Hello, beautiful souls! Facing life’s darkest moments can be incredibly challenging, but it can also lead to profound personal growth. In this episode, Thomas Moore shares insights from his influential book, Dark Nights of the Soul. He discusses the importance of accepting one’s fate and making the best of what life presents, rather than complaining about it. He also emphasizes the difference between the soul and the spirit, and how embracing life’s challenges can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself and the world.

Whether you are navigating your own dark night or seeking spiritual guidance, Thomas’s story offers hope, wisdom, and the possibility of finding peace and meaning in the midst of life’s difficulties

Checkout Thomas Moore’s work at: https://www.thomasmooresoul.com/

▶️ Click HERE to watch this episode on YouTube.

Episode Highlights:

03:36 Exploring the Soul and Spirit

19:41 The Commercialization of Spirituality

20:21 Personal Spiritual Practices and Insights

26:11 Exploring Intuition and Inner Guidance

28:04 The Magic of Enchantment and Spiritual Study

36:58 The Journey of Writing and Sharing Wisdom

39:25 A Message of Courage and Trust in Life

44:59 Continuing the Spiritual Journey

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Transcript

Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the angels and awakening podcast and friends. The guests that I have to share with you today is on my top 10 list of people who I have just wanted to interview my entire life.

So this is just the greatest honor of my lifetime. I have to tell you that I began reading his books. My mom was about to go through a divorce and having a dark night of the soul herself. And so she started bringing home all of these spiritual books from Barnes and Nobles and Borders. But one of the very first ones that she brought back was Dark Night of the Soul and Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore.

And I have this book, which is very, very sacred to me, and it’s got water stains on it because the very first time I started reading it, I was at the pool in seventh grade and I would just sit and skim through the pages and read and just go deep and listen to my intuition, but I remember picking it back up in college and I wrote.

And I found this. Writing just a couple of years ago where I was having ideas and inspiration as I was reading it and I wrote down, I could be America’s journalist of the soul, start my own magazine and on another page I put, I want to teach this one day, this is the future. And I think it’s so wild because almost 30 years later from very first picking up your work, I get the privilege and the honor of running this podcast and radio show that is now listened to via radio by over 150, 000 souls each week.

And so Thomas, thank you for being here. I’m so excited to spend this hour with you.

That’s a wonderful story. Yeah, I’m happy to be with you because it’s so much easier to talk to someone who knows what it’s all about.

Exploring the Soul and Spirit

How did you transition into writing about the spiritual world?

I grew up in a family of plumbers.

It was kind of a big step to get there. When I was 13 years old, I was overwhelmed by a desire to become a Catholic priest. I grew up in a Catholic family, and I don’t know what happened, but I love my family, but I had to leave home to do that. And I did, and that started things going, because actually I encountered soul there.

How did you encounter soul there?

Well, a number of ways. One was theology, you know, and history, talking about the soul, what the soul is, and how it differs from the spirit. Uh, in practice, because I lived a community life under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and we took those vows seriously, and that was kind of a very special kind of life.

It was not being in the ordinary world. for me, and that lasted 13 years when I just got to a point where I thought that part was over and I moved on.

You touched on this, and this is one of my biggest questions for you. The difference between the soul and the spirit. I’ve heard you talk before speaking events.

That you are just a lover of words and that words are so powerful because they can be overplayed so much where they just don’t have any soul left to them. But really when you hear words in a certain way or new words, they can spark this. Energy within you when it comes to the soul and the spirit I see the soul as being one droplet in the ocean.

That is god universe source And I think there’s a dimension in which it’s perfect. Like it’s untouchable. There’s nothing that could go wrong With it whatsoever. It’s all that is it’s One with the whole of everything again. And yet each one of us has this spirit that lives with us in our humanness every day.

And sometimes that spirit is happy and inspired and eager to move along in life. And sometimes that spirit. gets caught up in that dark night of the soul, or just melancholy, or depression, or different things. How do you, looking back over the last 30, 40 years of your work, do you still define soul and spirit the same way, or has your views changed and shifted?

