Father Francis Tiso Part 2: Light, Death, and Mystical Ecstasy

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello and welcome to Wonderstruck. I am your host, Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe, and how they transform us. On this episode, Father Francis Tiso returns for the second installment of our two-part conversation.

As you may remember, Father Tiso is a Catholic priest, a renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, and the author of Rainbow Body And Resurrection: Spiritual Attainment, The Dissolution Of The Material Body, And The Case of Khenpo A Chö. Last time, we talked about Father Tiso’s extraordinary journey to Tibet, how to achieve a rainbow body, and what happens when Catholic priests and Buddhist monks get together to discuss foundational matters of their respective faiths.

This time, in our final interview following last summer’s Embodiment Symposium in Italy, Father Tiso reveals more about his personal experiences with wonder, from visions of Jesus Christ, to encountering holy visitors in his dreams, to soothing cancer patients with visualization and guided meditation. Father Tiso shares how his own spiritual practices and his pursuit of wisdom prepare him to embody different levels of consciousness.

So, Father Tiso, Francis Tiso, we spoke a bit last time about your book, the Rainbow Body And Resurrection, which is a fascinating account of Khenpo A Chö and the dissolution of the body and the rainbow light in the sky. So, rainbow body, resurrection, death. Lots of people, including myself, have trepidation and fear of death. My own mom had, actually, a near-death experience back in the ’70s.

So, let’s just step right into it, if you don’t mind, and talk about death. You’ve been close to so many things as a priest, and as a contemplative, and as a researcher and a writer. You’ve spoken to people who witnessed the rainbow body of Khenpo A Chö, you’ve sat with people who are near the end of their lives, you’ve had visions of Jesus and other visions as well. Your own artwork is inspired. You mentioned you lost two friends in July.

Father Tiso:

That’s right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, how has all of this – and it’s a lot, I know it’s a lot – how has it informed you about life and death, and to use your own words, postmortem possibility?

Father Tiso:

Yeah, I think it’s very important to remember that although we’re looking at a very special kind of death of a very outstanding person in the case of Khenpo A Chö, we’re also looking at a community around him, and the responses of people to him as a person – as an extraordinary person – and, of course, also a response to his death, which was, in a way, putting the seal of authenticity on everything that he stood for.

So, that in itself is already… to move beyond just admiring unusual phenomena, right? We got into this even at the conference, at Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, and these days seeing Donagh Coleman’s film on the tukdam phenomenon.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I don’t know what that is.

Father Tiso:

This is where you have Tibetan monks or lamas, who at the time of death, breathe their last, do not manifest the rainbow body, but instead remain in a meditation posture with a kind of warmth around the heart area for several days, even two or three weeks, without any sign of decomposition. And so, there were some efforts on the part of Richard Davidson and his laboratory to study this phenomenon, in cooperation with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

So Donagh, who has been in touch with me over the years, did a rather splendid film on this subject. And brought in the communities and the families and interviewed close relatives of the people who had passed away, and what it meant to them, you know? And how important the witness of these distinguished lamas was, and then also the love that binds together the community around such a person.

And, of course, then they also, in one case, showed the child who has been recognized as the incarnate lama who will carry on the spiritual energy of his predecessor, the so-called reincarnation or tulku. So, there you have this little three year old playing around and being treated with immense love by people who knew the person whom they believe to be his previous incarnation, right? That was pretty intense. And as well as there was a good deal of footage on the various deceased lamas.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, this was in the movie, all of this?

Father Tiso:

Yeah, right in the movie.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Do you know what it is exactly called?

Father Tiso:

I think it’s just called Tukdam. So, that is something really worth looking for. It is going to be out there in different channels. I also tried in my book to look at the community, and to look at the feelings of the community, the beliefs of the community. The interviews provide us a glimpse, but then also the participation, and the life of the community.

But then there are also things, like, even my own experience of that moment of anger, and on the 6th of August, two or three weeks after meeting with the dharma brother of Khenpo A Chö. So, we meet with this very powerful kind of feisty lama, right? Really tough. Almost crazy wisdom kind of lama, right? You know, who’s challenging us. “Well, you’re just here with your Lassa accent,” you don’t really understand what’s going on.

And my team members are there, and Douglas Duckworth is translating, and a couple of relatives of Khenpo A Chö are there. And they’re all a little bit embarrassed by all this going on, you know? Meanwhile, of course, there are people outside the window of the cabin waiting for a blessing. So, the Lama, every once in a while, reaches out the window with a little flag that he had – and he blesses the people while going on with us, instructing us in the correct attitude, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Interesting.

Father Tiso:

And then at a certain point, he said to me, “All right.” First, he gave an example of himself approaching a great lama, and how you’re supposed to do it if you’re really polite. And you go before the lama, and you look at the lama, and you try to see if there are any spiritual signs on the body or the face of that lama. So, he says, “I went to the big monastery in Kandze, and I saw a very good Lama, and I saw the bodhisattva of compassion on his forehead. And I prostrated to him and showed my respects to receive his blessing. Now you, what do you see when you look at me?”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow, oh my goodness.

