Tami Simon: You’re Listening to Insights at the Edge. Today My Guest Is Mark Nepo Is a Poet and Philosopher Who Has Taught in the Fields of Poetry and Spirituality for Over 35 years. He Is a New York Times #1 Bestselling

the lineage and the literature.

Well, you know, life came along and gave me cancer and other things, and turned me upside down and suddenly I started to realize that that fish—you know, tying all the way back to that fish needing to swim through experience to stay alive, suddenly I realized “Oh, I don’t really need to create great poems, I need to discover true poems in order to stay alive.” So now everything shifted. Now in my 60’s, now it’s shifted even yet again. You know what? I wanna be the poem, [laughs] more than write the poem.

Of course, this devotion to this process is the only way that we can get close to that. So every act of love and every act of courage and every act of quiet lifting between human beings and every moment that touches down between a conversation like you and I are having—that’s the poem. And any attempt to share it, or preserve it, or record it, is betrayal of the artifact.

There’s a great story you may have heard of Buddha talking to his students and saying, “My teachings are only fingers pointing to the moon. Don’t get hung up on my fingers, look at the moon.” The real value of any work of art is the invisible, mysterious essence of life it points to—like that moon, not itself.

TS: I want to be the poem. I like that, Mark.

MN: [Laughs]

TS: You come up with a lot of good things.

MN: [Laughs more deeply]

TS: You know, there’s one thing I wrote down from listening to the audio series, I was listening to Staying Awake last night, literally staying awake listening to it. And you talked about sincerity, and you quoted a Chinese saying: “given sincerity, there will be enlightenment.” I wanted to make sure that you and I had a chance for you to talk about sincerity and what this means to you.

MN: Yes, it’s from the Doctrine of the Mean, which is one of the ancient Chinese texts. “Given sincerity, there will be enlightenment.” For me, I hold enlightenment not as a noun but as a verb. That is, the light within is released. The light within is manifest. The light within is made so that it comes alive between us. So sincerity, being authentic, holding nothing back, staying awake, all of these things are part of sincerity, which allows us to manifest the light within us. Again, being human, am I authentic all the time, every part of the day? No. I get tired. I get numb. I get cranky. I forget. I break things. I inadvertently hurt the people I love. Being authentic means I own it and say I’m sorry. Then I’m responsible and responsive to what my actions have created.

So sincerity—and also, I just found that the word “authentic,” goes back to the Greek meaning authentes, which means “the mark of our hands.” That makes so much sense. I’m always surprised and not surprised at the origins of words because to be authentic, to be sincere, is a hands-on job. It’s not in the head. It’s not conceptual. It all has to do with showing up.

I think, from the program, I think it’s worth talking about for a minute where the word “sincere” comes from, because it’s also very, very instructive. In the West, the word “sincere” goes back to the Renaissance, during that amazing time when there were so many geniuses, artistic geniuses everywhere. So in this glut of these amazing sculptures and painters in Italy, especially, in the 14- and 1500’s, there were an amazing amount of stone sellers. They were like hardware stores today. They were everywhere, And there were, like any vocation today, any retailers—there were honest, authentic sellers and there were fraudulent sellers. One way that fraudulent sellers would try to pass off damaged marble is they would get a piece of marble that had a crack in it and they would put wax in it and polish the wax and sell it as a pure piece of marble. Well the word sine cera in Latin means, “without wax.” So very quickly, an honest, authentic stone seller was one who didn’t hide the cracks or flaws in the stone.

And it wasn’t long after that the metaphor and the analogy came to be that an honest person, a sincere person didn’t, doesn’t, hide the flaws in their humanity, doesn’t hide the cracks in their character or their heart. Not only for the integrity of relationships but in many traditions, but we’ll just pick in the Tibetan mythology, it is said that a spiritual warrior—that is, not a military warrior—a spiritual warrior who is one who is committed to a life of transformation, a spiritual warrior always has a crack in their heart because that’s how the mysteries get in. So being sincere, not hiding the cracks in our humanity or the flaws in our character or the wounds that we carry is essential both for the integrity of relationships [and] because that is how everything larger than us can enter us and heal us and give us resilience.

So sincerity is definitely, I think being sincere is being more important—let’s put it this way; I was going to say more important that being intelligent. I think it’s a different kind of intelligence. I think sincerity is an emotional form of intelligence.

