Speaker 1: Normally, when you give yourself to great love, you're setting
Speaker 1: yourself on a path of great suffering. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf h thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Father Richard Roar, a
Speaker 1: globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening
Speaker 1: within Christian mysticism and the Perennial tradition. He is a
Speaker 1: Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of
Speaker 1: the Center for Action and Contemplation. Richard's teaching is grounded
Speaker 1: in the Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy practices of contemplation and self emptying,
Speaker 1: expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized.
Speaker 1: He is the author of numerous books, including The Naked Now,
Speaker 1: Falling Upward, Immortal Diamond, and his newest book, The Divine Dance,
Speaker 1: The Trinity and Your Transformation. If you value the content
Speaker 1: we put out each week, then we need your help.
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Speaker 1: And here's part two of our interview with Richard Rore,
Speaker 1: picking up from kind of where we left off talking
Speaker 1: about changing ourselves as a primary thing. One of the
Speaker 1: things that usually drives us to want to change ourselves
Speaker 1: is suffering. You talk a great deal about suffering being
Speaker 1: one of the main tools of transformation. You actually talk
Speaker 1: about love and suffering as the two. You say almost
Speaker 1: without exception. Great spiritual teachers will always have strong direct
Speaker 1: guidance about love and suffering. If you never go there,
Speaker 1: you'll never ever know the essentials. You always quote me
Speaker 1: so well, I just got to repeat it, you know.
Speaker 1: First of all, let me give my simple, non dramatic
Speaker 1: definition of suffering. It's whenever you're not in control, So
Speaker 1: you have to practice not being in control, or frankly,
Speaker 1: you become a control freak. And it's the situations where
Speaker 1: you're not in control where you can hand over control
Speaker 1: to someone else. I'm sure we learned this in every relationship.
Speaker 1: For a marriage to survive, you have to learn it.
Speaker 1: But I think for a relationship with the divine you
Speaker 1: have to learn it too. That if you're gonna allow
Speaker 1: someone else to steer your ship, you have to, at
Speaker 1: least on occasion, give up self steering, you know, So
Speaker 1: that's called suffering. Uh use the silly example of a
Speaker 1: red light where for thirty seconds you don't get your way.
Speaker 1: You want to get across that street, and who this
Speaker 1: doesn't know that experience. It's essential messaging, it's foundational learning.
Speaker 1: People who don't learn that become entitled narcissistic control freaks.
Speaker 1: As I said before, now I think none of us
Speaker 1: once major suffering. But I think that's when it gets
Speaker 1: hard to understand why is so much asked of some?
Speaker 1: For the last two years, I've been thinking of the
Speaker 1: women and children and Syrian refugee camps. You know, why, why,
Speaker 1: why should anybody have to suffer that much? I don't
Speaker 1: have a rational answer for that. Mystically, I can see
Speaker 1: it as the eternal suffering of God, and God is
Speaker 1: going to transform all of it. See. I see Jesus
Speaker 1: as a map, a map of the human journey. Carl
Speaker 1: Young said that too. And we came forth from God
Speaker 1: and we will return to God, and they're suffering in between.
Speaker 1: If I couldn't see that that this this suffering is
Speaker 1: going towards some kind of transformation, it would be very
Speaker 1: hard for me not to be very cynical, very negative,
Speaker 1: very uh disbelieving. I have to believe that there's meaning,
Speaker 1: and I use that word meaning with all the meaning
Speaker 1: I can put into the word meaning. Uh. If there
Speaker 1: isn't some meaning to suffering, you have every good reason
Speaker 1: to be a bitter person, especially once it happens to
Speaker 1: your family, or your child or your partner. But apparently
Speaker 1: you've heard me say the normal two paths of expanding
Speaker 1: the soul are great love and great suffering. And normally,
Speaker 1: when you give yourself to great love, you're setting yourself
Speaker 1: on a path of great suffering. It's almost inevitable. Now,
Speaker 1: the way I teach contemplation is that I don't think
Speaker 1: you have to learn my sophisticated or zen boo it
Speaker 1: a sophisticated way of teaching meditation or contemplation. But I'll
Speaker 1: tell you this, if you do learn it, it is
Speaker 1: a way of sustaining what you learn in great love
Speaker 1: and great suffering over the long haul. You see, the
Speaker 1: great love, as you well know, the honeymoon cannot be maintained,
Speaker 1: that wonderful period of the honeymoon and the and the
Speaker 1: unique liminal space we're in after in grief too, and
Speaker 1: great suffering, thank god, that can be maintained in that
Speaker 1: level of sadness or depression. But you are in a
