The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See by Richard Rohr

The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, by Richard Rohr, OFM, 2009, 187 pages

Read in 2009, re-read and reviewed, 5-2013

Thoughts on The Naked Now:

The Naked Now is remarkably easy to read, I think.  Not always easy to understand or agree with, but easy to read.  This is especially important because it invites us to think about how religion can transform us more than it has so far.  The ideas Richard Rohr discusses can get very dense and complicated in other hands.

Rohr believes that “if you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it to those around you and the next generation” (p. 125).  He writes like a crusader because he is one.  “There is no time for being against; there is so much now to be for!” (p. 131)

Christianity is ineffective unless it is “practice-based” as well as “belief-based” (p. 108).  Growth involves confusion and change, which is why “doubt and faith are correlative terms” (p. 125).  You can’t have one without the other for long.

We are intended to learn “how to hold creative tensions, how to live with paradox and contradictions, how not to run from mystery, and therefore how to actually practice what all religions teach as necessary: compassion, mercy, loving kindness, patience, forgiveness, and humility” (p. 132).

Jesus “found God in disorder and imperfection – and told us we must do the same” (p. 16).

Rohr’s title hearkens back to Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Sacrament of the Present Moment and forward to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.  He writes, “It is living in the naked now, the “sacrament of the present moment,” that teaches us how to actually experience our experiences, whether good, bad or ugly, and how to let them transform us.  When you can be present, you will know the Real Presence.” (p. 12)

And, he says, “it is almost that simple.”

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What follow are quotations and excerpts from The Naked Now, sometimes drawn together over a few paragraphs or pages.  The book consists of a preface, 22  chapters in three parts, 10 appendices and notes.

Enjoy …

 

Preface: Why I Am Writing This Book (p. 9-14)

(Rohr shares his own story)  I am a man born between ages, seeing between religions but happily a Christian.  I love what I see, but I know there is still more to see.  This seeing is also painful, and there are things I wish I did not see, or did not know.

I was born in the middle of Middle America, Kansas, in the middle of the Great War (1943), into a German Catholic family with deeply conservative farm roots, and yet I was sent to be educated into a much larger, rapidly changing and reforming world of the 1960s.  Vatican II tried to reform Catholicism, the therapeutic movement tried to reform the psyche, and the civil rights and antiwar movements tried to reform America.

I have been told that I have a fixation for trying to see almost all things as both/and.  It feels as though it is written in my genes – and my worst mistakes come from not self-balancing.  If you believe in astrological signs, I was born on the cusp of Pisces, where the two fish move in opposite directions, on the day between winter and spring, in the year in which the Resurrection was celebrated on its latest possible date.  I am always waiting for Easter, but surely expecting it too.

I was always happily Catholic but curiously Protestant and Pentecostal.  I knew early on that there were different kinds of knowing.  Words divided reality between either and or, but my living experience was always both-and.

I can survive only by building bridges, both affirming and also denying most of my own ideas and those of others.  Most people tend to see me as highly progressive, yet I would say I am, in fact, a values conservative and a process liberal.  I believe in justice, truth, follow-through, honesty, personal and financial responsibility, faithful love, and humility – all deeply traditional values.  Yet, in my view, you need to be imaginative, radical, dialogical, and even counter-cultural to live these values in depth.

I am formed by twentieth-century American culture, for good and for ill, by Catholic theology, for good and for ill, and by the wisdom traditions of the Native and world religions – especially Franciscanism, which has been largely for the good. – p. 9-10

What is it that keeps us humans from reading reality truthfully, humbly and helpfully?  Why have we told people they must “believe” in God in order to experience God, when God is clearly at work in ways that many “eyes have not seen, nor ears have heard, nor has it entered their minds” (1 Corinthians 2:9) – p. 10-11

Here is the overall message of this book: All saying must be balanced by unsaying, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing.  All light must be informed by darkness, and all success by suffering. – p. 11

All mature religions have discovered a software beyond dualistic thinking for processing the really big questions, like death, love, infinity, suffering and God.  Many of us call this access “contemplation.”  Originally the word was simply “prayer.” – p. 12

It is living in the naked now, the “sacrament of the present moment,” that teaches us how to actually experience our experiences, whether good, bad or ugly, and how to let them transform us.  When you can be present, you will know the Real Presence.  I promise you this is true.  And it is almost that simple. – p. 12

 

Chapter 1.  The Gift Is Already Given (p. 15-24)

True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union NOW.  The great discovery is always that we are searching for what has already been given.  I did not find it; it found me. – p. 16

Jesus found God in disorder and imperfection – and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.  But no one gave us a concrete program so we could know hope for ourselves, even and especially in disorder and imperfection.  Hope and union and are the same thing, and real hope has nothing to do with mental certitudes. – p. 16

For too many, no life journey is necessary because we think we already have all our answers at the beginning.  The church says, the Bible says … A second group tries to keep busy and be important.  Intensity replaces intimacy with ourselves, life and others.  Another group seeks transcendence but from a dualistic and inevitably self-centered point. – p. 17-18

Mature transcendence is when God is “done unto us” and all we can do is allow it.  We are being held utterly and warmly held and falling helplessly into a scary mystery at the very same time. – p. 18

Finally you allow yourself to stand before one mirror for your identity – you surrender to the naked now of true prayer and full presence.  You become a Thou before the great I AM.  Such ultimate mirroring gives you the courage to leave other mirrors behind you. – p. 19

This is a gift that can and should be asked for.  Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves.  You only ask for something you have already begun to taste.  The gift has already been given. – p. 20

When our religion depends on membership and sacraments, or personal decision or faith as technique, we are back in charge and doers.  There is no undergoing.  But there is absolutely nothing you can do to earn or get the Holy Spirit.  Don’t try to “believe” in the Holy Spirit as one doctrine among others.  Instead, practice drawing from the deep well within you, and then you will naturally believe.  Put the horse first, and it will draw the cart.  (There is also nothing you can do to lose the Holy Spirit.) – p. 20-21

“Everything exposed to the light itself becomes light” (Eph 5:14).  In prayer, we merely keep returning the divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves (2 Cor 3:18).  Prayer (in this book) is any interior journey or practice that allows you to experience faith, hope and love within yourself.  It is not a technique for geting things or pious requirement. – p. 22-23

In this process God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea.  We do not pray to Christ; we pray through Christ.  Or even better, Christ prays through us.  We are always and forever seconding the motion. – p. 23

 

Chapter 2.  The Great Unsaying (p. 25-26)

The unspeakability of the Hebrew name for God (YHWH) has long been recognized, but we now know it goes even deeper: formally the word was not spoken at all, but breathed!  Many are convinced that its correct pronunciation is an attempt to replicate and imitate the very sound of inhalation and exhalation. – p. 25

The one thing we do every moment is therefore to speak the name of God.  This makes it our first and our last word as we enter and leave the world. – p. 26

There is no Islamic, Christian, or Jewish way of breathing.  There is no rich or poor way of breathing.  This divine wind “blows where it will” (John 3:8), which appears to be everywhere.  No one and no religion can control this spirit. God is as available and accessible as the very thing we all do constantly – breathe. – p. 26

Isn’t it wonderful that breath, wind, spirit, and air are precisely nothing – and yet everything? – p. 26

Just keep breathing consciously in this way and you will know that you are connected to humanity from cavemen to cosmonauts, to the entire animal world, and even to the trees and plants.  And we are now told that the atoms we breathe are physically the same as the stardust from the day of creation.  Oneness is no longer merely a vague mystical notion, but a scientific fact. – p. 26

 

Chapter 3.  Three Ways to View the Sunset (p. 27-30)

The mystical gaze builds upon the first two eyes – of the senses and the mind – and goes further.  It happens whenever our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and non-resistant.  I like to call it presence, and it pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness.  At that point, you either want to write poetry, pray, or be utterly silent. – p. 28

If one ignores the first and second eyes, their hold on the third eye is often temporary, shallow, and incapable of being shared with anybody else.  The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know. – p. 29

The word “mystic” simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience.  Some call this movement “conversion,” some call it “enlightenment,” some “transformation,” and some “holiness.” – p. 30

This is Paul’s “third heaven,” where he “heard things that must not and cannot be put into human language” (2 Corinthians 12:2, 4).