Father Tiso:

“What do you see when you look at me?” The other team members are a little shaken up by this.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I bet.

Father Tiso:

So I did look at him. And what I saw was, actually – I didn’t make this up, you know? I mean, I’m really looking at him sincerely, and I’m seeing in his bone structure, in his very massive, powerful presence, the same kind of strong bone structure and fleshy appearance of the bishop who ordained me, was a very, very, dear, dear, dear master, a real master.

And I said, “You look like the bishop who ordained me. He is from the Abruzzo, so you are from eastern Tibet, but you could be brothers. And he really liked that, you know? He really liked that, because that was the respect for the teacher, the guru, right? And they translated for me explaining who this person was, and why this person was important.

And even, I will mention, I haven’t mentioned this to other people, but at one point – I don’t remember if it was during the research period, it must have been during the research period about the Rainbow Body – I had a dream in which that bishop, Bishop Di Filippo, actually appeared to me in the dream dressed in a very unusual black robe. He had sleeves. And normally a Catholic priest or bishop will have this black robe that’s worn on certain occasions.

And there’s a wide hem on the sleeve, but it’s usually either plain, or there are a couple of buttons, or something like that. Or if they’re a bishop or a monsignor, they might be red. But this was black. But it wasn’t just ordinary black. It was a black lace on black, okay? Really intricate black lace on black. Never seen this in any living priest. I’ve never seen this, all right?

So I did ask Bishop Di Filippo, “You know, you paid me a visit, didn’t you?” And he said, “Oh really?” And I said, “And you were wearing this cassock. Do you have one of those cassocks?” “Well, you know, I do.” He actually had a cassock like that with this black weave, this beautiful black, intricate lace on the hem of the sleeves.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Fascinating. That’s incredible.

Father Tiso:

So you know, there are these…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Was he aware of having visited you exactly or no?

Father Tiso:

He was very reticent about a lot of things. 

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, really?

Father Tiso:

I wasn’t the only…

Elizabeth Rovere:

So it was almost like he was checking in on you.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, yeah. He was a pretty amazing person. And you know, like the really great masters, they take the role that is assigned to them in life and play it to the fullest with all their heart. But they do not necessarily openly display paranormal powers, but they have them. Somebody like that, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

In the dream, did you see him? Did he say anything to you? Was he talking about anything?

Father Tiso:

I think it was just like an encouragement dream. It was not an admonition dream, which I probably deserved, but it was an encouragement dream: where he was encouraging me to keep going, keep going, doing what I’m doing. Which is exactly what Pope John Paul II did in person in 1992, you know? In June of 1992, I got tickets from the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue for the papal audience.

Now, I had never been in the special seats, all right? So, I didn’t know anything about the protocol. So, John Paul II was a very, very energetic guy, and this went on for hours and hours and hours, because not only did the speech in like 16 different languages, but then he goes all round and greets all of the groups from the parishes, and youth groups, and all of that. And a lot of enthusiasm and so forth. So, we’re seated, myself and a young Tibetan khenpo, who was the guy in charge of the young monks. He and I are seated in seats number one and two.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow, that’s special seats.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, right, the top tickets, right? But this is going on for so long, I said, “By now, you know, by the time he gets to us he’ll just wave and that’ll be the end of that.” But no, this is John Paul II. So, he’s as fresh as a daisy, and he comes in front of the two of us, and he introduces himself, asks me to introduce myself, and then he says, “And who is this?” And I will introduce the khenpo.

And he, with tremendous vigor, and he was still a big guy even after having been shot, “You keep doing this.” He’s pointing right at my heart. “You keep doing this dialogue with these Buddhists.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love it.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, very, very clear. Like I always say, apostolic authority, you know? “You keep doing this dialogue.” And then I shook his hand, and it was really awesome, because he had the yogic heat. It stayed warm for like 20 minutes afterwards.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Your hand stayed warm?

Father Tiso:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Holy mackerel.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, he had the yogic heat. And boy, that stayed with me.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, I bet. That’s incredible. I can feel it as you’re talking about it. It’s just like…

Father Tiso:

Yeah, he was more – well, what met the eye was already pretty impressive, but then there was under the surface.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, and the fact that he’s maintaining that kind of energy also with all of those people. And like you said, he gets to you and he still is just like…

Father Tiso:

Right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And he still heats you up.

Father Tiso:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, literally thousands of people carrying on in various ways. I thought for sure that that was the end of that. But no, no. And was really eager to see this happening. And later, of course, when I did go to Nepal, and I ran into an interesting chap, British fellow who was a Catholic, and he was in charge of the pension programs for the Gurkha regiments, all right? You know, the famous Gurkha, Nepali Gurkha regiments that fought so brilliantly for the British in many, many wars. And so, he said, “Oh, the Pope doesn’t like what you’re doing.” And I said to him, “Au contraire, he just told me you better keep doing this.” I have the apostolic command to do this, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean, that’s so inspiring, right? Then it transmits and it gives you energy to keep doing it.