They haven’t changed much, no. I think the reason is that I base almost all my thoughts on tradition and other, on ancient writings and traditional ways of looking at things from all over the world, many different spiritual traditions. And so they don’t change. Some things might shift, might be a different accent now and then, but basically it’s the same.

So how do you see the soul and the spirit?

I can see what you’re saying because of the tradition. I think it’s close to what you said. One tradition is that the soul is partly individual and partly belongs to the world. So there’s such a thing as a world soul. They called us in the ancient world, they called the anima mundi.

Anima means soul, so it’s the soul of the world. And in a way, our lives and our deep lives, deep within us, what we consider to be our soul, participates in that bigger soul. That’s the way they would say. They often use the word participate, meaning that our soul shares in the larger, greater soul. So that’s an idea.

But the one that I, that I use mostly for myself is that the soul is closer to home. So, and I mean that quite literally actually, that our home and family and friends are very important to the soul. So the ordinary life, it’s very important to the soul and the struggles we go through are part of it. And the happiness and the joy we have with other people and being at home and being with animals, even things like that.

You know, it’s all the soul. And soul means to be alive, to live, you know, to really live. Spirit, on the other hand, to me is something much bigger. It’s what I was really caught up in when I was a young man. I wanted to go out and offer myself to the world and wanted to serve the world. And I wanted to leave home to do it.

And leaving home is like moving away from that. The soul values, you know, it’s moving away and being caught up in that tremendous power of the spirit to kind of sweep you away.

There’s different dimensions to our existence, and I keep hearing spirits say there’s a point at which The soul is one with all that is and it’s perfectness, but there’s also a space in which the soul is expanding. How can both be truth at the same time?

Well, this is one of the things you have to learn in this business is that there are many contradictions and paradoxes. And most of the time, maybe all the time, what you have to do is not try to resolve those kinds, those, uh, oppositions, but rather to expand yourself to be able to do both. You know, you have to be able to contain things that are paradoxical and contradictory and give yourself to each of them and see what happens as a result.

One of your books, Dark Night of the Soul, I think has just had the biggest impact on this world. And Thomas, I don’t feel like you get enough credit for the work that you’ve done over the years, because anybody today within the spiritual community who is reading works, they are based off of other people in the 90s and the 2000s that were basing Their writings on your work, and I see that so much.

And if anybody’s listening and likes books, you need these books in your library. Dark Knight of the Soul, Soulmates, Hair of the Soul, The Re Enchantment of Everyday Life, and your new book is called The Eloquence of Silence. But Dark Knight of the Soul opened up a space for humanity to say, Okay. Life doesn’t have to be happy and cheerful and joyful all the time.

And I’m not wrong or bad as a human being for having periods where I don’t know what is going on in my life. I don’t know exactly where spirit is leading me. I don’t know what’s going to come next, but you’ve always given people. Peace and this hope to look for that somehow some way it’s all going to be okay How do you teach people to hold space during that time where they’re sad or they’re unsure?

And life is just really big and really confusing

One of the things I write in there is that a good starting point is to have a view of human life and of yourself as not being happy all the time. That it’s natural. It’s the way it should be. That there are struggles. In fact, I would go so far as to say that happiness is a feeling that comes along now and then.

It’s not a state that lasts very long. You know, real, real happiness. It’s important, very important. But I don’t think it’s a state unless it is something really deep inside you that is not too boisterous, you know, it’s kind of a steady, deep kind of feeling that you’re okay with the world. I like the way they put it in India.

They use a beautiful word in India, Ananda, which means the happiness you have when you are in tune with yourself and the world around you. That kind of happiness. It’s kind of a muted happiness. That’s a good kind to have all the time. But you can’t be, you can’t be giddy all the time. That’s not the way life is.

So if you can have a view of yourself, that you are a person like any other person, that has things going wrong, sometimes, and we’re all different, some of us have huge Challenges to deal with and some of us have not too much. So we all have our fate. That’s a part of soul to what’s given to us what we have to deal with.