Speaker 1: non dual state during those periods, in the honeymoon period
Speaker 1: and the grief period. Now, what you're learning in contemplative
Speaker 1: practice strictly called is learning how to stay there, the
Speaker 1: wisdom you learn of of holding the field open. I
Speaker 1: don't need to divide to what I like and what
Speaker 1: I don't like. It is what it is, what it is,
Speaker 1: and it's okay that for contemporary men and women, has
Speaker 1: to be learned, has to be taught. Otherwise you lose
Speaker 1: the honeymoon. You lose the wisdom of suffering. Usually a
Speaker 1: matter of months, sometimes weeks, sometimes days. Why. I think
Speaker 1: it was Thomas Merton and I'm just gonna paraphrase, and
Speaker 1: I think you mentioned it in one of your books,
Speaker 1: is you know watch out for success? You know is
Speaker 1: one of the surest ways to avoid transformation is to
Speaker 1: be very successful, because you don't why change if you
Speaker 1: feel like things are going well. That's why Jesus says
Speaker 1: it's so hard for a rich man. And know what
Speaker 1: he's talking about, because a rich man is a man's
Speaker 1: given his whole life to his personal success. Nor Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Suffering as a as a path to transformation is is
Speaker 1: relatively well known. Christa Tippett, who does on being and
Speaker 1: I think you had a conversation with her not too
Speaker 1: long ago. Yes, it's supposed to come out around Easter.
Speaker 1: She told me, Yeah, I can't wait to hear that one.
Speaker 1: But she says something along the lines of, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't become great in spite of our suffering, but
Speaker 1: because of our suffering. But you also use the phrase
Speaker 1: that says, if you don't transform your suffering, it becomes
Speaker 1: a wood transmitted. You transmit it. So what happens One
Speaker 1: person becomes another person and they become wonderful and warm
Speaker 1: and loving, and somebody else becomes bitical bitical that's a
Speaker 1: word for cynical together a bitical person. Um. What is
Speaker 1: the what are the elements that cause transformation to occur?
Speaker 1: You know, I said to the class last week. When
Speaker 1: I see people change for the good is when there's
Speaker 1: this I'm gonna call it judicious combination of feeling safe
Speaker 1: and okay with conflict. You have to feel safe and okay,
Speaker 1: are you won't have a big enough soul to embrace
Speaker 1: the conflict. But there has to be conflict. Uh. The
Speaker 1: way I've been teaching it to the students for growth
Speaker 1: to happen. Uh, I say, picture three boxes order, disorder, reorder,
Speaker 1: and there's no NonStop flight from the first box to
Speaker 1: the third box. To grow up, you must go through
Speaker 1: conflict disorder. Now Christian language would be the cross that
Speaker 1: a wrench has to be thrown into your neatly constructed
Speaker 1: first box of so called order, your salvation project, as
Speaker 1: Thomas Merton calls it, it has to fall apart because
Speaker 1: you're not in love with God at that point, and
Speaker 1: you're in love with the idea of being in love,
Speaker 1: and you're in love with yourself. You don't know that
Speaker 1: when you're young, but of course you are. That's you
Speaker 1: only can see that later and say I did not
Speaker 1: yet know how to love, and yet God used me anyway,
Speaker 1: and God grew me up anyway. It doesn't mean it
Speaker 1: was wrong. So when there's this wonderful combination of enough
Speaker 1: conflict and enough safety, just put it that way, that's
Speaker 1: when it moves to the next level. When there's too
Speaker 1: much conflict and not enough safety, it just gets cynical.
Speaker 1: You get angry, you get rebellious. You have to feel
Speaker 1: yourself being held, being sustained, being believed in. And that's
Speaker 1: what a partnership does for you. That Okay, I can't
Speaker 1: believe in myself right now, But she smiled at me,
Speaker 1: you understand, that will hold me for another half day.
Speaker 1: And and and that's why we have to give that to
Speaker 1: one another, because we can't always engender it inside of ourselves,
Speaker 1: so we need to mirror the best from one another.
Speaker 1: That's what friendship means, That's what love means. I think
Speaker 1: back on my moments of my big moments of suffering,
Speaker 1: you know, heroin, addiction, a divorce, and I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: what was what was holding me in those moments, and
Speaker 1: I think the first one was alcoholics anonymous. He was
Speaker 1: holding me. And then I think the second one, funny enough,
Speaker 1: was Pema Chodren, even though I don't know her, but
Speaker 1: there was something about her wisdom, her wisdom and that
Speaker 1: belief in your essential goodness underneath of it all, and
Speaker 1: she's a marvelous teacher. Sure well, good for you. Both
Speaker 1: makes sense to me, you know, But God gave you
Speaker 1: that to hold you. Yeah, I'm going to read something
Speaker 1: else you say, because I mean you say it so well.