 

Chapter 4.  We Should Have “Known” Better (p. 31-38)

How to know “worse”: More than any other personality trait, all-or-nothing thinking has caused me to make huge mistakes and bad judgments, hurt people and myself, withhold love, and misinterpret situations.  Don’t I know that every viewpoint is a view from a point? – p. 32

To stand back and calmly observe my inner dramas without rushing to judgment is foundational for spiritual seeing. We have not been practically or systematically taught this in the West for some centuries now.  The results have been rationalism, secularism, and atheism on the Left and fundamentalism, tribal thinking, and cognitive rigidity on the Right. – p. 32-33

In the West religion became pre-occupied with telling what to know more than how to know, what to see more than how to see.  It has been like trying to view the galaxies with a $5 pair of binoculars. – p. 34

Knowing “better”: I would like to call contemplation “full-access” knowing – not irrational, but pre-rational, non-rational, rational and trans-rational all at once.  Contemplation is an exercise in keeping your heart and mind spaces open long enough for the mind to see other hidden material.  A certain amount of love for an object and for myself must precede any full knowing of it. – p. 34

The word “non-duality” distinguishes itself from total and perfect absorption or enmeshment.  The contemplative mind thus can come to see things in themselves, apart from the words or concepts that become their substitutes. – p. 35

We tend to think that because we agree or disagree with the idea of a thing, we have realistically encountered the thing itself.  Not true, says the contemplative. Experiencing “presence” is a different way of knowing and touching the moment.  It is much more vulnerable.  It leaves us without a sense of control. – p. 35

Too often religion offers doctrine and truth claims, but fails to give people a vision, process and practices whereby they can legitimate those truth claims for themselves – by inner experience and actual practices. – p. 37

As Catholic theologian Karl Rahner is often quoted as saying, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’ or he will cease to be anything at all.” – p. 38

 

Chapter 5.  A Lesson from the Monks (p. 39-45)

Most ancient Christian teachings, including those of Jesus, revealed the small self to the person.  The emphasis was on spiritual practice, and on practices much more than on believing cerebral ideas to be true or false.  In general, they thought that balance brought one to divine union more than moral perfection did. – p. 39-40

Over-defining and over-asserting of the individual self and its private salvation has very real limitations, including lack of any keen awareness of the common good or the harmonizing of body, mind, heart and community.  That highly individuated personality colonized the world and spread its conquering version of Christianity. – p. 42

 

Chapter 6. Glimpses of Wonder: The Quest Is Begun (p. 46-48)

“Wondering” connotes:  1) standing in disbelief, 2) standing in the question itself, and 3) standing in awe before something.

I “wonder” why the reasons for most wars in history – reasons that seemed so compelling at the time – look foolish, wrong, or even naive to later generations.

I “wonder” why people often have a clearer idea of what they are against than what they are for.

I wonder why people who hate religion tend to attack it with the same dogmaticism that they hate in religion.

I invite you to sit with your wondering.  Let yourself even feel awe in the presence of these insights into the way all of us think.

 

Chapter 7: But We Have to Make Judgments, Don’t We? (p. 49-54)

You cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “No.”  You have to start with a “Yes” of basic acceptance, which means not too quickly labeling, analyzing, or categorizing things in or out, good or bad.  You have to leave the field open. – p, 49

Religious fundamentalism is basically a love affair with words and ideas about God instead of God himself or herself.  But you cannot really love words; you can only think them. – p. 50

 

Once you have learned to say a fundamental yes, later no’s can be helpful and even necessary: without them, you have no protected boundaries or identity … but many people make this an end in itself and then, by the second half of life, become highly judgmental. – p. 51-52

The ego is not interested in truth or in God, only in control.  On the other hand, if something is even 10 percent true, the saint is grateful and happy for that gift. – p. 52

Monotheists should be the first to recognize that truth is one and that God is “all in all” (Ephesians 4, 1  Corinthians 15).  Yet they often end up fearing and even opposing these ideas, probably because in their own lives their religion has become more tribal than transformative. – p. 53

As Rumi said, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” – p. 53

Presence is experienced in a participative way, outside the mind.  The mind wants a job and loves to process things.  The key to stopping this is, quite simply, peace, silence, or stillness.  This was always seen as God’s primary language, “with everything else being a very poor translation.” – p. 54

The overly verbal religion of the last five hundred years cannot follow Jesus and go into the desert for forty days, where there is nothing to say, to prove, to think, or to defend. – p. 54

 

Chapter 8: Yes, But (p. 55-57)

Yes, the mind is necessary, but it can’t do everything. – p. 55

Yes, the mind is very useful, but when it does not recognize its own finite viewpoint, it is also useless. – p. 56

Yes, the mind can make necessary distinctions, but it also divides in thought what is undivided in nature and in the concrete. – p. 56

Yes, the mind welcomes education, but it also needs to be uneducated, to learn how much of what it “knows” is actually mere conditioning and prejudice. – p. 56

The great religions of the world found methods to compartmentalize, but not eliminate, the over-control of the thinking, rational mind, through practices such as prayer, meditation or contemplation.  This allowed other parts of us to see, other things to be seen, and the rational mind to then be reintegrated, but now as a servant instead of the master. – p. 57

 

Chapter 9: Not Many Things But One Thing (p. 58-66)

Martha was everything good and right, but one thing she was not.  She was not present – most likely not present to herself, her own feelings of resentment, perhaps her own martyr complex, her need to be needed … Jesus challenged here at the daily, ordinary, human level because that would reflect her same pattern at the divine level. – p. 58

The great teachers know that one major change is needed: how we do the moment.  Then all the rest will fall into line. – p. 59

Knowledge is the gathering of information, of “the ten thousand things,” as the Buddhists poetically call it … Wisdom is a different way of seeing and knowing these ten thousand things.  Wisdom is precisely the freedom to be present … Presence is wisdom. – p. 59-60

Wise people actually lose a certain interest in gathering more and more information, books, and news.  These can clutter what is already a clear field. – 0p. 60

This is what Jesus means when he talks about the one who has being given more and those who have not losing what little they have (Matthew 13:12).

In Jesus’ time religiously observant people were storing up treasures for the next world, while Jesus was just living and talking about what was right in front of him – birds, lilies, tenants, and suffering. – p. 60-61

Eternity is going on all the time, and spiritual teachers give us a way to dip into that stream now and therefore forever.  Their assumption is invariably, “If you have it now, you will have it then.”  They see a perfect continuity between time and eternity.  This is why they do not fear death or judgment.  If God loves me so unconditionally, now, why would god change the love policy later? – p. 61

Many of us seem to have some kind of genuine spiritual breakthrough but never get around to the intellectual, lifestyle and ethical implications that often take years to recognize and integrate (more in chap. 11).  This integration moves from dualistic thinking to nondual thinking.  This way of seeing and being present can be called contemplation.

In studying philosophy I began with a boring and abstract course called epistemology.  It did not tell us what to know (that is metaphysics), but how we know what we think we know.  It is not so good to study religion and Scripture before critiquing my own lens and process, examining my own way of seeing. – p. 62-63

How you see is what you see. – p. 63

There is a catch, and it’s a big one.  Without exception, all of the wisdom traditions insist that this wisdom is given and not taken, waited for and not demanded, having much more to do with long-term willingness than mere willfulness.  We undergo the receiving of this wisdom, rather than somehow making it happen. – p. 63

There are few teachers of this dark path; most organized western religion has emphasized will power (heroic ego-affirming virtues) rather than willfulness. – p. 64

If you cannot get there by trying harder, then for westerners this counterintuitive path is truly what Jesus called the “narrow path” (Matthew 7:14).