And that’s part of dealing with the dark nights. And that is to be able to take our own fate. What life is giving us. And not complain about it, but try to do our best with it.

I like how you said that we all have these cards that were dealt because it’s so true. And I think for the longest time I felt in my life, I was just supposed to have things figured out, or I was supposed to just get things on the very first take when Spirit was showing me something.

And it’s taken me a long time to learn that they’re trying to teach me, whether it’s God, universe, source, the angels. Loved ones on the other side, my own higher self can’t be learned. It’s more a process. And in this crazy busy world, everybody wants things so fast, but it takes time and patience to allow this.

Rose petals to, like, unfold and the rose to bloom and the lesson to just come in over time.

That’s certainly true. I’ve been a psychotherapist for about 40 years. I have to say, it’s such an intense thing to do when you do that at a deep level, do that kind of work. So it affects me tremendously. And what I’ve noticed is that people can go deeper and they can change their point of view.

And they can find that life is more meaningful. That’s possible. You don’t have to be defeated by the challenges that come along.

Understanding Soulmates and True Connections

Switching gears here a little bit, you talk about soulmates. And I want to set the record straight because over the last couple of years, there’s been some Cults that have come up, people who take things to a very weird place in the spiritual community.

There are a lot of people telling folks on the internet that every single person has one other person here on earth that they’re attached to, and that if they don’t find that person, they’re saying that they can find that person, but they’re only pairing people up within the cult soulmates. I don’t remember ever being like a term before you coined it.

What does all of the research from the last thousands of years, what does it say about what soulmates truly are?

I’ve come across the word, not too often actually, in history. I did come across it in Ireland. I’ve lived a lot of my life in Ireland. And you know John O’Donohue wrote a book called Anamkara.

But that’s a phrase that’s used by the Irish quite often. And Anamkara means a soul friend. That’s a particular kind of friendship. It doesn’t mean that you suddenly have this person that has been destined to be your friend for the rest, you know, from eternity. That’s a kind of very childish way of looking at things, I think.

But rather what it means is that you, you establish a friendship in which you care for each other’s souls. That means that you actually, you’re not just someone that you hang out with. This is somebody, and Anamkara is someone that you do hang out with, but you also, Take some responsibility or make some effort to help them get through life.

You know, there’s that added dimension. And that’s all it is. So you could have a friend in your life right now, no matter where you live. And if it’s someone you can have a very intimate connection with, I mean close, you can talk about things that matter. That’s the main thing. You talk about things that matter.

You can, in a sense, very lightly, maybe, I don’t want to push it too much, but guide your friend when they’re in trouble. Be there to listen to what they have to say and point out some things that maybe they don’t see. And that kind of a relationship, to me, is kind of a soulmate. That’s very different from the highly romantic one.

And this idea, there’s one person, I never intended that when I used the word soulmates and I think I made that clear. I meant a relationship that has soul. where you are actually touching the other person’s soul deep within them. And that’s a, it’s a deep connection you have.

And you absolutely did make that clear, but I don’t think everybody gets as deep into books as they should anymore.

And they need to reread your book because the word that you touched on is actually a word that Spirit’s been using a lot lately to kind of bring through a lesson. I have. The world’s best husband in the entire world. I don’t believe that you just have one person for you, but that’s for a different day.

He’s just so kind and he’s caring and he takes care of me and he supports me and he respects me. And no matter what crazy idea I think up, he encourages me. I read a person’s book and had someone on recently where I saw that dynamic and their relationship to where just the man was so supportive and caring.

Spirit highlighted the word. Care, right? That in this day and age where everybody is so divisive, can’t have friends with somebody who doesn’t believe exactly like you can’t even be married anymore to somebody who doesn’t believe exactly like you. We’ve lost that care of one another.

Absolutely. Well, my book, Care of the Soul, that wasn’t my title in a way.