Speaker 1: I can't help it. But the loss and renewal pattern
Speaker 1: is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be
Speaker 1: called a secret at all. Yet is still a secret,
Speaker 1: probably because we do not want to see it. We
Speaker 1: don't want to embark on a further journey if it
Speaker 1: feels like going down, especially after we have put so
Speaker 1: much sound and fury into going up. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: gist of my book, Falling Upward. Now. The Catholic language
Speaker 1: for that, which most people don't understand, was the Paschal mystery.
Speaker 1: And and it was called a mystery because it isn't logical,
Speaker 1: it isn't common sense. At the way up is the
Speaker 1: way down. That the way through is the way of
Speaker 1: letting it fall apart. The previous stage always has to
Speaker 1: disappoint you, fall apart for you to go on to
Speaker 1: the next stage. You know, if I had to say
Speaker 1: no offense if you were raised in the Protestant tradition.
Speaker 1: But the great Achilles heel of Protestantism because of the
Speaker 1: period of history it emerged in after the sixteenth century
Speaker 1: where we were all climbing and capitalizing and achieving and performing,
Speaker 1: is there's almost no theology of darkness, almost none. You
Speaker 1: have to go to the Catholic mystics. You have to
Speaker 1: go to the first years to get all the teaching
Speaker 1: on darkness. And that might be the greatest single liability
Speaker 1: of Protestant spirituality that when suffering darkness, absurdity, desolation, tragedy come,
Speaker 1: there aren't the tools to know how to deal with it.
Speaker 1: You can't just quote a scripture quote. They have to
Speaker 1: be inner tool us. And that's why the recovery movement
Speaker 1: has been so important, because I think the Recovery movement
Speaker 1: brought a language of darkness, if you will. Powerlessness was
Speaker 1: their word to a Protestant world that didn't understand any
Speaker 1: tools for dealing with powerlessness whatsoever. So thank God, I
Speaker 1: always say, when the spirit isn't getting through, the main
Speaker 1: line of the spirit comes through the duct. Work has
Speaker 1: to come through indirectly, like of course, and miracles, payment
Speaker 1: Chaudrin and UH twelve step program, those are all works
Speaker 1: of the spirit. You know, Thomas Aquinas taught us in
Speaker 1: the Catholic tradition, when you hear truth, don't ask who
Speaker 1: said it, because that will prejudice you. Just ask is
Speaker 1: it true? And if it's true, it's always from the
Speaker 1: Holy Spirit. If it's true, it's all how could that
Speaker 1: not be true? If it's true, it's of the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1: I don't care if pain with Shadrin said it and
Speaker 1: she's Ludha's two cares. You know, Jesus said, and he
Speaker 1: was a Jew, So you know, if I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: take Christians, I'm in trouble. Yeah. I try and do
Speaker 1: the same thing with listening to music, Like if I
Speaker 1: put on like you know, a Spotify or whatever it's playing,
Speaker 1: I'll hear a song before I go to see who
Speaker 1: it is. I want to listen to it. I want
Speaker 1: to experience it without because as soon as I know
Speaker 1: who it is, I immediately have some Oh he's gonna
Speaker 1: be good, She's going to be exactly. So you've just
Speaker 1: taught me something. I like that. Yeah that makes sense
Speaker 1: because I can see my mind work that way. Well,
Speaker 1: I won't like him, Yeah, I can't. I can't hear
Speaker 1: it clearly once I know what it is. One of
Speaker 1: the things that you talk about is necessary versus unnecessary suffering.
Speaker 1: I think that's a theme on the show a lot.
