about dying — what the connection was between playing the Bach pieces and that positive view about dying.

Thomas Moore: Well, playing Bach every day, to me, is like what Plato talked about with philosophy. He said that philosophy prepares you for dying. Plato said that about thinking the way philosophers do. I would say music does it for me. It puts me in touch with a way of existing that is rich and satisfying and meaningful, that takes me out of ordinary time and puts me into musical time, which is quite different.

I think any musician will tell you that when you’re making music, you’re not in normal time. It’s a different kind of time. It has to do with the music you’re playing — when it’s over, when it’s beginning, and how long you’re going to go on with it. Those are musical decisions that don’t have much to do with the clock. You can’t use a clock to figure out how to do the time in music. You have to have a different sense of time, and I think that carries over then into life. You need a different sense of time to live life meaningfully, and not put it all in these categories of clock and calendar and plans and age, how old you are, all of that kind of thing.

I think you have to be able to step outside of that. That’s what I’ve always meant by care of the soul. One of my Renaissance teachers says, “The soul lives in time and eternity.” He says that very plainly and clearly. I remember reading that when I was much younger, and that made such an impression on me. Oh, yeah — if you’re going to live a soulful life, you must live partly in time and partly in eternity. And that’s what I try to do.

Tami Simon: In terms of The Cure at Walden Pond addressing our cultural lostness at this time, is it fair to say that one of the things you’re pointing to is this notion that we’ve lost having a foot in eternity? That that’s part of what we’ve lost?

Thomas Moore: Yes, we’ve lost that. We are stuck on clock time and calendar time. That is a very limited way for human beings to exist. That’s what I was saying before. We are not just physical beings that can be measured. We are people who have another dimension to us, and we have to be able to live in such a way that we are not limited by time, by age.

I wrote a book called Ageless Soul, and in that book I tried to say that we can learn to live, year after year, more and more in a timeless way, so that as we age, our sense of time expands, it increases. That’s a good way to age, it seems to me. So yes, there’s a relationship between living this timelessness and living in a better world — to have a better sense of things. It’s very limiting to live according to what the scientists tell us. Except, of course, modern physicists and astronomers are really pushing the limits.

Tami Simon: Tom, why do you think that when most people read Thoreau and refer to him, they talk about him as the naturalist, the environmentalist, and they’re missing some of the other points that you bring forward in The Cure at Walden Pond? Why do most people miss it?

Thomas Moore: I think they miss it because, first of all, if they’ve ever read about Thoreau, they’re taught that he was a naturalist. He was an environmentalist, and he went to Walden Pond in order to study nature. But he’s absolutely clear. He says, “When you go into the forest, leave your books behind. Don’t go in as a scientist, as a naturalist.”

He was interested in getting to know nature. He made all kinds of studies of nature, but he didn’t do them in the way his Harvard friends did. He did not bring those books and those studies that were being done at Harvard. He went to Harvard for four years, and he had friends who were studying nature, and he himself said he didn’t want to do it that way. He did want to go into nature and get to know it, but not in that way — and especially, he wanted to go into his own nature.

People asked him if he traveled much. He said, “Oh, yes, I’ve traveled. I traveled in Concord.” In Concord, Massachusetts. His whole world is sort of miniature. It’s Walden. Walden is the garden of paradise. Everything’s there. The river is the Ganges. It’s all compressed for him. Everything in the world that’s worth knowing is compressed in the place you are, and where you are at that moment.

And if you could understand that — see, I think what he’s doing is what a mystic does. I think he’s a mystic who can compress everything into your local place. So that’s why I say he’s not a naturalist. He’s not trying to scientifically study nature, or even to know it the way a naturalist wants to know it factually. He says, “You should be in nature looking for the divine — for the divine that is lurking there.” He uses the word lurking, and it’s a great word. The divine is lurking in nature. It’s not apparent. It’s lurking. And if you can find it lurking there, then you’re fulfilling your purpose of going into the natural world. That’s very different from being a naturalist.

Tami Simon: One of the big themes that the first part of the book explores is this whole notion of being individual and eccentric. You write about yourself that you express your eccentricity by being low-key and appearing pretty normal. I think that’s true. It’s very eccentric of you, Tom. But you’re joking. You have this dry sense of humor, part of your eccentricity.