The title came from Plato, I think, in the, like, way before the time of Christ. You know, it’s a very ancient way of talking about things. And care was an important word, and I thought that was a very important word to have in the title, as important as soul. So what you do with, with that, with the soul. And what I do as a psychotherapist, psycho means soul, that’s from that word psyche means soul.

So what I do is I, I don’t try to cure my clients, the people who come to me, I try to care for them. And so if they tell me, for example, that they are depressed, one of the first things I will do is ask them to just tell me some stories about, you know, what happens when you’re feeling that way. I listen for the narratives.

I listened to a person. That’s how we, even in a marriage, how we could care for each other. We could listen more to each other and give the other person an opportunity to talk about what’s going on, to realize the absolute importance of narrative, of stories. in human life. And in order to have stories, you need a teller, but you also need a listener.

Otherwise, the story is not going to be there. So that’s an important part of the relationships we have, whether it’s, for me, a professional relationship, or if it’s a marriage or a friendship, or even, you at the workplace. You know, there are all these places we’re at where we could be carers rather than fixers and healers.

Even healers is too strong a word.

Even true in business nowadays, there’s so many so called spiritual businesses out there that are just taking sale after sale and there is no care behind the business itself. There’s no soul behind the business itself.

The Commercialization of Spirituality

One of the things that’s also really struck me lately Just within society is how commercialized spirituality is becoming and that people are almost looking at spirituality like they would a medication.

They just want a quick fix that, okay, well I can just learn this and then everything’s going to be perfect. But my spiritual practice has ebbed and flowed over the years, trying new things. And I find that’s one way that I nourish my own soul is. Find what’s working for me at the time. What’s your spiritual practice now?

And how has it ebbed and flowed over time?

Personal Spiritual Practices and Insights

My spiritual life has changed radically from time to time in my life I started out as I said Leaving home and living in a monastery. Essentially. I was living a monastic life. So it was a very intense and kind of all Pervasive in my life. When I was in there, I was reading a lot.

You know, I, I was in a quite open-minded community and I was reading Thomas Merton, who was a Catholic theologian, or and monk at the time, in, in my early years, very influential and very intelligent, and that opened me up to investigating the world, thinking about what was going on. I was not interested in being too pious.

I wanted an intelligent approach to the spiritual life, and as I went, I became very interested, for example, in other people like Teilhard de Chardin, who was a Catholic priest who had ideas about how the world is evolving spiritually. He had a theory of evolution, and that was very interesting to me. And then what he did and what Merton did was say that our spiritual life is in the world.

It’s a worldly thing. You don’t make a big distinction between secular and sacred or spiritual and ordinary. That has increased throughout my life. So at this point, I don’t have a very visible practice. I don’t meditate the way I used to. Now I meditate playing the piano. I play the piano every day, and I play, I’m interested in classical music, so I play, I play certain composers that I, I think, I think are going to give me something special, and I play those and learn those pieces and play them, and they are a meditation for me.

I’m lost in the keyboard. I like the kind of spirituality today. For myself, that is connected to the world. I’m doing it in the world, not apart from the world that I live in. So I may, if I want to go for a walk, I live on a new England pond and I might go out in my boat or, or go out in the water or something in order to be in the world in nature in that case.

So, my spirituality today is not separate from life, and that’s very important to me.

When it comes to people taking care of their souls, nourishing their souls, who haven’t thought about it in this way before, where do you encourage people to start?

You have to start where you are. What you can do is look more carefully at what’s going on in your life, like for example your work.

What are you doing with your work? Are you choosing your work only because of the amount of money you can make? I mean, that’s an important consideration. Even spiritually, it’s important. Look more deeply at it. You know, like I ask people to think about their families. What did your father and mother do?

And how did that influence you? What about your grandparents and your other relatives and your whole tradition? You know, who are you in relationship to all the people that came before you? What people have influenced you in your own life and where, where have you been directed to go? And then the other thing, very important these days in my work is, what is your inner guidance?

Like what is, you know, what, what, what is it inside you that has moved you to be who you are? As you went through your life, and can you pay more attention to those inner impulses that will, and sort them out so you know what is going to work for you, what isn’t. That’s a big part of living today as well.