 

PART TWO

Chapter 10: What About Jesus? (p. 67-83)

Our dualistic mind needs to split and divide, with the result that it tends to understand Jesus as only divine and understand human beings as only human, despite all scripture and mystical affirmations to the contrary.  The overcoming of this divide was the whole point of the Incarnation of God in Christ. – p. 67-68

Our preoccupation with Jesus’ divinity did not allow us to hear about his own proudly proclaimed and clearly emphasized humanity.  This misses and avoids the major point he came to bring.  Not balancing humanity and divinity in jesus, we are also unable to put it together in ourselves. – p. 68-69

Theism believes there is a God.  Christianity believes that God and humanity can co-exist in the same place.  Most Christians are very good theists who just happen to have named their god Jesus. – p. 69

We think of ourselves as mere humans trying desperately to become spiritual. But the Christian revelation is precisely that we are already spiritual (“in God”) and our difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human. (This echoes Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings have a human experience.”)  – p. 69

It is in our humanity where we are wounded, needy, unloving, self-hating … while at the same time we seek to become spiritual and religious. – p. 69

Jesus must have recognized that contemplative/nondual seeing would be the exception and not the rule.  Most seemed to misunderstand or ignore him, despite what seem to be astounding healing and miracles.  Yet he did not let that discourage him: “Happy are you that do see, and happy are you that do hear!” (Matthew 13:15). – p. 70

How did Jesus attain his freedom and authority?  He seemed to prefer a prayer of quiet, something more than social, liturgical or verbal prayer.  During his forty days in the desert he missed Sabbath and public temple services. – p. 71

He warned his followers about the dangers of public prayer and invited them to private prayer with few or no words (Matthew 6:5-7). – p. 71-72

Emphasis on public, verbal and social prayer, and group rituals, while not giving people any inner experience of their own inner aliveness, tends to keep religion on the level of a social contract.  So the prophets criticize the priesthood, the sacrifices and the sanctuary (which all emphasize the verbal group ritual), and Jesus quoted these critics often. – p. 71

Group rituals hold groups together, but they do not necessarily transform members of the group at any deep level.  In fact the group experience often becomes a substitute any real individual journey. – p. 72-73

This becomes a “structural” sin.  We all live inside a common domain which largely determines how much we can hear or even imagine. – p. 73

Many Christians seem to have little experience of prayer of quiet, and tend to actually be afraid of it or even condemn it.  They have not been taught what to do with their overactive minds, and so they are afraid of silence. – p. 74

So Jesus emphasizes interiority in each of the three spiritual disciplines: almsgiving, prayer, and fasting.  However, western culture tends to be extroverted with a “can-do” spirit. – p. 74

Prayer often becomes an attempt to change God and pay most attention to what we want instead of what it was meant to be: an interior practice to change the one who is praying. But this kind of change WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN if we stand calmly before this uncanny and utterly safe Presence, allowing God to invade and heal our unconscious, the place where 95 percent of our motivations and reactions come from. – p. 74

All we can really do is return the gaze of God. – p. 74

Jesus honored and allowed Mystery consistently.  But because of this his sayings are enigmatic and confusing to the dualistic or systematic thinkers.  If I had turned in papers as open to misunderstanding and even heresy as most of Jesus’ teachings are, I would not have passed a single theology course. – p. 74-75

The Pharisees asked, “When and where will the Kingdom come?”  Jesus answered, “Not here and not there.  It is in your midst (within you).” – p. 76

Eckhart Tolle does this for many today with is “power of now.”  Any good spiritual teacher must overcome both space and time to communicate a sense of the eternal and the Really Real.  Poor teaching points to “only” here or “only” there, such as “only in my church.”  Good spiritual teaching is saying “always” and “everywhere.” – p. 76

In this passage Jesus is exactly repeating the Sanskrit neti, neti of ancient Hinduism.  “Not this, not that” protects the final unpronounceability and full knowability of the Holy. – p. 77

Jesus humbles much of organized religion’s capacity to control the God-human relationship.  His good theology protects God’s total freedom.  He does not demand, and we must not demand, that God follow our rules. – p. 77

Once you have known grace, your tit-for-tat universe is forever undone: God is everywhere and always and scandalously found even in the failure of sin.  There is no place left where God cannot be found.   This is true even though groups hold together much better when there is a clear and undefined “us” and “them.” Because we need to keep our group together we “bind up” God rather than “loosening” divine availability. – p. 77-79

We really do not want God to be everywhere, just here, and we of course end us losing God even for ourselves. – p. 79

God’s very job description is showing love and mercy to sinners (Romans 3:9ff), but we find that work difficult.  John the Baptist led the way for Jesus: when the temple priesthood made God distant and elite, John went down to the riverside and poured natural water over shamed bodies.  This initiation rite was a scathing critique of temple or official requirements. – p. 79

Jesus knows that God does not love us because we are good.  God loves us because God is good.  That changes everything. – p. 79

When we impose either-or thinking on God, grace becomes an impossible concept to process.  It gets worse.  We also apply all-or-nothing thinking to ourselves, making the message of grace impossible to obey at any honest level.  As a result, we are forced to pretend, repress, deny, or become a hypocrite, because nothing human is or ever will be perfect enough, worthy enough, or pure enough. – p. 80

It is not so much that hypocrites join religious groups, but that the very structures of much religion encourage people to act and pretend. – p. 80

This cancer at the heart of our preached message changes our experience of God in at least two ways:

1) The God who commands us to love unconditionally does NOT.  The God who tells us to love our enemies punishes them for all eternity.  This stifles and paralyzes many believers at the conscious or unconscious level.  Such a message will not save the world and will not produce many great or loving people.

2) If we end up more loving than God, then we don’t take God very seriously.  Even my least saintly friends on their worst days would not imagine torturing people who do not like them, worship them, or believe in them.  “God” ends up looking rather petty, needy, narcissistic, easily offended, and not particularly intelligent.  Why would anyone trust or love such a God, or want to be alone with Him?  Much less spend eternity with such a Being?  I wouldn’t.  This perspective, conscious and unconscious, is at the basis of much agnosticism and atheism in the West today. – p. 80-81

Jesus takes God out of the straight-jacket and lets God’s unconditional love set the only standard and measuring stick (Matthew 7:11).  Then Christian spirituality becomes very simply the “imitation of Christ” (Eph 5:1): to love one another and ourselves exactly the way God loves us. – p. 81-82

History has shown us: if you don’t get the first thing right, that God’s love is absolutely unconditional, then the whole thing falls apart.  You CANNOT arrive at an unconditionally loving God or self with the dualistic mind, because there will always be contrary evidence that puts you back into some kind of worthiness contest.  This invariable draws us to regressive dualistic texts in the Scriptures, which only reinforce our own violence and fears. – p. 82

You see the text through your available eyes.  You hear a sacred text from your own level of development and consciousness (see Appendix 1).  Punitive people love punitive texts; loving people hear in the SAME TEXT calls to discernment, clarity, choice and decision.  We do not see things as they are; we see things as WE are. – p. 82

God swims in an ocean of mercy, with plenty of room for the outsider, the sinner, and even the violent, according to the Scriptures.  The crucified Jesus calls for no recrimination against his killers.  The Great Forgiver calls us all inside of God’s universal breath (John 20:22).

Or as the poet puts it (Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Compared to the Air We Breathe”):

Wild air, world-mothering air, nestling me everywhere,

I say that we are wound with mercy round and round, as if with air, the same,

And makes – O marvelous! – New Nazareths in us.

In the world of religion, nondual seers are the only experts.  Sinners, saints, lovers and poets and all those who have swum in this ocean of mercy can hold contrary evidence together because they have allowed God to first of all do it in them – over and over again.  To these ever new Adams and ever new Eves, Jesus the human always makes sense.  Head and heart and body finally work together as one, and we are back in the garden with him, naked and unashamed.