The goal, though — for Thoreau, and I think what you’re saying for all of us — is to be really ourselves. You write, “The ultimate secret is to show the world who you are.” Now that’s interesting. Not just to be yourself, but to show the world who you are. And I wanted to talk to you about that, because — now I’m going to just get personal for a moment — when it comes to showing the world who I am, I notice that’s very edgy for me. It’s one thing to be that way in private, in my pajamas, dancing around the living room, but it’s another thing to show this to the world.

And I’m going to take this just a little bit further, because I heard a lecture where you were quoting James Hillman about the power that comes from allowing ourselves to be humiliated. And I thought, really? That’s the thing I fear about showing the world who I am — and yet that’s where my soul lies, is in greater humiliation. I need to understand this more.

Thomas Moore: I think what Hillman was getting at is consistent with his way of looking at a lot of things, which is that there are many human experiences that we try to avoid that actually could be very helpful to us. For example, another one that I really like — well, a couple. He points out how useful jealousy can be for us, even though it’s very painful, and it looks like a weakness to be jealous. Or inferiority, feeling inferior to other people — that can really help us.

What I do when I follow him as a therapist, if someone tells me they’re feeling inferior, is what we say following Hillman: we go into the symptom, go deeper into it, instead of trying to get rid of it. So if someone’s feeling inferior, I’ll say, “I wonder if there are ways that you could get in touch with your inabilities — the things that you can’t do, the things that embarrass you when people discover that — and maybe find ways of doing it that are more useful and are easier for you to do.”

So I would say that to anyone, about anything like that. If you’re feeling inferior, it just needs a little tweaking. I think it should be tweaked. I don’t think you should just go around feeling inferior. But I bet there’s a way in which you can get in touch with what you don’t know, and that will give — that could be a plus for you. You could really add that to your store of abilities and enjoy it, ultimately. But it does have to be changed a bit.

Tami Simon: Yeah, I think this is important, because a lot of people feel bad about themselves because of the ways that they feel incapable of this, that, or the other thing. How am I supposed to now welcome this as a doorway to my soul? I’m trying to lift my head up, not follow the ways I feel less than.

Thomas Moore: Well, I would say it’s great to lift your head up, but don’t do it all the time. You have to enjoy those moments when your head is down. If “enjoy” is too strong a word, at least tolerate them. Give them a little space. Give them something. I always say that to my clients. I always say, “Give it a little space. Don’t give it everything — give it something.” As much as you can tolerate right now, and that feels all right. And then gradually, that will probably increase, and your sense of who you are will expand.

I feel that for myself. I used to be very nervous about showing some things, especially when I had to enter this more public life, which was the last thing I wanted. I found it very difficult for a while, but I worked at it. Being a therapist is — I always say that doing therapy is being in therapy. So I’ve been in therapy a lot, because I’ve been a therapist, and I’ve worked things through for myself by doing therapy.

And some of them have been being able to take on some of the qualities that before I’d be embarrassed by, that I just feel, “Well, that’s just the way it is.” I don’t make a big deal of them. I just let them be, and give them as much as I can without feeling it’s too much.

Tami Simon: What do you mean, that doing therapy is like being in therapy? I’ve never heard a therapist say that.

Thomas Moore: I haven’t either, but I have heard therapists express that sentiment — that we do learn a lot when we are working with somebody, in lots of ways. I have a client now who’s a therapist, who tells me that as she leaves me, she’ll go and talk to one of her clients, and they’ll be saying the same thing she just said to me.

This happens. Our clients often are going through some of the same issues that we are dealing with. So that’s one way we might get big benefit from doing therapy. Another way is simply that some of the insights we can bring to our clients, we can apply immediately to ourselves, and I find that all the time. So in that way, doing therapy is being in therapy, and I find it very helpful.

Tami Simon: Tom, when you write, “The ultimate secret is to show the world who you are” — here at age 85, do you feel that you are 100 percent in that expression? Like you’ve held nothing back at this point?

Thomas Moore: No, no, no. No, it’s just the opposite. I feel that I’ve shown a little bit more, but not everything — certainly not everything, and not even very much. I’m full of inhibitions that I used to have when I was a child, that I connect with my childhood. And I’m as neurotic in some ways as I was then, although I can say that I’ve gotten over quite a few neurotic tendencies that I’ve had over the years. But there are more neuroses left than I’ve gotten rid of, that’s for sure.