That’s such a great point to touch on and highlight is that when you start out in the world, your early, you know, 20s, the world is your oyster and there’s just So many different directions to go. And I think that kids these days have so much pressure on them to figure it out. There’s a very different energy in life.

When you look at your life from the perspective of what I should be doing or what my parents want me to be doing, or what’s going to make them proud versus what. Actually calls to me, like what actually aligns with my heart, what makes me feel inspired. And when you look at things from that perspective, you can kind of start to pick out, okay, well, I don’t love fishing, but I really love going for hikes or I really love reading books and spending time on a Friday night and borders, just the little nuggets of alignment that you have within yourself.

You’ve really taught me throughout my life to follow those. And. I think I’ve always had trepidation or this bit of fear, like, okay, but where am I following it to the next puzzle piece of alignment? It always comes And I finally feel at 42 Like I don’t have As much, maybe a little bit, of that fear or scaredness of what’s to come in my life because I’ve learned to trust that alignment and follow the breadcrumbs.

And I know, no matter what comes, I’m gonna figure it out. Life is gonna be okay. And I’m still gonna be me. And I think you’ve really taught me how to like being myself, so I just want to thank you for that too.

It’s so important to love, and it doesn’t have to be a narcissistic thing, loving yourself. It can be looking at your life that you’ve been given, and the person that you are, and the benefits you’ve had to be the person you are, and you can love all that.

It’s not loving yourself as though you desperately need some kind of love. It’s appreciating. What life has given you and you, who you have become, rather than, you know, this, this idea of putting yourself down when people do that, that’s more of a narcissistic kind of move because it’s too focused on self.

When you really love yourself, I think what you do is you love life and you love life the way it has taken shape around you and what, what you’ve been given in your life and you can be thankful too. But that’s. Part of the love.

One of the things that I’ve been exploring over the last couple of years is the way that we hear from our soul guide universe source that intuition.

So often people think it just comes in because you see a vision or you, you hear something, but there’s really so many different. Formats of. receiving that energy or alignment and that vibration. What are all the different ways that comes in for you intuition?

I think you have to have an interior life and inner life to some extent.

In other words, you pay attention to your emotions and to the impulses that come to you. And as I said before, you have to sort them out. Because some of them, they’re not all guidance, you know, and it’s hard to determine which is which. So you have to sort it and evaluate what’s going on, but you pay attention to what impulses, what desire.

One of the questions that I was taught among my friends when I was studying this work was, they would say, you ask, what does the soul want? Now, what do I want? What does the soul want? That’s a good hint. It’s about desire. It’s what in classical writing they call eros, desire. And if that can be the principle in your life, you do what you love, essentially.

You do what love takes you to do, invites you to do. I find that I have taken, when I have followed those impulses, they have not been easy. They’ve been frightening very often. And I don’t know where it’s headed. I’ve never known where I’m going. But I, I think that’s the way to live. And that’s what I have done.

I don’t know. It’s like a foolishness. You know, it’s like, you’re crazy to do it. It turns out, and for me I know it turned out, things turned out very well, as a result of following those inner and outer moments of guidance.

The Magic of Enchantment and Spiritual Study

You use words, too, that are different in the re enchantment of everyday life.

Enchantment is just this magic word. You use the word magic a lot, too. And I think that, There’s been too many, maybe religious connotations on it. Like if it’s magical, it’s bad, or it’s of this witchy thing. And it’s not like this life can be so enchanted to your point before off, when you follow that voice within life can turn out so much better than you possibly expected.

How can we demystify those words in order to just embrace them more into our lives?

I, you know, one of the things that I always advocate is, especially in the spiritual realm, is study. Monks study. I always say, what do monks do? Then I know what to do in my life. Monks or nuns, you know, I mean, they study.