 

Chapter 11: Conversion: Begin by Changing the Seer (p. 84-88)

While never denying the objectivity of truth, Bernard Lonergan claimed that most religious people have “an exaggerated view of the objectivity of truth” and especially their capacity to understand it. – p. 85

Lonergan taught that the only real way to find objectivity today was for one to clarify and heal their subjectivity.  He used an old-fashioned word for this process: “conversion.” – p. 85

Authentically converted people see truth, as far as humans are able, and they see it in a way that can be shared, at least with other converted people.  I know how “safe” and energized I feel when I am sharing my most offbeat ideas with truly or loving people (or good therapists).  Perhaps this is familiar to you as well.  On the other hand, among antagonistic, insecure, or dualistic people, I always feel unsafe. – p. 85-86

Lonergan’s “new foundation” for truth-seeking became changing the seer himself or herself.  This was a remarkable breakthrough for the West, in my opinion, and in part he learned it from scientists, who knew the connection between the seer and the seen. – p. 86

We spend much of our time fishing for right ideas than for people, as Jesus called us to do.  Lonergan boldly says, “Conversion is the experience by which one becomes an authentic human being.”  My assumption would be that human beings attract other human beings to the same level of awareness, just by being themselves.  This sounds like the fishing Jesus was talking about. – p. 86

It comes down to this: transformed people transform people. – p. 86

For Lonergan, conversion has three important levels:

1) Intellectual conversion, moving from sense perception into a “universe of being”.  This sounds like what we are calling third-eye seeing, seeing as the mystics see.

2) Moral conversion, shifting from desire for personal satisfaction and control to honest perception of value outside yourself.

3) Religious conversion, allowing ourselves to live as a being-in-love who is “held, grasped, possessed, and owned through a total and so other-worldly love.”  Then and only then are we spiritually converted.  Transformation into love is the heart of religious conversion because, of course, God is love.  This is not at all the same as believing things to be true or false or joining a church. p. 86-87

So then the basis for Lonergan’s objectivity is transformed people who see what is really there.  Jesus does the same thing in making truth into a person rather than an abstract concept: “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6).  Authentic people like Jesus both see and are truth.  Because they are “true,” they can see truth. – p. 88

For Lonergan, rational thinking (“attentive, intelligent, reasonable”) does not occur without authentic conversion first.  Mature religion involves changing ourselves and letting ourselves be changed by a mysterious encounter with grace, mercy and forgiveness. – p. 88

To often we try to push, intimidate, threaten, cajole, and manipulate others.  It seldom works, but that is not the way the soul works.  On the other hand, in the presence of whole people, or any encounter with God, we simply find that, after a while, we are different- and much better! – p. 88

 

Chapter 12: Change Your Mind (p. 89-97)

Jesus’ very first message in the Gospels (Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:15) is the Greek word metanoia, which quite literally means “change your mind.”  Once you accept ongoing change as a central program for yourself, you tend to continue growing all your life. – p. 89

Rather than using their  minds to close down and protect our ego/false self, self-critical but not negative people will flourish inside of difficulties. It is especially there that they will grow. – p. 89-90

Defended and defensive selves will do anything rather than change – even act against their own best interest.  Ask any addict or member of a tightly defined group.  Ego is just another word for blindness.  Ego is the unobserved self, because when you see it, the game is over.  The ego must remain unseen and disguised to be effective in protecting itself. – p. 90-91

Many of us have not yet discovered a different mind (or way of seeing), but only different behaviors, beliefs and belonging systems. – p. 91

Required behaviors and beliefs are good and necessary to get us started.  But when we invest in them too heavily, they soon become places to hide.  They are like training wheels that need to be replaced by real wheels after awhile. – p. 91

There is often not much difference between religions and political parties at the ego level – only the vocabulary, rituals and conversation circles differ.  “We all go where we get our backs scratched.” – p. 92

Liberals protect themselves by dualistic suspicion judgments, making them overly dismissive of those they consider authorities or the top.  Conservatives protect themselves by dualistic worthiness judgments, making them overly dismissive of what they judge to be the bottom. – p. 92

The “prophet,” the professional inside critic, was a protected office in Israel and even in the early church.  But in recent centuries it has largely disappeared. – p. 93

The ego diverts attention from anything that would ask itself to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change.  So, for example, Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence, simplicity, love of the poor and enemies, and inclusivity are overwhelmingly ignored, while concepts about the divinity of Christ, virgin birth, atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex are emphasized and become battle-ground bullet points. – p. 94

This is the spiritual form of the law of inertia.  We want to go with the prevailing flow. – p. 94

We might do better if we are offered religion as ego transformation (“unless the grain of wheat dies”) instead of religion as group superiority, or as God’s demand for us to have correct ideas about things, or religion as a moral worthiness contest to win entrance into the next world. – p. 95

Simone Weil said, “Inner communion is good for the good and bad for the bad.  God invites all the damned into paradise, but for them it is hell.” – p. 95

The logically necessary concept of hell is an urgent warning against the fatal and eternal consequences of not changing into communion.  It indeed kills the soul. – p. 96

Keeping the heart spaces and the mind spaces open is the essential work of spirituality.  Cardinal Newman said that “to be human is to change, to be perfect is to have changed many times.” – p. 96

I don’t always need to get the words or ideas about God right.  I find God is willing to turn the whole world around to get me facing in the right direction. – p. 96

God seems to be totally into change.  I know this every time I see how divine grace maneuvers around my sinfulness and human events. – p. 96

Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and a very abundant life at that” (John 10:10).  How did we ever get correct rational ideas confused with an abundant life? – p. 97

When I do not let go of my attachments for a living relationship (“The old wine is good enough!”), I miss out on the great banquet that all the mystics, the prophets and Jesus describe. – p. 97

 

Chapter 13: Things “Too Good to be True”: From Polarity Thinking to Prayer (p. 98-104)

Polarity thinking avoids all subtlety and discrimination and creates false dichotomies.  If you fight dualistic thinking directly, you are forced to become dualistic yourself.  Instead, Jesus told a story, kept silent or presented a third alternative that completely reframed the false dilemma. – p. 100

All you can really do in the spiritual life is get tuned to receive the always present message.  Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to, but only inner resonance and a capacity for mutuality (Matthew 7:7-11). – p. 101

Prayer is not an attempt to change God’s mind about us or about events.  It is primarily about changing our mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us. – p. 102

True prayer stops defending or promoting its ideas and feelings, lets go of any antagonistic attitudes or fears, and waits for, expects, and receives guidance from Another.  – p. 102

Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, “Prayer happened, and I was there” more than “I prayed today.”  God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world and becomes at some level your own “I am.” – p. 102-103

You start knowing through, with, and in Somebody Else.  Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.”  This might be the most important thing I am saying in this book. – p. 103

To move from polarity thinking to prayer thinking is like being raised from the dead.  You only know you have been raised after you are on the other side of the divide, but it is almost impossible to convince anyone who has not yet allowed that passover. – p . 103

 

Chapter 14: The Lost Tradition (p. 105-115)

The two trees in the Garden of Eden serve as ideal metaphors for our two minds.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents “either-or” dualism, which we are strictly warned against and told not to eat.  The tree of life promises access to eternal things, accesses the deep ground of God and of the self. – p. 105-106

Dualism is good and necessary but can take us only so far; it cannot access eternal things.  It is not the tree of life, but only the tree of “this or that.” – p. 106

The struggle to forgive reality for being exactly what it is right now often breaks us through to nondual consciousness. – p. 106

Faith in Christianity largely became believing things to be true or false (faith as intellectual assent) instead of giving people concrete practices so they could themselves know how to open up (faith), hold on (hope), and allow an infilling from another source (love).  – p. 107

Until we move from a belief-based religion to a practice-based religion, we will merely continue to argue about what we should believe and who the unbelievers are. – p. 108

Christianity will likely fight its own mystical tradition more than most religions fight theirs, because it has so heavily invested itself in highly rational structures. – p. 109

Contemplation began its major decline in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and by the time of the European Reformations we were pulled into such defensive/offensive thinking that the new mind largely died out, even in Catholic and Orthodox monasteries. – p. 109

The Enlightenment drove the final nails in the coffin of contemplation, as religion become even more oppositional and defensive in its fear of its “new enemies” of rationalism, scientism, and secularism. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic. – p. 110