Father Tiso:

Exactly. And even in the last few days being at the Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa with many people, very, very relieved and happy that there are Catholic priests who are actively interested in Buddhist studies and Buddhist communities, and engaging in in-depth dialogue.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, it’s like yourself, your mentor, Brother David, also very much so, who is also a Zen practitioner, right?

Father Tiso:

Right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And then here we go with the Pope. I mean, it’s not really the story that you hear about the Catholic Church. So, it’s fantastic to hear it. It’s like Catholicism, Buddhism, neuroscience. I mean, this kind of dialogue. We’re asking the same questions, right?

Father Tiso:

Very much so, yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You know, what you spoke about with Pope John Paul and the… feeling your arm heat up; looking at this idea of a monk dying and the heart stays warm, and then kind of, again, the body and the rainbow light. What does this mean to you about who we are, and life and death?

Father Tiso:

Yeah, because now we have the… you see, when I was a child, I was around 10 years old, and none of our grandparents had yet passed away. It was another two years before my father’s father passed away. But I was in some kind of a gym situation, you know? Taking off or putting on my sneakers, and there was Tommy Russo, I remember, with nice thick black hair and a nice crewcut. You know, way back then in 1960 or ’59.

And I was saying, “You know Tommy, we’re all going to have to die some day.” And Tommy turns to me and says, “Oh Frankie, you’re too young to be thinking about that stuff.” You know, with a nice New York accent. You’re too young to be thinking about that stuff. And it wasn’t like I was obsessed about death, but in fact, you might say I was obsessed with life, regeneration, and the flowering of plants and birds and trees and the Ravenna mosaics and all of that.

That was an intimate part of my childhood, because we lived in a kind of battered, semi-urban neighborhood, not far from the border of the Bronx, right? And everything is asphalt and concrete. But there were these vacant lots, and I would go there and collect stones and crystals and fossils and plants and moss and ferns and salamanders, and put them in terraria, and collect these things. And you know, was just absolutely passionate about nature and life, right?

But along with life you do encounter dead salamanders and dead lizards and all of that. That’s part of the experience of the enchantment of nature. Because as a child, for me, there was no difference between nature as enchantment and nature as science. There was none of this split. I never had that, I never felt that. And so, the death of creatures, the death of plants, the death of trees and the death of people all somehow made sense, you know? It was all part of life, right?

So later on when I was at the divinity school, and I’m doing – this was a very odd experience, because nobody ever really explained to us, as I recall, although I may have missed something – that in your senior year you’re supposed to have written a thesis of some kind, all right? So, I’m reading in the instructions, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to write a senior thesis.’ But I was already doing kind of a senior project as the student chaplain at what was then called the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, which I think now is the Farber Children’s, or something like that, Cancer Hospital.

Elizabeth Rovere:

In Boston?

Father Tiso:

In Boston, yeah. So, I was already chaplain there and I was actually working in one of the labs, as well as the laboratory secretary. So, there I’m doing my biochemistry, and doing my chaplaincy simultaneously.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, and so again, enchantment and…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, science and religion. Enchantment and nature and science.

Father Tiso:

Yeah. You’ve got 35 beds, and everybody in there is in the latter stages of cancer, and young and old. So, there I am, 27 years old, working with this reality, and trying to figure out how to absorb the feelings of people – not only the patients, but their families – that are going through a horrendous experience, okay? Chemotherapy, you know, experimental treatments, severe pain, imminent loss.

I’ll never forget the time there was a young guy, who must have been only a few years younger than I was, who had an athletic body. Perfect athletic body. And there he was, going to die. I’m looking at this, you know? It was really, really… and could get to you, you know? And so, at the same time, Harvey Cox, the great theologian, Baptist theologian, he was my advisor, and he was guiding us to do two hours of sitting meditation every day. So, we made a commitment, a bunch of the students, we made a commitment to do that on top of everything else, and somehow we managed to do it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, it’s a lot of time as a student.

Father Tiso:

Oh, yeah, two hours is a long sit. An hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. But I did it, and as I’m working through the feelings of working with these people who are dying – and many levels of interaction, because it’s not only talking, there are the odors of a hospital, the odors of sickness, the quality of a human being that’s going through pain, you know? So, taking that into the breath meditation, the shamatha meditation, and of course being grounded by Brother David’s instructions on Zen, which I had received seven years previous to that.

And my practice of the rosary and Christian contemplation, my reading of The Cloud Of Unknowing, and St Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey To God, which… those are two of my favorite mystical works. And being able to take this in, and then go back into the hospital day after day, and try to be close to these people who are suffering. And one of the moments that I think was very helpful for me, in terms of later work on things like Rainbow Body, was there was an older man who came in with a very recent diagnosis of severe advanced liver cancer.