That’s one of the things, when you think of a monk, you think of a library. No, and a scriptorium, I guess, in the old days. So that’s one way by becoming more intelligent about your life, especially the realm of spirit. You’ve got to be, you have to use your intelligence because it’s so easy to be swept away by things that are going to get you in trouble.

You can be swept away by a teacher. Or a book, or a leader, or a tradition, and so many people get taken up in these kinds of, usually very emotional, kind of spiritual movements. Some of them are, are fine, and others are not. And some of them are fine generally, but not for you. Questioning and sorting things out, using your intelligence, thinking about being an intelligent person as a spiritual person, that’s what I would advocate.

Your new book is called the eloquence of silence. And you mentioned that in here of just, it’s not about the religion or spirituality or categorizing or the teacher. It’s just about your own life journey. And you have these beautiful stories in here and histories that you have, have combined in here. Do you want to tell us a one of your favorite stories that’s in this book?

I gather together in this book called The Eloquence of Silence. It’s really about silence as being empty, you know, no sound. It’s emptiness. So emptiness is the main theme and that’s a very traditional concept in almost all the great spiritual traditions. Emptiness is there. It means not being attached, usually, or not taking things too literally.

One of the stories that I like was, is the first one, I think, in the book, if I’m not mistaken, where this character in some of the stories comes from the Sufis, who are a religious order that started in Islam. They teach their spirituality largely by, uh, stories. They have a main character, his name is Nasruddin.

Nasruddin is a, sort of a teacher, and he lives in a village in most of the stories. So he’s in this village, and one of the villagers comes to him and says, I’m going to move away. My job has taken me to another town, and I have to leave, and I hate leaving. And you have been so important to me, he says to Nasruddin.

He said, I had this idea that I’ve seen this beautiful ring that you wear. And I thought if you let me have that ring, I’d put it on my finger, and every time I looked at it, I would think of you. And Nasruddin thought about that for a few minutes, and anyway, he’s not, he’s not usually willing to give things away.

So he says, I have a better idea. He said, why don’t I keep my ring? And now when you go away, every time you look at your finger, And see that there’s nothing on it, you’ll think of me. I think what Nasruddin, the teacher, is giving this man something very important. Instead of adding something, adding one more thing to life.

I mean, it is, it’s like a symbol. It’s not really to be taken too literally, even in that story. So it’s like a symbol of anything. People want to, you know, a new book, a new, Teacher, a new place to live, some new object to have in your, in your house. We want something, we want to add something. What, uh, Najudin is doing is taking away.

And he’s saying that’s going to be more important, really. You are going to remember what we have, what you have learned here by not being attached anymore. Letting go of the source and of the teacher, and that will help you on your path more than anything. It’s a pretty good lesson. It

is. It’s very, very powerful.

You can’t really carry it all with you.

Balancing Intention and Surrender

There are a lot of spiritual teachers out there who talk a lot about acceptance and surrender and kind of that emptying process. And yet, I feel as though They’re talking about it in a way that is confusing to people who are listening because there is still will intention and effort in our lives.

Like I can’t just lay in bed every day and have an intention come to fruition. There is effort on my behalf to wake up, to get ready, to care for. What I’m working on the work itself and to move the work forward. But you can have that good intention and that effort and that will to care for the work while also simultaneously being surrendered and accepting.

How would you explain that to people? Because I think it’s a disconnect that’s out there right now.

One of the things that, uh, one of the teachings in regard to emptiness is traditional, is that emptiness has to be empty. You know, you can’t, you can’t use emptiness for anything. You know, if you’re manipulating the world by being empty, you’re not doing it.

You have to get, it’s very subtle. One example, but at the same time it’s simple. So one example for me is, here I am talking with you right now. As far as I, you know, my experience is that I am fully focused on talking to you. I have no thoughts about my career or anything I need to, to receive from talking to you or anything like that.

I, and I have no message really. I don’t try to convince people of my way. I have not created anything. I do teach a course once a week and that’s turning into a bit of a community, but it’s a very natural development. I have not created anything. My work has largely been very, quite empty in this very subtle sense, I think.