Christianity became rational to oppose rationalism, losing its secret “wisdom,” as Paul loved to call it.  In Europe, this took the form of highly academic theology, and in America the form of narrow ahistorical fundamentalism. – p. 111

In recent centuries, the Christian churches were on the wrong sides of most human reformations and revolutions, until after these reformations succeeded.  As a result, Christianity has often become ineffective or even in-credible to much of the world.  Our history now works against us. – p. 111-112

Almost singlehandedly in his writings of 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Merton re-opened the field, reintroduced the much more traditional contemplative vocabulary, and reawakened the true contemplative mind in the West.  We are now enjoying the immense fruits of his and others’ work, over forty years after his tragic death in 1968. – p. 112

As long as you understand prayer as merely “thinking holy thoughts” or even “meditating on pious images,” you will normally remain in dualistic consciousness.  You must be taught to go beyond this, and how it is possible to do so. – p. 113

“Social prayer” took over to partially fill the void.  Even today, Catholicism serious overplays the liturgy card, because it does not know it has a much larger deck available. – p. 114

The lost tradition continues to this day and is probably why religious orders no longer appear to offer any serious alternative consciousness in society except our celibacy – which, if not practiced well, can actually reinforce dualistic thought. – p. 114

Dualistic people use knowledge, even religious knowledge, for the purposes of ego enhancement, shaming, and the control of others and themselves, for it works very well in that way.  Nondual people use knowledge for the transformation of persons and structures, but most especially to change themselves and to see reality with a new eye and heart. – p. 115

They hold and “suffer” the conflicts of life instead of passing them on or projecting them elsewhere.  They do not get rid of life’s pain until they learn its necessary lessons. – p. 115

Such a holding tank that agrees to hold it all, eliminating nothing, is what I mean by living in the naked now and being present outside the mind. – p. 115

 

Chapter 15: Faith is More How to Believe Than What to Believe (p. 116-121)

Twelve thoughts about faith:

1. Faith points to an initial opening of the heart or mind from our side.
2. Letting go of the old involves initial unknowing/confusion, which is why doubt and faith are correlative terms.  People of great faith often suffer bouts of great doubt because they continue to grow.
3. Human faith and religious faith are similar except for their goal.   What set us on the wrong path was making the object of religious faith ideas or doctrines rather than a person.
4. Faith allows you to bypass your usual pattern of dualistic thinking.  Not forever, but for just long enough to think and act holistically – contemplatively – for awhile.  Eventually you must make use of reason again.
5. This contemplative thinking and acting lasts long enough (hopefully) for some form of mutuality, presence or mystery to be “tasted.”  This in turn leads you to search for an even deeper encounter.  This is the point made by the classic Sacrament of the Present Moment and by its contemporary, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.
6. Once you have gained even momentary access to nondual unity, all previous stages can be returned to as needed, including your dualistic reason.  In fact, if you do not return to “reasonable” language in some sense, your faith is both unshareable and unable to be critiqued by others or even by yourself.  Faith and reason are not opposites.
7. Faith always includes and honors all the previous stages.  This keeps it from being dualistic itself.
8. Trans-rational faith is not the same as immature, pre-rational faith.  What Jesus means by “being a child” is the initial “beginner’s mind” and vulnerability that comes after we pass through the rings of fire in life.  From the outside, pre-rational and trans-rational look the same, until you draw close and see that one is free, and the other is either inexperienced, scared, or both.
9. One cannot “prove” the existence of god to someone who has not gone through the rings of fire.  Faith is reasonable only to those who have endured the temporary unknowing darkness, the “childhood,” and have returned on a different level of awareness.
10. Critics of religion attack the immature form of religion, a form that is largely dominant today.  But the mature believe is primarily claiming a different way of knowing which allows her to see many more things and allow them to co-exist.  You can tell adult and authentic faith by people’s ability to deal with darkness, failure, and non-validation of the ego – and by their quiet but confident joy!  Infantile religion insists on certitudes or “light” every step of the way and thus is not very happy.
11. In every age, country, religion, denomination, institution, diocese and monastery, there is invariably a leavening remnant who understands this.
12. This “remnant” consists of those who have suffered much or loved deeply.  These two experiences are the common crossover points, the rings of fire, and because love and suffering are available to all, the eyes of truth faith are available to all. – p. 116-121

 

Chapter 16: Opening the Door: Great Love and Great Suffering (p. 122-128)

Love and suffering are a part of most human lives.  Without doubt, they are the primary spiritual teachers more than any Bible, church, minister, sacrament or theologian. – p. 122-123

Love is what we are as an outpouring from God – but suffering often seems to be our opening to that need, that desire, and that identity.  If you never go there, you will not know the essentials.  You must love with “your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind and your whole strength” or it does not appear to be love at all. – p. 123

That’s how love works and who it leads to the giving up of control, which is my simple definition of suffering: whenever you are not in control. Within great love and great suffering, you do not have much choice, and you are being led. – p. 123

Great love makes you willing to risk everything.  The feeling of fusion or acceptance by another, or with the Other, at least temporarily overcomes your terrible sense of aloneness, separateness, and fear.  The ecstasy of this union makes you let down your barriers and see things inside of a new kind of wholeness and happiness for awhile. – p. 124

Love songs in every language celebrate this wondrous experience.  Almost as if there was nothing else in the world to sing about!  No wonder people run toward love. – p. 124

Strong taboos against promiscuity, solo sex and premarital sex in most religions are aimed at preventing the trivialization and making ordinary of this temporary but ecstatic seeing and crucial opening of the heart. – p. 124

This “ordinary-ing” is an endemic global problem now because of the easy access to internet pornography, where no opening of the heart is needed before the orgasmic “ecstasy” experience. – p. 124

To remain permanently “in love” something else is needed – which can be called mystical, whether it is based in nature, consciousness or God. – p. 124

Great suffering opens you in a different way.  Here, things happen against your will.  This is what makes it suffering.  Over time, because you have no choice, you can learn to give up your defended state.  Although we invariably go through Kubler-Ross’ stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression/resignation and (hopefully) acceptance, the situation is what it is.  – p. 124

Suffering might feel wrong, terminal, absurd, unjust, impossible, physically painful, unacceptable, or just outside of your comfort zone.  It might just be a long stoplight, or it might be a terminal prognosis for yourself or someone else.  Little and big, many things every day leave us out of control. – p. 125

Remember always that if you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it to those around you and even to the next generation. – p. 125

Suffering leads you in either of two directions.  It can make you very bitter and close you down.  Or it can make you wise, compassionate, and utterly open – either because your heart has been “softened,” or because suffering helps you realize you have nothing more to lose. – p. 125

Suffering often takes you to the edge of your inner resources where you “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). – p. 125

We must all pray for the grace of this second path of softening and opening.  I think this is the very meaning of the phrase “Deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer.  We aren’t asking to avoid suffering, but for God-softening. – p. 125

What does suffering look like?  Struggling with one’s shadow self (facing interior conflicts and moral failures), undergoing rejection and abandonment, daily humiliations, any kind of abuse, any form of limitation – all are gateways into deeper consciousness and the flowering of the soul. – p. 125

These experiences give us a privileged window into the naked now, because impossible contradictions are staring us in the face. – p. 125

Much needed healing, forgiving, and accepting one’s interior poverty and contradiction are normally necessary experiences to invite a person into the contemplative mind.  (Watch Paul do this in a classic way from the depths of Romans 7:14 to the heights of his mystic poetry in most of Romans 8.) – p. 125

In facing the contradictions in ourselves, the contradictions that we ourselves ARE, we become living icons of “both/and.”  Once you accept mercy, it is almost natural to hand it on to others. – p. 126

On the other hand, if you have never needed (or accepted) mercy and do not face your own inherent contradicitions, you can go from youth to old age, dualistically locked inside a mechanistic universe.  This, in my opinion, is the “sin against the Holy Spirit.”  It cannot be forgiven because there is a refusal to recognize that you even need mercy or forgiveness. – p. 126

