This fairly short video of a talk given by Richard Rohr sounded to me like someone just talking extemporaneously in a conversational way the first time I watched it. But when I saw the transcript I realized how tightly woven his exposition really was. A friend shared the transcript with me on another forums in the first four posts of this thread. But here is one of my favorite sections as a teaser. I hope to hear from those interested in how mind and soul relate.
True spiritual growth balances knowing with not-knowing. The arrogance of the mindâsomething the Book of Genesis warns us aboutâmust be tempered. The strange injunction against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, I believe, a warning to religion be humble about declaring who is right and who is wrong, who is in and who is out. But we have eaten from that tree voraciously for centuries. When religion clings only to the cataphatic pathâcertainty, concepts, proofsâit leaves no space for mystery, darkness, and the liberating humility of not needing to know. Only the mystics consistently preserved this. Figures like John of the Cross and Teresa of Ăvila revel in the language of darkness, calling it âlearned ignoranceââthe hard-won freedom not to cling to certitude. It is this spaciousness that allows the heart, the intuitive mind, to emerge.
Here is another excerpt from the transcript coming shortly after the one above:
Older traditionsâembodied, intuitive, rooted in poetry, dance, music, and artâintimated something different. What we once dismissed as âprimitive religionâ increasingly reveals itself as profoundly perceptive. These traditions understood that we must shift into another mode of consciousness. I am convinced that the very word prayer originally meant âa different operating systemâ. Christians still say, âIâll pray about that,â but I think what they instinctively mean is, âI must step out of my argumentative, dualistic, ego-centred mind and move into a larger, more spacious consciousnessââwhat the heart-centred traditions teach so beautifully. Yet over time, even this became fragmented. The heart, which the Desert Fathers of the second and third centuries spoke of constantly, became trivialised into little more than sentimentality, emotion, and Valentineâs Day romanticism, rather than the symbol of integration: the place where body, mind, and soul come together.
I see no evidence that Jesus ever systematically taught what we would now call non-dual thinking. But he embodied it, which is even better. When he says, âI and the Father are one,â he expresses unitive consciousness without apologyâand he is criticised for it. When he speaks of Godâs sun shining on the good and the bad alike, or rain falling on both the just and unjust; when he commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves; when he insists that whatever we do to the least, we do to himâthis is unitive consciousness throughout. Yet organised Christianity fell into trouble because we overwhelmingly read these teachings with a dualistic, argumentative mind.
Thanks for posting this! From the transcript you linked to ⌠here is at least one excerpt that catches my attention âŚ
The imperial system needed a unifying religion, and the name of Jesus served the purposeâeven though this political Christ bore little resemblance to the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. You simply cannot make that sermon an imperial manifesto; it is intuitive, love-centred, nature-rooted, community-oriented.
After this compromise, those who wished to preserve the older, contemplative way fled to the deserts of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Cappadocia, and to Celtic lands like Ireland and Scotland, which the empire never absorbed. This is why Celtic spirituality today feels so fresh: it was never Romanised.
Later, the Protestant Reformation brought much-needed critique, but it also intensified the split. From the desert period onwards, non-dual or unitive wisdom survived mainly in monasteries. Two major approaches emerged: the cataphatic path, which seeks God through words, ideas, light, and clarity; and the apophatic path, which seeks God through unknowing, darkness, and humilityâthe âcloud of unknowingâ. For the last 500 years, as Christianity fought its sectarian battlesâeach side insisting it was right and the other wrongâthe contemplative mind all but died. Once you must prove your correctness and someone elseâs error, the ego takes centre stage. And when ego rules, contemplation becomes impossible. Everything becomes self-referential. We see the consequences today in our divisive political discourse: public conversation reduced to its lowest form because dualistic thinking is the only tool left.
Good find. I was also interested to hear about how Christianity had been coopted by Roman civilization. But I especially like the idea that faith, rather than being a stubbornly insisted on hold on the truth, could also be seen as that which provided a cloud of unknowing in which one can feel in touch with what the intuitive mind of the heart can give us. It may be what rewards contemplation. Opening to the truth rather than constructing it and defending it as âoursâ.
Itâs a start. Deep down the hole with a long, hard, climb out. But why bring Christianity in to it at all? Apart from âLove one anotherâ? Why bring unwarranted, unjustified, untrue belief in to it? Why bring mysticism, metaphysics, mystery, darkness, unknowing in to it? As if thereâs anything behind that? To that? To those hollow words? Poetry, dance, music, art; GREAT. Behind it ALL is existential yearning. Thatâs it. There is no mystery. Apart from how bags of enzymes suffer and love.