And it’s not so much, not always what you intend, I, what I intend. So it turns out to be empty partly because that’s just the way it’s turned out. I haven’t tried to do anything with it. So I think that’s, that’s a different way of being in the world and it’s, you can’t push that, you can’t package it. You have to be very subtle in everything you do.

I mean everything. All day long, every day. Everything you do that you are not out there pushing your ego or trying to manipulate the world in any way, but you can simply be with what’s happening. And trust that if you are, if you do that, the world will, will respond to you and connect with you. And you’ll probably get more of what you want than if you try to.

I think you said that on Oprah. Or there was some big news outlet, I heard you say, when you were speaking one time, that like they asked you to summarize your message in like five minutes.

Yes, that was the first time I was on Oprah, which was quite a while ago.

That was like, I don’t know, you know, early nineties. I didn’t know anything. And Oprah was very nice, but she was younger also, you know, today she’s such a. A present warm person, but at the time, I think she was quite, you know, trying to really make her mark. And she asked me at the end of our conversation.

She said, well, what is your message for people today? I probably would have given her an answer. But at the time, I was kind of full of myself more. And I said, uh. You know, I don’t have a message. It was true, but I really shouldn’t have said that. I should have just let it go, but I did tell her, I said, I really have no message.

And it was true that I felt the same way I just described a few minutes ago, that I don’t have a message. I have nothing that I want people to do or to take from me or use my language or my ideas. I’m just out there to put them out there and see what happens.

The Journey of Writing and Sharing Wisdom

And yet, your work has just been so soft and subtle, and yet, millions of people have found your books, and it has brought comfort and support and reassurance, a message, and has guided the way for so many people’s lives.

I just can’t thank you enough. Tell you how grateful I am. And I know that your work has touched my mom’s life and other people in my family. But I know that they go back and read your book once every couple of years, because it just, you get something new out of each one of your books. Every time you read them.

I wonder why I wrote so many, you know, that’s like it’s over 30 now. And I think to myself. You know, I never intended to do, I never thought I’d do such a thing. And I wonder about it, why I should write so many books, what me, I should have written just like three, you know, really good ones. But that’s just the way it is.

I think it’s one continuous book that I just keep putting out the different sections of it.

Every single book that you write is the same, where the book, the words just pour out, or some of them are like that and others aren’t?

Some are like that, but for me, if they pour out, I have to do a lot of work on them, because there’s a lot of garbage in them, too.

So I, I spend my time at that sometimes, but not a whole lot, but I do. I have to tell you that I’m working on a book right now, uh, it’s sort of a dialogue with Henry David Thoreau. And I’m enjoying it very much, but I’ve written now. You know, three or four versions of it, and I still can’t get all the chapters right.

And last night, I mean, this is last night, I woke up at 3 a. m. and I started working on it because I couldn’t sleep. So, I started working on it, and it was going really well. I think I really got the answer to what I was looking for, for a long time. So, I stayed up through the night. I haven’t slept since then.

Even now. But I think that there’s something to that, you know, that it’s not, it’s never fully easy. The writing, writing is the challenge. It can be difficult. Sometimes you just breeze through it and sometimes it’s a real challenge. But I like both ways and I stick to it.

That’s so beautiful. What message, you said before that if you were back on Oprah’s show, you would go back and you would say that you do have a message.

So I’m going to repeat her question. What message do you have for the world right now in your life?

A Message of Courage and Trust in Life

I would say this to her now. The second time I was with her, I, we had such a beautiful Long and, uh, really deep conversation that I feel differently in. So I would, what I would say is that the main part of my, my idea is to cooperate with life, to listen closely to what life wants you to do, and to not have the courage so much, but maybe the foolishness to be able to follow certain things that your friends might think are not intelligent.

Most of the moves I’ve made in my life, my friends thought were terrible ideas. But they were really, they turned out to be good. I would follow that and trust myself, learn how to trust myself more. And love life. It’s so important to love life and be, you’re part of it. So when you go along, you’re, you’re not doing something that is only focused on self, on yourself, but you, you want the world.