So he had six months to live. He was in a state of complete panic. And his family was in terrible distress. He hadn’t slept or eaten for three days. They bring him into the hospital for his treatments and he was really in a terrible, terrible state psychologically. So, they get him in the bed, and the nurses try to inject him with tranquilizers, and nothing is doing anything.

So, they call me in, and so I sat there with him, and I devised a guided meditation on the spot. And it was based on the five senses. And I had him imagine different scenes, near a lake, under the pine trees, where there was light and color, odors, tastes, and so on, touch, and guide him through the five senses in this imaginary beautiful place. And then at the end, I got him to respond with his finger to tell me, when you see that light, when you see the water scintillating, when you smell the pine needles, just raise your finger.

And he started to calm down. And then at the end, we did Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. And by then he was ready to sleep. And the nurses are standing in the doorway and they can’t believe their eyes, you know? First of all, because they’d never seen anybody quite in a panic as bad as his, and then they never saw anybody being talked down that way, you know? And the head nurse, who was Native American, we had some great conversations after that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I bet.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, and how to train the nursing staff, how to train the doctors, how to engage with patients and families in creative ways. And she was so thrilled that finally somebody had come around and recognized that there was a human dimension to be addressed in this whole treatment area. But the best part of it is that toward the end of the life of that man – came back for further treatments, right? I had made a tape of the meditation, which he took with him and played every day. And by the time he was ready to go, that man was glowing.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Really?

Father Tiso:

Yeah, that man was glowing. It was a very different person in front of me after three, four months of daily meditation of this kind. And his wife, my God, for years afterwards sent me cards and thanked me.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That is so beautiful and profound.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, this is reality. This is reality.

Elizabeth Rovere:

This is reality.

Father Tiso:

You know? It’s not just a theory in a book. I wrote this up in my senior thesis and all of that, and I have used that meditation on a number of occasions since then with people who are dying. And it does seem to help people connect with the inner structure, the subtle body structure, right? That we were talking about a few weeks ago. Their own subtle body, and their own capacity to overcome even death. To be strong in the face of death, and not just stoically strong, but deeply spiritually strong. And to reach the point of luminosity and gratitude, right? In the true way that Brother David would have said himself. Great stuff.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Luminosity and gratitude. And when you’re talking about it, I’m associating to things, like being connected to nature and the process of going back to nature. It’s almost like the ground connecting to the spirit.

Father Tiso:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Or evoking the spirit inside of us. And I have to ask you about this, because in your Rainbow Body book, you talk about Romans 8. Is it something like that, with spirit touching spirit?

Father Tiso:

Yes, exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Can you explain that a little bit more?

Father Tiso:

Yeah, that’s what I call “the Bible we should memorize.” There’s like six or seven chapters in the New Testament that – and of course a couple of psalms, but my basic mystics Bible includes the eighth chapter of Romans. And I even wrote a term paper on the first 10 verses of that for Harvard, with the great late Krister Stendahl, who was our teacher in the letter to the Romans, and in the great European tradition of commentaries on that letter.

But what I found in that letter, of course, was its mystical dimension. And clearly, the Spirit of God is touching our spirit, all right? And thus, we know that we are the children of God. So, it’s so different from a view that says, human beings are fallen, they’re in this collapsed state, and from them has been washed-out any capacity to respond to divine grace, to the point that you have to be pumped up by divine grace in order to say yes to divine grace.

Which is, in some ways, an overly dramatic depiction of the situation. But it’s also logically incoherent, because if you have to be pumped up to say yes, then all is lost anyway. Because there’s no dimension of response, there’s no capacity to respond. So, it’s like you’re a dead thing. And this being…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right, you’re starting out a dead thing.

Father Tiso:

You’re starting out a dead thing. And this, I think, is what infects a lot of Christian preaching. And even though we Catholics are very proud to say, you know, that we don’t believe in total depravity and all of this, and nevertheless there is a tone in the preaching of some of us that makes one feel as if the best you can do is to beg for mercy and spend your entire life begging for mercy because you really are a total mess.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Feeling like crap about yourself.

Father Tiso:

Right. So, the self-esteem issue becomes a major issue. And then forgiveness, you know? All right, well if you’re forgiven, that means you can be open now to receiving the gift. But a lot of people seem not to believe they’re really forgiven, you see? And it’s quite a struggle sometimes. And then there’s anger and pain and many other symptoms that emerge when someone is unable even to feel forgiven.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely.

Father Tiso:

Yeah. So, the Romans 8, you sit down and read that, and you see, ‘Oh, so there is something in the human person, in the body-mind complex, that can say yes to the gift of the spirit. And there’s a touching point, all right? There’s this point of contact, which Thomas Merton used to call the virginal point, the point of this virgin point, as if the whole universe is about to be reborn from that one point. That singularity.