In her great “Magnificat,” Mary speaks three times of God showing her “mercy.”  How much more so the rest of us? – p. 126

Great love has potential to open first the heart and then the mind space.  Great suffering has potential to open first the mind and then the heart space.  Eventually both need to be opened, and for such people nondual thinking can be the easiest. – p. 126

People who have not loved or suffered normally try to control everything with an either-or attitude, or all-or-nothing thinking.  This closed system is all they are prepared for.  This leaves them judgmental, demanding, unforgiving, and weak in empathy and sympathy.  And this is how they treat themselves as well.  They remain inside the prison of meritocracy, where all has to be deserved. – p. 126

We have done the people of God a great disservice by preaching the Gospel to them but not giving them the tools whereby they can obey that Gospel.  You cannot sincerely love another or forgive another’s offenses inside of dualistic consciousness.  – p. 127

There is a straight line between love and suffering.  Long-term loyalty will always lead us to a necessary pruning of the narcissistic self. If you love greatly, as you give up control to another, it is fairly certain you will soon suffer. – p. 128

Love, I believe, is the only way to initially and safely open the door of awareness and aliveness, and then suffering for that love keeps the door open and available for ever great growth.  They are the two great doors, and we dare not leave them closed. – p. 128

 

PART THREE

Chapter 17: What Non-dual Thinking is Not (p. 129-133)

Nondual thinking or contemplation is a sign that you have found the Absolute, but it is far beyond any words or ideas. … Words are mere guideposts now, and you recognize that most people have made them into hitching posts. – p. 130-131

Bonaventure said, “God is the One whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”  It takes a different mind to live in such a different space and time. – p. 130

Inside this broad and deep awareness, paradoxes are easily accepted and former mental contradictions seem to dissolve.  That’s why mystics can forgive and let go and show mercy and love enemies. – p. 131

They may look dangerous and even heretical to those who have not shared a similar experience, and that is a burden they must forever carry.  They have no time for being against; there is so much now to be for! – p. 131

The nondual/contemplative mind holds truth humbly, knowing that if it is true, it is its own best argument, and any formulation is still partial and “imperfect,” as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12.  Moral outrage at the ideas of others hardly ever serves God’s purposes, only our own. – p. 131-132

Non-polarity thinking (if you prefer that phrase) teaches you how to hold creative tensions, how to live with paradox and contradictions, how not to run from mystery, and therefore how to actually practice what all religions teach as necessary: compassion, mercy, loving kindness, patience, forgiveness, and humility. – p. 132

It allows you to live in the naked now and to resist the pulls toward any shameful past or any idyllic future. – p. 132

What you resist persists, but now in a disguised form – and inside of you. – p. 132

 

 

Chapter 18: The Watchful Gaze: What Do We Mean by Being “Awake”? (p. 134-139)

“How can we understand that part of you which does the understanding?” – Upanishads, II, 4, 14 – p. 134

What does awake mean?

Being happy?

Being more thoughtful, more reasonable?

Being grateful and appreciative?  Helpful and useful?

Being more productive, trying harder, doing better?

Being more aware of myself and God and others? – p. 134

These are results of being awake.  Being awake begins with:

Dropping to a level deeper than the passing “show.”

Becoming the calm seer of my dramas from that level and watching myself compassionately.

Dis-identifying with my emotional noise, and no longer letting it pull me here and there, up and down.

Not thinking about this or that, but instead “collapsing into” pure consciousness of nothing in particular. – p. 135

At first this doesn’t feel like “me.”  Up to now I thought my thinking was “me,” yet now my thinking has ceased.  This is the accurate meaning of Jesus’ teaching on “losing oneself to find oneself” in Luke 9:24. – p. 135

Soon this new and broader sense of “me” begins to feel like your deepest and truest self.  God, consciousness, me, silent emptiness, and simultaneous fullness all start to feel like the same wonderful thing.  This is what most traditions call “the soul” or the True Self, and what some might call the “collective unconscious” because when you live there you are somehow “shared” and participating in something larger. – p. 135-136

This awareness deepens gradually on the cellular level – breathing, heart, seeing, hearing, touching, aroma.  This is what is being refined in a regular contemplative “sit.”  The thinking level will be the last to fall because it always overstates its own importance and represses the other sources of awareness.  So you must practice ignoring it. – p. 136

Now there is not much room for compulsivity, fanaticism, trumped-up excitement, or even depression.  Equanimity is the very nature of the soul.  Jesus would have called it “the peace the world cannot give, nor take away.” – p. 136

I am now on a solid viewing platform, apart from the usual level of small self, where I can see things as God might see them.  This is the beginning of nondual thinking and is surely the “mind of Christ” in which Paul invites us to participate (1 Corinthians 2:16). – p. 137

You become a living paradox: at one and the same time utterly connected to everybody else in a compassionate and caring way, and absolutely free to be your own self. – p. 137

This is contemplation and dwelling in the naked now.  It is available always and everywhere. It is available to you, now.

 

Chapter 19: The Meaning of Spiritual Love (p. 140-142)

What I let God see and accept in me also becomes what I can then see and accept in myself.  And even more, it becomes that whereby I see everything else.  This is “radical grace.” This is the glue that binds the universe of persons together. – p. 141

Can you let God “look upon you in your loneliness,” as Mary put it in Luke 1:47, without waiting for some future moment when you believe you will be worthy?  To be loved in this way is to live in the naked now. – p. 142

 

Chapter 20: Sinners, Mystics, and Astrophysicists: How to Celebrate Paradox (p. 143-155)

“By and large Western civilization is a celebration of the illusion that good may exist without evil, light without darkness, and pleasure without pain.” – Alan Watts – p. 143

The great dogmas of the church are almost always totally paradoxical.  Think of Jesus = human/divine, Mary = virgin/mother, God = 1/3, and Eucharist = bread/Jesus. – p. 144

The very modern phenomenon of fundamentalism shows an almost complete incapacity to deal with paradox, and shows how much we have regressed. – p. 144

Each of us must learn to live with paradox, or we cannot live peacefully or happily even a single day of our lives.  In fact, we must even learn to love paradox, or we will never be wise, forgiving, or possess the patience of good relationships. – p. 145

You cannot see in total light or total darkness.  You must have variances of light to see.  The shadowlands are the only world we live in.  There is nothing on this created earth that is not a mixture at the same time of good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, endearing and maddening, living and dying.  St. Augustine called this the “paschal mystery.” – p. 145

A paradox is something that initially appears to be inconsistent or contradictory, but might not be a contradiction at all inside of a different frame or seen with a different eye.  One of religion’s main tasks is to give us that eye for paradox and mystery. – p. 146

Western Christianity has tended to objectify paradoxes in dogmatic statements that demand mental agreement instead of any inner experience of the mystery revealed. – p. 147

We worship these paradoxes in the living collision of opposites we call Jesus.  But then we tend to miss the underlying principle that Jesus, the Christ, has come to teach us about life and about ourselves. – p. 147

Jesus the Christ is the template of total paradox: human yet divine, heavenly yet earthly, physical yet spiritual, possessing a male body yet a female soul, killed yet alive, powerless yet powerful, victim yet victor, failure yet redeemer, marginalized yet central, singular yet everyone, incarnate yet cosmic, nailed yet liberated, resolving the great philosophical problem of the one and the many. – p. 147

And we have often reduced this momentous and cosmic Christ into the private savior of our personal agendas. – p. 147

Too often we say, “Believe in Jesus” without explaining the mystery Jesus reveals and without invitation to see the same truth in ourselves and all of creation. – p. 147

Jesus is the unique son of God AND the public beginning of the great parade of all who are partners with him “in his triumphal procession,” as Paul beautifully calls it (2 Corinthians 2:14). – p. 147

All statements about Jesus are also statements about the journey of the soul (birth, chosen-ness, ordinary life, initiation, career, misunderstandings and opposition, failure, death in several forms, resurrection, and return to God). – p. 147-148

All statements about the “Christ” are statements about the “body of Christ” too.  Christ is not Jesus’ last name, but the field of communion that includes us all with him.  You do not “believe” these doctrines; you know them. – p. 148