This was so important to me when I, my book started to be read around the world. That’s very important to me as a writer because I think about all those people in different countries. Reading these books and I think I’ve got to speak to them and I have can’t be parochial anymore. I started out very Limited in my view of the world and I expanded it Simply because my readers were there telling me that they’re reading the books and all these corners of the world This year, for example, I gave a talk at in Moscow and I didn’t go to Moscow I did it online at Moscow and it was so important for me that You That moment of being able to, because of the political problems in the world, to be able to speak about things that really don’t, are not relevant to borders and nations, you know, it’s something human.

And I think it’s very important that we have voices that speak for our humanity today.

Which is interesting because there’s so many people who self doubt that. I think there are a lot of people who feel called in this world to serve in some capacity, but then they self doubt like, who am I to do this work?

And a couple of thoughts here. One is, I get really sad in life. I know you would tell me not to feel this way, but I get really sad in life when I feel like, Oh my God, I’m going to pass away one day and I’m not going to have read all of the great works. Like they’re not possible just to read everything here.

But at the same time, I think one of the reasons that I’ve always had just this really, really deep, uh, heartfelt. Respect for your work is that you’ve done us all such a great service of looking at all the great works that you possibly could and building off of that and consolidating past wisdom and modernizing it for what we’re all going through in today’s society.

I don’t know where we would be.

One of the reasons that I, it takes me a long time to write a book is that I, I am fed by people writing, you know, in the past, 2000 years ago or 500 years ago. I don’t trust the translations. I do my best to translate everything myself, and that takes time, because I don’t know all the languages that well, you know, I’m not a great linguist at all.

I have a few languages, and I consult my Greek dictionary all the time. In my Latin dictionary, I’ve studied those languages, and they’re the big ones, and some others. And what I’m saying about that is that, uh, I think that to really do it carefully, what you’re talking about there, you can’t do it in a quick way.

You can’t cheat. You know, you have to really do it. That requires some time and attention. I really value those writers who understood. There are a lot of writers who understand that.

And

I think it’s important for us to keep that tradition going.

Absolutely. And I’ve started to think of it almost like as an interpreter, right?

Like you’re kind of an interpreter for the old world and the old spiritual writings and interpreting it into modern day society.

That’s a, that’s a very well, a very good way to, to look at it. I think we are interpreting, translating in the sense, not just the language, but trying to present these ideas in ways that are correct.

They’re really the ideas of the past, but they’re understandable. today. And that’s not too hard. You can do that. And if I can say that, I wanted to say about you that you must have, when you were talking about having the courage to go out and do something, go out in the world, make a mark in the world, you must have had that experience just in creating your, the work you’re doing now, which is so important.

And you mentioned that you had that idea when you were quite young. And I think that’s another good sign. I think most of us, what we do that’s effective in our adult lives. Uh, you can see the traces of it when we’re quite young.

Like you, the first thing, I went to Catholic school and when the nuns asked in third grade, I have this vivid memory of saying that I wanted to be a priest.

And they said, well, you can’t be a priest. You’re a woman. And so I said, okay, well, then I’ll be a nun. And they said, well, you can’t be a nun, uh, if you want to have children. And I think I knew that very clearly. Early on that I wanted to have a family. I go, okay, well then I must be wrong because I just knew I wanted to work for God in some way.

Yeah.

Continuing the Spiritual Journey

Anyone could be a priest.

Thomas, thank you so much for being here. Please tell everybody where they can find you. Um, your new book, the eloquence of silence, surprising wisdom and tales of emptiness.

That’s a small book, easy to read, a lot of stories, and I’d say several of them are pretty funny. You can find me@thomasmooresoul.com, Thomas Moore.

That’s with two Os Moore, Thomas Moore Soul. The only thing I’m doing these days much of is I am teaching weekly. I teach a course on all these things, and I’m finding that so wonderful, so rewarding.

Thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for your service to the world over these years.

Well, thank you, Julie. I wish you the best.