So when the spirit touches your spirit and you know you’re a child of God, everything is reborn. And you can do this many times a day. You can really make it into a spiritual practice. You can say, ‘Oh, for a moment there I forgot, but really I am a child of God, thank you,’ you know? What Holger Yeshe, one of the monks, said to me this morning, “You know, Father Francis, of all the Buddhists that spoke in the past few days, none of us articulated altruistic love, bodhicitta, as you did on several occasions.” And he said, “Thank you, it is so needed.”

This responding to goodness with a willingness to love, a willingness to give of yourself, it’s so crucial. But I think I have to say that I learned this of course from my parents and that sort of relationship in the family, but also all these years being with people who were suffering, and learning from them. There are many times…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Learning from them in the way that they respond, like their altruism in the face of their own suffering and connecting to someone else.

Father Tiso:

Right, and even being willing to go out of their way to be kind to somebody even though they themselves were suffering considerably.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s powerful.

Father Tiso:

Yeah. So, those are the lessons. And you might say one of the beautiful things about ministry is that if you really go with it, and let people be the focus of your care, they give you all of this insight that you couldn’t have accumulated just on your own. It would have torn you apart, you know? Can you imagine thousands and thousands of people that I’ve known over the years, if I had to go through what all of them went through cumulatively, I wouldn’t be here anymore.

Maybe I would be a rainbow body, right? But through their sequential teaching, then I could take all that in, and of course through meditation and prayer you take it in and lift it up. And then I can share it with others, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you talk about it as… it’s Catholic or Christian, and it’s Buddhist in this way, too. You know, Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you, and the Buddhists talk about the divine, that, like, sort of good – is it bodhicitta, that inherent goodness?

Father Tiso:

Well, bodhicitta is the awakening of the desire to attain enlightenment, but it’s also in the bodhisattva path, the motivation to become a buddha for the sake of everyone. And that’s a tremendous horizon of historical Buddhism, right? When they begin to realize it’s never going to be enough for me to be free of my junk once and for all, without taking others with me. And in fact, when I discover that, how can I not notice the effect that it has on the people around me, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, I mean, does it go back to this idea that we’re kind of all in it together and we’re all interconnected? Like the more that I’m practicing myself, the better that I’m impacting you because of all of these types of things. Like we’re not separate.

Father Tiso:

That’s right. There’s this, you call down the light on to the face of the earth by trying to be kind and good and available, you know? And serving others. And that happens. And people notice it. All right, let me go back to that example I was telling you about – the dharma brother of Khenpo A Chö. And two or three weeks later I was in a really awkward situation because I wanted so badly… now that I think back on it, it seems trivial, but perhaps it’s better that it seemed trivial.

Because at the time it didn’t seem trivial. I got furiously angry with one of the people who was leading our second tour into eastern Tibet during that summer. And this was the 6th of August, so it was the Feast of the Transfiguration, all right? And so, I said, “Wouldn’t it be great to pause today and pray, and offer mass on the feast of Christ’s body of light,” since after all, it’s the year 2,000, it’s a Holy Year, and also I’m doing this expedition on the rainbow body. So, what could be more appropriate, right?
So, all these assumptions, concepts, preferences, and opinions are building up in my head, and really weighing me down. And I’m about to explode with rage at the leader of the group who should have known better, was being completely insensitive to this, completely indifferent. Now, maybe you can deal with people who are ill and dying through shamatha-vipassana, but you need a little something special to deal with this kind of rage.

At the time I was already conscious of where the blessing was coming from. It was coming from Lama A Khyug, right? That wrathful guy, you know, with the fleshy face and all of that. I knew it was coming from him. And something drove all of that energy of rage to the top of my skull and, it was not only letting go of the anger, it was finding myself in an altered state of consciousness.

I mean, I was really in this very different way of seeing the world. It wasn’t the first time that I had such an experience, but this was the first time that it had happened out of anger. And also, it stayed with me until well toward the end of September – 6th of August all the way to the end of September – I was floating. It was powerful. It was really, really powerful.

And the other amazing thing about this, actually I made a sketch of this, it was as if one little tiny point – the same virginal point that Thomas Merton talks about – was a little tiny dot that had such power that it could explode all of our built-up emotional charge around people, places, things, opinions, titles, who’s important, who’s great, who’s famous, who’s got this, who’s got that. The whole kit and caboodle exploded. And it’s very hard to describe in total detail what that felt like, but as you can imagine it’s almost like your whole world has exploded, but instead of being devastated you feel immense relief. Immense relief.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Do you think then that we are just like consciousness hanging out in this body and that we go back to consciousness? And then I go back, thinking about the guy that you were talking about in the hospital that you wrote your thesis about. Like with that meditation, even though it’s about the senses that’s physical, it’s still a light-based transcendent kind of thing. Was he becoming more comfortable because he was feeling a transcendent experience, something greater than the body?