Tami Simon: I was speaking to a friend of mine recently, and what he said to me in the conversation was, “I don’t see it as my task to heal all of my neurosis, Tami. I’m not working on that.” He’s like, “I accept it. It’s fine. I have a kind of unconditional appreciation of all of it.” And I was like, oh — I wrote that down. “I’m not trying to heal my neurosis.” I thought, oh, I still am.

Thomas Moore: Well, my answer would be, do both. Try to heal some of your neurosis, but don’t work too hard at it, and don’t worry about the ones that don’t get changed.

Tami Simon: All right. One final thing I want to talk to you about. I know you’ve written extensively on the dark and difficult passages in people’s lives, including a book on dark nights of the soul, and I’m wondering if Thoreau went through a dark night, and if you discovered that in his writings, and what we might be able to learn from that.

Thomas Moore: Yes, he went through a terrible one. I can think of a couple that he did, but one in particular. He and his brother John were very close. They did a lot of things together. They created a school together for a while, and they sailed down a river on a boat that Thoreau had made. He writes about that journey that they had. They were very, very close.

And not long after that journey on the river, his brother was shaving and cut himself on a kind of a rusty blade, and died from tetanus. A very painful death, and Thoreau held him while he was dying. And it took him a long, long time to get over that — if he ever got over it. It was something that he had to deal with, and he writes about it, and his biographers write about it. It was one of the greatest tragedies in his life, maybe the greatest tragedy in his life. That was a terrific, I think, lifelong dark night that he had.

Tami Simon: What can we learn from his confrontation with that?

Thomas Moore: First of all, we learn that you never get over these things. Don’t think you have to get over them. That’s not a good thought. That’s too heroic — “I’m going to get beyond this.” But you can say, I think time will help, as everyone says. I can reflect on it and write about it and talk about it, and I’ll get on with my life. It won’t be as intense as it is right now, but it’s never going to go away. And I think that Thoreau showed by his example how to get on with his life quickly, and yet be very, very open about his emotion about his brother.

Tami Simon: You said there were a couple of examples. Is there another one that comes to mind?

Thomas Moore: Yes. He wanted to get married once. He fell in love with this young woman, and John, his brother, also fell in love with her. And Henry was a bit — he was not too confident in those relationships. And so he wrote a letter to this woman proposing marriage.

He proposed marriage in a letter, which is kind of typical of him. And her father said no, she couldn’t do that, so she wrote back and said, “No, I can’t.” That was a really very difficult thing for him to deal with. And if that’s the reason, I don’t know, but he never got to that point again, as far as I know.

Tami Simon: One of the chapters in The Cure at Walden Pond is “Be Cold and Hungry.” This was the title of the chapter, and I was like, really? I don’t think so. But anyway, I kept reading: “Modern life is one massive attempt to avoid the storms and deep snows of life. We appreciate our conveniences and even have stores named for that purpose.” It seemed like there was some theme about embracing the grittiness of nature, of life, of hardships. I wonder if you can speak to that, for Thoreau and for us.

Thomas Moore: I love that about Thoreau. I think that’s what makes me trust him so much — that he includes the difficult and the challenging and the uncomfortable part of life, that you should not only tolerate it, but go after it. He says, if you really want to do something for yourself, maybe instead of exercising and running, what you should do is go out in a snowstorm and feel what it’s like to trudge through the snow when you’re cold, and it’s difficult and a challenge to your body. He suggests that, and of course he means more than just physically. We should take things on that are difficult and challenging — not good weather all the time. But also, even in a metaphorical sense, accept the bad weather moments.

Tami Simon: Okay, Tom. And then, because I have you here, and I think people learn so much from the hardships people go through, I’m wondering if there’s an example from your own life and how it impacted you — what you learned, what we can learn through your passage through something really difficult.

Thomas Moore: I can give you one I often refer to. When I finished my PhD work at Syracuse — and I loved every minute I was there, I was there for three years — I got a job eventually teaching at a university. I taught religious studies, and my courses were cross-listed in psychology, because they felt I was doing both things, which is right. And I loved teaching there. I loved being at the university, and I loved the students. There are certain things of university life I didn’t enjoy, but most of it I did, and I wanted to continue it forever, and I thought I would.