TS: Let’s say someone wants to become more sincere.

MN: Yes, I think this goes back to some of the things we talked about earlier. I think personally everybody has to find what that looks like in your life, but I would say that archetypally, universally, we are always challenged by things that dishearten us, that understandably move us away from the heat of being alive.

So if we want to extract what is essential from life, through the gill of our heart, if we want to become more sincere, we need to recognize the ways in which we are disheartened and develop personal practices for how to move to what heartens us. To move from what puts us asleep—not to eliminate what puts us asleep, not to eliminate what numbs us, not to eliminate what distracts us—but how to move from what’s distracting to what’s essential, from what is sleep-giving to what is wakeful, from what is numb to what is alive.

This involves all the things that we’ve been talking about—how to lean into life when experience and pain and suffering and loss push us away. How do we do that? I think it takes—not only are we charged to do this by ourselves, but we need friends. We need honest friends. We don’t do this enough in our culture. It’s somehow taboo, but you know, just like what you asked me Tami, it’s like if I feel I’m at point in my life where I’m struggling to be authentic and sincere, well, I need to have the courage to go to trusted loved ones to say, “You know what, I’m struggling here. How do I do this? Can you help me do this? You know me—what am I not doing that I used to do? Or what am I doing that you see is not being consistent with what you love about me?” We don’t really process our heart in an honest way in our culture, when it’s of a tremendous, tremendous resource to do that.

TS: You know, Mark, I just wanted to end with talking a little bit about this idea of pilgrimage and our life as a pilgrimage. You mentioned at one point this journey of the pilgrim, and several people have sent me a quote from you about the difference between being a pilgrim and being a nomad. Maybe you remember this quote that I’m talking about.

MN: Yes. I think this is in The Book of Awakening. “To journey without being changed, is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.” Of course you know, we hear that and discover that, and I and everyone who reads that or hears that, we want to be the last one. We don’t want to be chameleon or the nomad, but the truth is, we’re all three, and we move among these things. This is part of our incarnation on earth.

We can spend a day as a nomad or a decade. We can spend a year as a chameleon or an hour, but the important thing as we’ve been talking through all of this is how do we return to what is authentic, how do we become more sincere? How do we extract what is essential? How do we return to being awake and being compassionate so that we can move through the lessons of being a nomad and a chameleon so that the underlying journey that holds us is one of being a pilgrim?

TS: I want to end on just a one final note here, you have this teaching and it’s part of your teaching related to staying awake to “be present in all ways and in all directions.” Can you give us a feeling for that? Be present in all ways and in all directions.

MN: Yes, and I think again like everything else, if we are blessed, we can have moments of this. I don’t think we can arrive at a state of being like that. This is the sense that we spend so much time sorting and counting—you know, sorting good feelings from difficult feelings, sorting what’s right from wrong, what’s good from bad, what’s up from down. But the essence, the aliveness, the mystery of life doesn’t present itself that way. Just like we talked about water. It’s H2O. I can’t say, I’d only like the hydrogen, please. It stops being water and it stops being quenching. So life comes as a whole and a oneness. And the only way to receive it that way is by being open enough and present enough to not delineate and parse and separate.

You know, the older I get, when I feel things deeply, it’s usually more than one feeling at the same time. I can be happy and sad at the same time. I can be confused and clear. I can be tired and awake. I think that our charge is how to keep the heart open enough to get the lessons and the depth that those things hold at the same time and not to reflex because my mind is uncomfortable as a discomfort. “Well, wait a minute, how can I be tired and awake at the same time? No, no, I’ve got to put tired over here, and awake over there, and I’ll try to move from being tired to awake.” And we totally stop growing in our experience of oneness. It’s kind of a very wonderful kind of ongoing example, but the saints and sages of any tradition, wherever you think they might be, they have for the moment returned to the state of oneness where love isn’t reserved for a person or an object. Love emanates like the sun for everything. I think that when we’re authentic enough and sincere enough, the reward for that is that we can no longer contain our love. It spills like the sun on everything.

TS: Beautiful. I’ve been talking with Mark Nepo. Mark, thank you so much...

MN: Oh, it’s a joy.

TS: ...for your warm sun in the center of your heart, the poem that you are.