Father Tiso:

Exactly. Yes, because you see, what I discovered through that experience with him was that the meditation on the senses is going on, yes, in the brain, but there’s more than just the brain involved. And that you have what the great Alexandrian theologian of the third century Origen called, right, the spiritual senses. And so, the spiritual senses are what is being awakened by this kind of meditation.

And in fact, Ignatius of Loyola’s method of the spiritual exercise is pretty much the same idea, that by thoroughly visualizing a particular scene in the Bible, right? Jesus healing the lepers, or multiplying the loaves and the fishes, all of that. You visualize it as vividly as possible with all of your senses. You awaken the spiritual senses so that you are actually there. On a certain mystical plane you are engaged with what is an eternal reality being enacted.
And some people use the term ‘the imaginal’. Not imaginary, but the imaginal. Because you’ve gained access to something that is at least as real as we are. So, this is where it gets interesting, because you begin to see that the level of peace, joy and luminosity that was on the face of that dying man, several months later, communicated the fact that he had broken through, okay? And he knew he was not only his dying body, he was much more, and he was ready to move with it.
And I had the same experience even with one guy, same illness, years later, who really didn’t believe any of this, you know? I mean, he was, quote, a non-believer. But his wife insisted on praying with him, and having me come over, and guide him. And I made the tape for him, too, and everything.

And when he died, I’m almost afraid to say some of the stuff that happened after he died on video. Well, he made a bit of a nuisance of himself afterwards. Because he still had some attachments to the things of this world, and he also had some injustices that he wanted to sort out. But we eventually convinced him to not do too much of that anymore.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Does it mean, do you feel that there’s like that place where a person, a being is hanging out in like a bardo-esque place before they go further, and that you can make a nuisance of yourself, or be of benefit to others of yourself for a period?

Father Tiso:

Yes, you can, you can. And in this particular situation, it’s a good example of why the spiritual guide has to be very careful. Because precisely because he was not really a believer, all right? You can’t get them to the point of purification and inner freedom that you need in order to do this properly. And then the person can cause harm.

This is ghosts, this is some of the negative energy phenomena that are associated in postmortem situations, all right? And so, in that case, we should have emphasized more that whatever the outcome of these meditations, whether he was going to be healed, whether he would die in peace, whatever it was going to be, that he always had to keep a high and pure sense of love, you know? He had to keep that.

Once again, we come back to bodhicitta, you know? That I’m doing this because I care about other human beings, I care about my family, I care about even my enemies. I want them to be well, you know? Because I think that he didn’t quite have the detachment from the family and he didn’t have the forgiveness of his enemies that he should have had.

And he paid me a visit and he said, “I want to thank you. Now I realize that it wasn’t just a bunch of nonsense that you were telling me.” And I got this, like this sphere of light comes into my bedroom late at night, and I’m getting this message. Pretty wild. But he was able to move. He was able to move around, because of what he learned from this five senses meditation.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I have so many associations to what you’re saying. One is, did you ever read The Death Of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy?

Father Tiso:

I know the story, but I don’t know if I actually read it cover to cover.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s a short story. It’s worth reading, because it’s, relatively speaking, short. But he has an illumination experience at the end, Ivan Ilyich, and he’s kind of a disgruntled, angry dude who’s like – his wife is upset that he’s dying because it’s going to upset her tea party, you know? It’s great. So, he’s very angry, and then of course it’s this sense of the peasant, right? Who’s like the person who’s the farmer, and knows about nature and herbs, who’s like washing his feet and talking to him.

And it’s the bodhicitta, the love, the connection, and Ivan Ilyich at the end of his life has an illumination experience with this peasant, Gerasim. And it reminds me of what you’re talking about. And so, I think about that, this kind of transformation. And then I also think about, you know, going back again to the rainbow body, and Khenpo A Chö, and Thomas Aquinas. And this is all from you, I’m not pulling this from…

Father Tiso:

I know, I know. Aquinas describes the qualities of the resurrection body.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes.

Father Tiso:

Subtlety, agility, and so on and so forth, right?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, and moving, and how… but my understanding was that Khenpo A Chö could move through walls while he was alive.

Father Tiso:

Yeah, yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And I know that some of these… I’ve read about it in qigong masters and so forth… can do this. And it’s kind of like, I’m like, ‘What? How am I supposed to understand that? They’re not dead. They’re doing it.’ And then you’re saying in the risen body, Aquinas talks about it. Can you help me understand this? If it’s possible to understand.

Father Tiso:

Well, yeah, in the biographies of Milarepa and Rechungpa, for example, you can find descriptions of their experiences. You know, passing through walls and mountains, and all of this stuff. And flying, you know? This phenomenon, levitation.