Doctrines and dogmas are very good pointers in the right direction.  They are intended to support rather than distract us from the full and risky journey with Jesus.  But often it is easier for people to believe things or even be moral than to go on the risky journey themselves. – p. 148

There are two groups who have a head start in this paradoxical seeing: sinners and mystics.  The sinners cannot deny their contradictions, and the mystics, who go on interior journeys with God, learn how to face and hold the contradictions, even weep and laugh over them. – p. 148

Trinitarian theology was almost made to order to humiliate the logic of Greek mind.  If actually encountered and meditated on, the doctrine of God as Trinity breaks down the mind’s binary system.  It makes either-or thinking totally useless. – p. 150

Unfortunately, we believe the doctrine of Trinity as a strange riddle, but never let it call our addiction to Greek logic into question.  So faith became a matter of believing impossible or strange things instead of an entranceway into a very different way of thinking altogether. – p. 150-151

We did not let the principle of three undo our dualistic principle of two. – p. 151

Light is both a wave and a particle, and at the same time.  This requires the reductionistic Western mind to reframe itself. The irony is that, today, religious people are often much more invested in either-or thinking than most scientists, who now know better. – p. 152

We religious folk want to “think” our way to God and be certain every step of the way, while still calling it faith and without any prayer, honest study, suffering, waiting, or inner journey. – p. 153

Ken Wilber is the best teacher today to help us see much of this and give us an “integral spirituality,” as he calls it.  Although he would self-identify as a Buddhist, he is our postmodern Thomas Aquinas, and one of the best friends that religion has ever had. – p. 153

In Christianity non-duality is not a philosophical principle, nor pantheism in any form, nor a denial of necessary differences.  The nondual paradox and mystery is for Christians a living person, an icon we can gaze upon and fall in love with.  Jesus is the living paradox, calling us to imitate him, as we realize that he “and the Father are one” (John 10:30). – p. 154

The mystery of the incarnation invites Christians to put together all the same contraries we see in Jesus.  That makes me joyful to be a Christian.  Already in the second century, Irenaeus called this the “scandal of the incarnation.”  It has remained a scandal to this day. – p. 154

Throughout most our history, we have been largely unable to find the pattern that connected all the mysteries, even though it had been fully given to us in Jesus. – p. 154

We worshiped Jesus instead of following him. – p. 154

We made Jesus into a mere religion instead of our leader in a journey toward union with God. – p. 154

Christianity became a religion of belonging instead of transformation. But God has continued graciously drawing us into the mystery anyway.  All of us.  You as well as I. – p. 155

One of the most subtle ways to avoid imitating someone is to put them on a pedestal, above and apart from us.  – p. 155

When you accept that Jesus was not only divine but human as well, you can begin to see how you are not separate from Jesus.  Open yourself to recognizing the great paradoxes within Jesus.  Then you can begin to hold those same opposites together within yourself. – p. 155

 

Chapter 21: What Every Good Leader Knows (p. 156-158)

There is no greater training for true leadership than living in the naked now.  There we can set aside our own mental constructs and lead situations more imaginatively, with the clearer vision of one who lives beyond oneself.

Here are some insights into what every good, nondual leader knows and practices:

1. Good leaders see alternatives.
2. Good leaders move forward by influencing events and inspiring more than by ordering or demanding.
3. Good leaders know that every one-sided solution is doomed ahead of time to failure.  It is only a postponement of the problem.
4. Good leaders now that total dilemmas are very few.
5. Good leaders search for middle ground and work for win/win situations.
6. Good leaders know there is no perfect solution.  That is the lie and false promise of the dualistic mind and all-or-nothing thinking.
7. Good leaders know that law and obedience can inform you only about what is illegal or immoral; it cannot of itself lead you to God, truth, goodness, or beauty.
8. Good leaders know that rapid recourse to the law might be seeking the will of God, but it might also be seeking to avoid the necessary self doubt and the prayer required to live in faith, hope, and love.
9. Good leaders know that patiently sought compromise and consensus seek to discover community values and give more people personal personal investment in the outcome.
10. Good leaders ask, “How can this situation achieve good for the largest number and for the next generations?”

 

Chapter 22: The Principle of Likeness: In the End, It All Comes Down to This (p. 159-162)

Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.  Call it the “principle of likeness” if you will.  The breakthrough is that when you honor and accept the divine image within yourself, you cannot help but see it in everybody else, too, and you know it is just as undeserved and unmerited as it is in you. – p. 160

Your own wholeness sees and calls forth wholeness in others.  That is why it is so pleasant to be around whole (and holy) people. – p. 160

We mend and renew the world by strengthening inside ourselves what we seek outside ourselves, and not by demanding it of others or trying to force it on others. – p. 160

• If you want a reconciled outer world, reconcile your own inner world.
• If you notice other people’s irritability, let go of your own.
• If the world seems desperate, let go of your own despair.
• If your situation feels hopeless, honor the one spot of hope inside you.
• If you want to find God, then honor God within you, and you will always see God beyond you.  For it is only God in you who knows where and how to look for God. – p. 161

 

Appendices: Practicing the Naked Now

Appendix 1: Levels of Development (p. 163-165)

One of the more important breakthroughs in understanding why some people seem to “get it” (whatever “it” is) while many do not get it or even oppose or distort it, has now come to be recognized by teachers as diverse as Jean Piaget, Lawrence Romberg, Abraham Maslow, James Fowler, Clare Grave, and Ken Wilber. Their insights remind us of Thomas Aquinas’s observation that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.”

In simple terms, whatever you teach or receive will be heard on at least eight to ten different levels, according to the inner, psychological, and spiritual maturity of the listener. Level 1 people will misuse the Bible, the sacraments, the priesthood, spiritual direction, the Enneagram, or anything else that is presented to them. Levels 7-9 people will make lemonade out of even sour or unripe lemons.

It does little good merely to assert doctrines or passages of Scripture and, because people assent to them, to assume that they have any existential knowledge of what they are talking about. You can perfectly assent to the Catholic belief in the Real Presence, for example, and be totally incapable of presence yourself— so there will be no inner experience and no transformation of the self. One will manipulate or use the very doctrine for ego enhancement purposes and control. This is likely what Jesus is referring to when he quotes Isaiah 29:13 in his Sermon on the Mount: “These people have all the right words, but no change of heart. It is all just a lesson memorized, a human commandment.”

Following is my own attempt to correlate the various schemas of development that I have studied. In my experience, we move from level 1 to level 9. (Note that this is merely a teaching tool; real life is much more subtle.)

1. My body and self-image are who I am. Leads to a dominance of security, safety, and defense needs. Dualistic/ polarity thinking.

2. My external behavior is who I am. Needs to look good outside and to hide or disguise the contrary evidence from others; I become so practiced at this game that the evidence is eventually hidden from myself, too. This emergence of the shadow is very common among conservatives.

3. My thoughts/feelings are who I am. Development of intellect and will to have better thoughts and feelings and also control them so others do not know, and so, finally, that I do not see their self-serving and shadowy character myself. This education as a substitute for transformation is very common among liberals and the educated.

Normally a major defeat, shock, or humiliation must be suffered and passed through to go beyond this stage.

4. My deeper intuitions and felt knowledge in my body are who I am. This is such a breakthrough and so informative and helpful that many stay at this level. Leads to individualism, self-absorption, and inner work as a substitute for any real encounter with otherness.

5. My shadow self is who I am. The dark night. My weakness comes to overwhelm me, as I face myself in my raw, unvarnished, uncivilized state. Without guidance, grace, and prayer, most go running back to previous identities.

6. I am empty and powerless. “God’s Waiting Room.” Almost any attempt to save the self by any superior behavior, technique, morality, positive role, or religious devotion will lead to regression. All you can do is wait and ask and trust. Here is where you learn faith and discover that darkness is the much better teacher. God is about to become real.