And one day, after eight years doing this, the chairman of the department — he was my good friend for many years — called me in and said, “Tom, the faculty’s decided to let you go, and you won’t be teaching here anymore. And I doubt you’ll be able to get a job anywhere else, because we’ll not give you tenure here.” And I said, “Well, what’s wrong?” And he said, “I can’t tell you. We had a secret meeting. I can’t tell you.” And he said, “If you want to, you can appeal it.”

And I thought about that for a moment. You know, I’m a good Catholic guy, from the past anyway, or in my own way. And I know the Annunciation, which in Catholicism is the time the angel comes to the Virgin Mary and says, “You’re pregnant now, and you’re going to give birth to this child who’s divine.” And she says, “Okay, let it happen.” Fiat, fiat, they say in Latin. Let it happen.

So I thought of that. At that moment I thought of it, and I said to the chair of the department, “No, I’m not going to appeal it.” I hear the voice now. What I said to myself was, he doesn’t know this, but he’s the angel speaking to me, telling me to move on. It’s time to move on. I felt that in that moment. I only had five minutes with him, but it was enough for me to make that connection. See, this is what Thoreau would do — look for a myth that you’re living. And that’s what I did, and I was very comfortable with it.

I mean, it was painful, but I was comfortable in the sense that I would never appeal that. And then I had to go off and figure out what in the world I was going to do next. I had never thought of doing anything else. I loved this life. What am I going to do? I didn’t know. So I went off into quite a while of trying to figure that out — maybe about three or four years to try to figure out what I would do. And eventually it came to me.

But it was painful, very painful. I was very disoriented. I had to go to my doctor, because I was getting sores in my mouth and I couldn’t sleep at night. It was so disturbing to me that I would not have that life anymore.

Tami Simon: What would you say to someone who’s in the middle of the dark period, and it’s like, “Okay, this is wanted somehow in my daimonically inspired life, supposedly, but I don’t get it, and I’m really suffering right now”? And really, if they’re truthful, they’re like, “I want out. I want out of this.” But they’re in it.

Thomas Moore: Well, I’d want out of it, for sure. This is the point: if you can learn that little lesson that you brought up from Thoreau — that the snowstorms have a place, the clouds and the rain, the storms, the lightning have a place in life. They’re a part of nature, they’re a part of my nature. So if you could do that — and maybe that’s what you have to learn when you go through your own dark night — is that this is part of life.

And you can fight it if you want, and you’re never going to get to the point where it’s going to be easy, or you’re going to think, “Well, this just happens. Let it go.” You want it to be different, but that’s part of the experience of it. You want it over quickly. That’s part of the experience of it. So you stick with it anyway, and deep down somewhere you have trust that this is what life is. It will eventually — the clouds will go, the sun will come out, and I’ll be okay.

Tami Simon: I’m talking to Thomas Moore, age 85. His most recent book is The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity. And one final question for you, Tom. I imagine someone listening and saying, “I really appreciate what Tom’s saying, but it seems so out of sync with the madness of our time.” Really — I mean, this kind of cure of knowing the timeless and having our mythic imagination, living in a multidimensional way, this is just not where the culture’s at. This is out of sync, Tom.

Thomas Moore: I know it’s out of sync, but I say that the culture is where it is because it doesn’t have this. It doesn’t have what I’m trying to offer through Thoreau. I think Thoreau had it. He felt his culture was out of sync too, entirely, and he wanted to offer alternatives. He was very interested in music, and he always said, “I’d rather listen to the clink of the hoe when I’m cultivating my beans than go listen to the Boston Symphony” — or the Boston Opera, is what he said.

He offers us — that’s my point in this book — the cure is not just his cure, it’s our cure. Yes, this book is coming out at a time when the world is feeling very troubled, and we are troubled. We have a lot going on that’s horrible to contemplate. So it’s time for our cure, and I think that the answers are there in this book.

Tami Simon: Thomas Moore, his new book The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity. Tom, great to be with you always, and to feel your heart and your wisdom. Thank you so much.

Thomas Moore: Thank you, Tami. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to being with you, and I hope it isn’t quite so long before the next time.

Tami Simon: All right. Me too.

Thank you for listening. I’d also like to invite you to join us on Sounds True One, where you can enjoy early, ad-free access to episodes of Insights at the Edge. Sounds True One is our premium membership platform. It’s built around live classes and online events, award-winning specials, intimate learning experiences, and Q&A sessions with the world’s leading wisdom teachers. You can get your first month free at join.soundstrue.com.

The Sounds True Podcast Network.