Now, in a Buddhist frame of reference, this is moving from the spiritual senses into the subtle connection between consciousness and matter, such that matter is lived as empty. So, it’s empty, meaning it is produced interdependently by causes and conditions, okay? It doesn’t mean it’s not there, it means it’s produced by the concatenation of causes and effects.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What word was that?

Father Tiso:

Concatenation, the chaining together of causes and conditions that bring about visible phenomena. But they are ultimately empty of metaphysical substance. So, a person who has that realization can pass through walls, can pass through rocks, or can shape rocks with their hand, you know? Or put footprints in the rock. Because matter then becomes plastic, becomes fluid, all right?

And now, there’s that famous handprint at the Asura cave at Pharping in Nepal, which is the hand of Padmasambhava. You know, that handprint. And then there’s another story, and it’s from relatively recent times. The Southern Italian saint – who was very close to my mother’s family – his name was St Gerard Majella, okay, who was a tailor, and he was noted for ill health, and being very frail, and all of this.

But when he would go into mystical ecstasies, he could bend iron, and do all kinds of amazing things. And we’re talking about 1700s, so there were eyewitnesses who wrote this down. It wasn’t something like, you know, 2,000 years ago. Eyewitnesses actually saw him haul a boat out of the Bay of Naples in a storm all by himself, all right? Things like that. And I actually saw the iron that he bent. And if you go to eastern Tibet, there are some siddhas who also could magically bend iron or this kind of thing. So, there’s that ability that emerges through contemplative practice in certain gifted individuals.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I kind of circle back to two things. I have to ask you this one question. But I want to ask you these other questions, because now you’re giving me all these other things to ask about. But it’s just like, one is – so, we’ll go this direction first, and then I’m coming back. I’m going to come back to death. So, this history, right? From the birth of humanity, where these kinds of fascinating or uncanny or miraculous, extraordinary phenomenon happen, right?

And for some reason, and maybe it’s just since the Enlightenment, I don’t know, but currently we don’t really look at it. And you know, we don’t really… science doesn’t really study it, or they write it off as, like, mystical or it’s not really true or it’s irrelevant. And I have a beautiful quote from you that says, well, yeah, here, let me just read this. This is a quote from your book on page 333, The Rainbow Body.

“People are not encouraged or aided to connect existentially with their innermost sense of being. The problem is not about language or capacity, it is about denying human beings a faculty that they already have, a faculty that has been nurtured for millennia by some of the most remarkable people who have ever lived. This is the price our world has paid for material progress.” This is in the same section of the book where you talk about conventional versus ultimate truth with Buddhism, like conventional being rationality, and ultimate being contemplative. What is going on with this?

Father Tiso:

Yeah, because it almost looks as if some sooty cloud came over the minds of the opinion leaders of Europe some time in the 18th century. And they took charge, right? And made everybody live in this sooty cloud, which of course literally became the sooty cloud of pollution and colonialism and slavery and many other things, you know? And we keep saying, “Oh, but how wonderful,” because they invented, I don’t know, vaccines, or hygienic hospitals or something like that. But then when you really put all of the pieces together, we could have had hygienic hospitals, and many other kinds of positive things without the dark sooty cloud.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I want to just go back to this one question that I started with. So, how do you feel about death? What do you think of it? Like, are you afraid of it, are you kind of, like, bewildered? Or not bewildered, but… are you afraid of death? I’m sometimes afraid of death. I mean, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes, I’m like I am very afraid. And then I talk to you or I read something, and I’m like, ‘Oh, it sounds kind of adventurous.’

Father Tiso:

Well, of course I’ve been thinking about it since I was 10 years old, right?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, are you scared of it?

Father Tiso:

You know, there’s something, Brother David often brings this out too. One of the meditation topics called the Instruments Of Good Works in the rule of St Benedict is to keep death daily before your eyes. But you break down that, and especially a good abbott will discuss this with the monks in the morning reflection, all right? Because in a Benedictine monastery, you read a portion of the rule, the abbott is supposed to comment on that portion, and then they go on to business, okay?

And so, every once in a while that one comes up. And what does a good abbott say? He says, “All right, this is not to get you depressed about an inevitable fact, it’s to enable you to know why your motivation needs to be reawakened daily. Your motivation to attain holiness, your motivation to serve others, your motivation to be here in the concrete circumstances of our lives as a community.”

Death is inevitable. The Tibetans put it brilliantly also. Death is inevitable. We have this precious human birth. Your karma is also inevitable, so you better get to work. You know, it’s a motivational orientation. So, in that sense, keeping death daily before your eyes, I also like to think of it as not only motivational in the sense of I better get my rear end going, you know? But also it’s a confession of radical trust.

I’m going to live today, I’m offering everything to God. Before the day begins, before the day begins I’m going to say with all the courage I can, even if today I’m going to die, I’m going to give this day to you, joy, suffering, sorrow, and even my last breath. It’s all given. So, that gives you immense courage. Immense courage.