I like that, too. Some may think âunknowingâ carries a negative connotation here, but I donât see that. I think that is a good way of describing the contrast between our objective problem solving brain and our emotional brain (i.e. heart). There has always been a part of humanity that is drawn to the mysteries in life.
Absolutely, I was drawn down that garden path, and on to the yellow brick road to Ozâs bogus wizard, for 65 years. I still yearn, to a good yarn. But they have to be really good nowadays.
Well said. I think it is just a matter of the right mind for the job. For creativity and human meaning, give me the âdark sideâ. For matters empirical, bring the light of settled science and analysis to bear.
This is where Christianity toning down the claims to certainty would help everyone, themselves included. But if faith can help someone keep their figuring-it-out mind out of the way in creative matters, that would be beneficial.
But as you say it neednât be Christianity. Weâve had the same suite of brain options for a long time. But in the absence of one wisdom tradition or another it is hard to see how one would come to recognize the use of the less directly useful one. The creative/emotional mind is useful for finding meaning. So if you happen to be brought up in a religion that still addresses the need, why switch? I think theyâre all true in their way. But I donât think we just make up our meaning any old way we like. What has meaning must be discovered. I find meaning in all manner of literature and in most every mythos.
And I guess the religious part of that are known as âthe mysticsâ or âcontemplativesâ to hear Rohr tell it - not the groups that would become belligerents grabbing for cultural steering wheels I guess! More from RohrâŚ
Religion, frankly, has not done its job. In much of Western culture, spirituality was reduced to tribalism: âWe are the Catholic tribe; you are the Protestant tribe; you are the Jewish tribe.â This is a low level of consciousnessânot transformation, merely boundary-maintenance.
True spiritual growth balances knowing with not-knowing. The arrogance of the mindâsomething the Book of Genesis warns us aboutâmust be tempered. The strange injunction against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is, I believe, a warning to religion be humble about declaring who is right and who is wrong, who is in and who is out. But we have eaten from that tree voraciously for centuries. When religion clings only to the cataphatic pathâcertainty, concepts, proofsâit leaves no space for mystery, darkness, and the liberating humility of not needing to know.
Good one. The squabbling probably does cut into to market share. But of course Iâd include other religious traditions in addition to other denominations as requiring greater attempts at neighborly inclusion. With enough darkness we can find the humility necessary to meet every such tradition with respect. Faith considered rightly should never elicit enmity.
I like that ⌠but maybe with the necessary exception of enmity with all that would break relationships and create enmity? Enmity with enmity itself, perhaps? God canât have some of the family driving other bits of the family away. Which means that the âdriving bitsâ are themselves driven away? A paradox I suppose, but I think they drive themselves away. Nobody forces religious leaders to do what some do.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes well on these things - both âDarknessâ and âHoly Envyâ.
Here is another related thought. We begin life helplessly dependent. And to some extent (I suppose if weâre lucky? unlucky?) we end life that way too. Babies excite a lot of love in us (at least in our better, less sleep-deprived moments as parents) . It is a hardened and embittered heart indeed if the heartstrings do not feel sympathetic vibrations with the cries or giggles of an infant. And since our lives seem to be bookended with these states, should that be taken as a reminder that such is our own true state all our lives long? Of course we admire and strive for independence and strength - of the sorts that allow us to participate in care-giving and not just care-receiving. That is needed too, in its seasons to be sure. But whenever our self-confidence mounts up to the heavens, we tend to forget that even in our own personal âstrongestâ seasons of life we are still indebted, still in receipt of so many things beyond our control or contrivance. Not to mention all the unearned things we just inherited to help us get there in the first place. It is the peculiar arrogance of the wealthy and strong to be always forgetting that. Maybe thatâs also somewhat related to being as wise as serpents, but still learning to linger and live in the innocence of a dove.
That is also true. Happiness is like sleep in that we cannot will ourselves to fall asleep or to feel happy. All we can do is cultivate the necessary conditions and then accept what comes.
How we live at all is not a question about anything we can make happen. It is rather a question about something miraculous. We scarcely understand how life got started but it did.
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
20
Tribalism does seem to be a widespread human flaw.