7. I am much more than who I thought I was. Death of the false self, and birth of the True Self. But because you are not at home here yet, it will first of all feel like a void, even if a wonderful void. “Luminous darkness,” as John of the Cross would call it.

8. “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Henceforth there is only God, or as Teresa says, “One knows God in oneself, and knows oneself in God.” All else is seen as a passing ego possession, and I do not need to protect it, promote it, or prove it — to anyone.

9. I am who I am — “just me.” Warts and all.  It is enough to be human, no window dressing necessary. Now you know religion is just a finger pointing to the moon, but not the moon itself. There is no need to appear to be anything but who I really am. Fully detached from self-image and living in God’s image of me — which includes and loves both the good and the bad. This is the serenity and freedom of the saints. Total nonduality.

 

Appendix 2: Training for the “Third Eye” (p. 166-167)

The lamp of the body is the eye. — Matthew 6:22

The ego self is the unobserved self. If you do not find an objective standing point from which to look back at yourself, you will almost always be egocentric — identified with yourself instead of in relationship to yourself.

Most of us have been given no training or practice in this, because we thought it was all negative self-criticism instead of calm self-observation (moral examination of conscience instead of examination of consciousness). Ego is not bad, except as it takes over when you do not see truthfully and completely.

Much of the early work of contemplation is finding that stance and learning how to return there in all moments of emotional turmoil (positive as much as negative), until you can eventually live more and more of your life there. You will find yourself smiling, sighing, and “weeping” at yourself, more than either hating or congratulating yourself (which of themselves are both ego needs).

Eventually, you will discover a detached place of quiet self-observation.

It must be without moral judgment, or you will tire of it and rebel against it.

It must be compassionate and calmly objective.

It names the moment for what it is.

It names my reaction without a need to praise or blame — it just sees it.

To see my reaction for what it is, it takes away this reaction’s addictive and self-serving character.

It deflates my reaction and disempowers it from “possessing” me.

Now I have a feeling instead of the feeling having me.

It maintains the good sense of “I” but without ego attachment.

It actually fosters much deeper, broader, more honest feelings.

It also gives me a strong sense of “I,” because there is now no need to totally eliminate or deny the negative part. (My full self is accepted.)

Ironically, the truly destructive part of the negative is exposed and falls away as now unnecessary. To see the negative is to defeat it, for evil relies upon denial and disguise.

The Christian name for this stable witness is the Holy Spirit. Already in place, and doing all the giving, filling in all the gaps.  Already compassionate and more merciful than we are.  Never demanding the perfection of any technique, practice, or asceticism.

One only needs to constantly connect with our deepest level of desiring, which, paradoxically, is much harder than mere will power and technique. The Spirit bears common witness with our spirit that we are indeed children of God (Romans 8:16). It is a common knowing, a participative event, and feels like you are being “known through,” but with total acceptance and forgiveness. This will change your life! You will then “know as fully as you are known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

Appendix 3: Litany of the Holy Spirit (p. 168-169)

Appendix 4: Practicing Awareness (p. 170)

Appendix 5: Christian Tantra: The “Welling Up” Exercise (p. 171-172)

Appendix 6: The Prayer of the Self-Emptying One (p. 173)

Philippians 2:6-11 is thought to be an early Christian hymn to the Christ journey: a path of kenosis (self-emptying), incarnating in the “slave,” “as all humans are,” and even all the way to the bottom of total “acceptance” and “even humbler yet” (the cross). This allows God to raise Jesus up in God’s time and God’s way, and “name” him anew in a glorious state of transformation.

This hymn can be taken as a rather precise guide for the process of contemplative prayer, if we apply to the soul the same mystery that was in Christ Jesus. As mentioned throughout the book, take it as a rule: “Everything we can say of Jesus, we can say also about the soul.”” This is exactly how he becomes the icon of transformation for us, and why he says “follow me.” Notice how it begins with this verse:

“In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus— ”

Your “state” is also divine. Hold it confidently (the True Self in God).

But do not cling to it with any form of self-validation or importance.

Instead, “empty yourself” and refuse to self-name — either up or down, positively or negatively.

Enter fully into your humble human state of failure and weakness, even to the point of complete detachment, if called to or if possible.

Now God can pick you up at the right time, when God is ready.

God can “name” you correctly, secretly, truthfully, and always lovingly, by Him and as His (Experienced True Self).

This Self is indestructible, un-offendable, and already in heaven.

Note that shortly thereafter, there is a final affirming and confirming passage: “It is God who for God’s own loving purpose puts both this will and this action into you.”  (2:13)

Even the sitting down, dying for twenty minutes, and still standing up afterward is a perfect metaphor for what is happening in prayer—always the mystery of death and resurrection.

Appendix 7: The Virgin Prayer (p. 174-175)

Appendix 8: Walking Meditation: The Mirror Medallion (p. 176-177)

A Joyful Mind (p. 178-179)

Joy and mind. Those are not words that you would normally put together, but they inspired the eleventh-century Richard of St. Victor, a Scottish canon teaching in Paris, and became the themes of his two books on the contemplative mind, Benjamin Major and Benjamin Minor. The titles are taken from one obscure passage from Psalm 68:27, where “Benjamin” is described as leading a procession into the temple in mentis excessu, which was translated as “with a joyful mind” or “with an ecstatic mind.” This made me ask: What might a joyful mind be?

1. When your mind does not need to be right.
2. When you no longer need to compare yourself with others.
3. When you no longer need to compete — not even in your own head.
4. When your mind can be creative, but without needing anyone to know.
5. When you can live in contentment with whatever the moment offers.
6. When you do not need to analyze or judge things in or out, positive or negative.
7. When your mind does not need to be in charge, but can serve the moment with gracious and affirming information.
8. When your mind follows the intelligent lead of your heart.
9. When your mind is curious and interested, not suspicious and interrogating.When your mind does not “brood over injuries.”
10. When you do not need to humiliate, critique, or defeat those who have hurt you—not even in your mind.
11. When your mind does not need to create self-justifying story lines.
12. When your mind does not need the future to be better than today.
13. When your mind can let go of obsessive or negative thoughts.
14. When your mind can think well of itself, but without needing to.
15. When your mind can accept yourself as you are, warts and all.
16. When your mind can surrender to what is.
17. When your mind does not divide and always condemn one side or group.
18. When your mind can find truth on both sides.
19. When your mind fills in the gaps with “the benefit of the doubt” for both friend and enemy.
20. When your mind can critique and also detach from the critique.
21. When your mind can wait, listen, and learn.
22. When your mind can live satisfied without resolution or closure.
23. When your mind can forgive and actually “forget.”
24. When your mind can admit it was wrong and change.
25. When your mind can stop judging and critiquing itself.
26. When you don’t need to complain or worry to get motivated.
27. When you can observe your mind contracting into self-preservation or self-validation, and then laugh or weep over it.
28. When you can actually love with your mind.
29. When your mind can find God in all things.

 

The Shining Word “And” (p. 180-182)

1. “And” teaches us to say yes
2. “And” allows us to be both-and
3. “And” keeps us from either-or
4. “And” teaches us to be patient and long-suffering
5. “And” is willing to wait for insight and integration
6. “And” keeps us from dualistic thinking
7. “And” does not divide the field of the moment
8. “And” helps us to live in the always imperfect now
9. “And” keeps us inclusive and compassionate toward everything
10. “And” demands that our contemplation become action
11. “And” insists that our action is also contemplative
12. “And” heals our racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism
13. “And” keeps us from the false choice of liberal or conservative
14. “And” allows us to critique both sides of things
15. “And” allows us to enjoy both sides of things
16. “And” is far beyond any one nation or political party
17. “And” helps us face and accept our own dark side
18. “And” allows us to ask for forgiveness and to apologize
19. “And” is the mystery of paradox in all things
20. “And” is the way of mercy
21. “And” makes daily, practical love possible
22. “And” does not trust love if it is not also justice
23. “And” does not trust justice if it is not also love
24. “And” is far beyond my religion versus your religion
25. “And” allows us to be both distinct and yet united
26. “And” is the very Mystery of Trinity

 

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