You know, we talk about faith and salvation by faith and all of that in the Pauline writings of the New Testament, but what is he really saying? It’s just this radical commitment that I dedicate my whole life – because I’ve received the grace of God, back to God, and it’s all there. So, do I fear death? A few weeks ago I had not such good results from a blood test and whatnot.

So, this is always very good, because it teaches you that you’ve made a few mistakes and you need to re-equilibrate your body, right? And I did several days of meditation on the real possibility I could become ill and die. And I did go through a little bit of fear. I went through a little bit of fear, and I looked at that, I examined that, the same you would in meditation about anger or any other emotion or feeling. And I worked through that. And once again, I come back to this statement of courage, statement of total dedication, statement of total openness to love, right? And the fear really does dissolve, you know? It really does.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow. Last week I interviewed someone who was talking about how, during childbirth, she had a vision of a rainbow. And I was just like… and so, I told her about you. I told her about your book. So, you might be getting a phone call. But it was, like, she saw a vision of this glorious rainbow when she was giving birth, and then we know about the rainbow body. And I hope this is okay to also ask you about, like also her mom, who was very attached to her family pet, their dog. After the dog had passed her mom was talking a walk in the garden.

She had asked her mom, she was like, “Did you feel anything after this pet died?” And she was like, “Well, it’s actually interesting that you say that, because I took a walk in the forest and I saw a rainbow.” And I just didn’t… like, what do you make of that?

Father Tiso:

Well, first of all, the birth is rather interesting. The thought that the rainbow would appear at the time of birth as if to say perhaps what… I mean, whether or not there’s reincarnation, but something returned from somebody who was very high up, right? Something, some blessing, came down from someone else into that child at the time of birth. But we can also say this, that joy, ecstasy, right?

That the act of giving birth can be very painful, but it can also be ecstatic, right? Even one of the elder women of the tribe, this week, was talking about her own experience of giving birth. And a cat climbing on her belly as she was about to give birth and suddenly giving birth to her kittens simultaneously, right? Fantastic, you know?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, my God, whoa. Wow.

Father Tiso:

And purring in ecstasy as that happened. So, there is – and many women will say that this was a very spiritual experience to give birth. And then, of course, as you probably know, the giving birth in the water tank, you know, this kind of thing, which diminishes the tension and pain, and makes this experience even more ecstatic and spiritually meaningful. So, that makes a lot of sense.

I think some people who have had a deep loving relationship, and had a sexual experience together, have also reported light and rainbow light. So, there is an ecstatic quality within the human mindstream that takes the form sometimes of this rainbow light. So, it also suggests that the kind of meditation that one might do on rainbow light – some of the things that I taught this week, some of the things that Anne Klein has been teaching also from her Dzogchen training – is about the imaginal re-flowering of our ability to engage with rainbow light, which then engages actively with the life of ourselves.

So, there is something going on here with the material body and its subtle doppelgänger, right? So, the subtle body and the material body intersect at a kind of virginal point, if we might say so, where light and matter exchange their, what we say, particle and wave qualities. And the power of meditation to enable what we call the mind or consciousness – to get back to that earlier part of your question – to get consciousness to engage with and even shift matter, the wave particle flip-flop there that goes on, is I think what is really happening, whether it’s preparing for tukdam, or preparing for rainbow body, and so many of these other phenomena.

Incorruption, ecstatic experiences, and other paranormal manifestations seem to indicate that there are ecstatic contemplative states that occasion bio-plasticity. Dramatic as well as subtle waves, okay? And this is the area of research which I hope more laboratories will begin to take up. Whether it’s going to be bio-photons, whether it’s going to be the chromotherapy route, whether it’s going to be ever more subtle EEG kinds of research, whether it will be more effective and carefully prepared self-reporting of inner experiences.

All of these things are being developed, including by some of our young researchers. And I think we’re about to move into an era of very helpful research in this area. It’s not just about measuring heartbeat or oxygen levels. It’s a lot… we’re getting instrumentation that’s much more subtle.

So I’m, again, optimistic about the contribution of scientific research to this fascinating area of… perennial area of human interest. But I don’t think that it takes anything away from the integrity of the many world cultures that, in almost a boundless variety of ways, talk about inner experiences of light, transformation of the body, the connection between mind and matter, and our eternal destiny also.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely. It’s a combination of it all, of the spiritual, the contemplative, the scientific.

Father Tiso:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Fantastic. Well, thank you. I think that’s a great way, a great ending for us.

That was Father Francis Tiso. Thank you so much, Father Tiso. Please come back next time on Wonderstruck, when I’ll be talking about all things tantra with a Harvard Divinity School professor, Esalen board and member, author, tantra practitioner and social entrepreneur, Sravana Borkataky-Varma. For more information about Wonderstruck, our guests, and some really exciting upcoming events, check out wonderstruck.org. And please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and subscribe on YouTube.

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