Speaker 1: We I talk a lot of the second arrow parable
Speaker 1: from Buddhism. I don't know if you're familiar with that
Speaker 1: one where we get shot with the first arrow and
Speaker 1: that's kind of what life does to us, right, and
Speaker 1: then we tend to shoot ourselves with the second arrow
Speaker 1: on the second arrow is what all this means? Oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I break my leg and I'm the kind
Speaker 1: of person who always break my leg? Or why does
Speaker 1: this happen to me? Or you know, and you talk
Speaker 1: about you quote young saying that so much unnecessary suffering
Speaker 1: comes into the world because we won't accept the legitimate suffering. Again,
Speaker 1: don't take offense. I don't mean to say Jesus my
Speaker 1: only teacher, but I think it was important in the
Speaker 1: Christian mythology, the Christian storyline, that Jesus suffering be undeserved,
Speaker 1: be unjust. That's crucial to the story because of the
Speaker 1: very point you made, because if it's just, well he deserved,
Speaker 1: if that changes it. But to deal with undeserved suffering,
Speaker 1: which is most of it, let's be honest, right, almost
Speaker 1: all of it? Who deserves anything? That's the breakthrough too,
Speaker 1: that Jesus was the the willing victim, even though he
Speaker 1: was not the unworthy person. That takes such a high
Speaker 1: level of transformation to accept that when we're in it,
Speaker 1: When we're in that position, everything in us wants to say.
Speaker 1: You know, I was jail chaplaineer for fourteen years in Albuquerque,
Speaker 1: and I would say, I never knew whether it was true,
Speaker 1: but my suspicion was half of the people I worked
Speaker 1: with should not have been in jail, maybe more than
Speaker 1: half for all kinds of reasons, but a lot of were.
Speaker 1: They didn't do it, you understand, And I just would
Speaker 1: have to work through that with them sitting there every
Speaker 1: day knowing you didn't do it. Yeah, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1: Can you what it must take to not be better
Speaker 1: and people? Man? Yeah? Or when a friend lied about you,
Speaker 1: bore false witness against you, can you imagine the kind
Speaker 1: of holiness? I don't know what other word to use.
Speaker 1: Wholeness and holiness are the same word that it takes
Speaker 1: too to wake up each day and be happy. I
Speaker 1: was just on the phone with a prisoner yesterday, and
Speaker 1: young man who was I'm quite sure falsely imprisoned. You know,
Speaker 1: he thinks he might be there the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: He's just in his early twenties. Just ah, So I'm
Speaker 1: not really answering your question, I'm talking around it. But
Speaker 1: but if we can't deal with necessary suffering the cost
Speaker 1: of being a human being, which is I don't always
Speaker 1: get my own way, I get old, my body doesn't
Speaker 1: work like it used to when I was your age,
Speaker 1: and all of that is so hard to accept that
Speaker 1: and I can't change it, you know it, It is
Speaker 1: that way. But if I can't surrender those things, imagine
Speaker 1: if if I'm falsely accused tomorrow and oh so, you've
Speaker 1: got to use every chance of not getting your own way,
Speaker 1: not being in control. You've got to use it as
Speaker 1: a practice, as a practicing, uh so that you don't
Speaker 1: turn bitter, and you can help other people not turn bitter.
Speaker 1: Because the natural movement of the human journey is it devolves,
Speaker 1: you know, the the rejections, betrayals, abandonments of life, the
Speaker 1: people who've lied about you, walked away from you, starting
Speaker 1: in your childhood. They pile up. And I'm about to
Speaker 1: turn seventy four in a few weeks, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of pile up there now. By the grace of God,
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm better. I don't think I'm cynical,
Speaker 1: but I have to fight it every day, every day,
Speaker 1: not always consciously. But you know, like I said, I
Speaker 1: wake up yes today feeling just I think that's some
Speaker 1: of that left over hurt. When I gave the male
Speaker 1: initiation rights, I we had a whole day devoted to
Speaker 1: grief work. And I defined grief as I talked to
Speaker 1: those men as unfinished hurt. And I would just talk
Speaker 1: to them for a while to find how much unfinished
Speaker 1: hurt they had in their life. You would not believe
Speaker 1: men who were completely healthy, normal, happy, successful, smiling once
Speaker 1: they were given space, once they were given permission to
Speaker 1: go there. I mean, I saw a lot of men sobbing,
Speaker 1: unfinished hurt, and I think we all have to compartmentalize
Speaker 1: it because we've got to get through another day. I
Speaker 1: don't have time to feel this. And we men are
Speaker 1: especially good at that, as you probably know, compartmentalizing it,
Speaker 1: putting it to his side, and so wanting somewhere to
Speaker 1: be a little boy again and just cry it through.
Speaker 1: But that's what a lot of my men's work was
Speaker 1: helping men do that. But nothing in this American system
Speaker 1: gives them that freedom, space or permission. So they're by
Speaker 1: the time their age, they're highly stuffed men. No wonder
Speaker 1: they become addicts. I drink vodka every night too, or
Speaker 1: something if allowed, that is just eating away at you.
Speaker 1: Sure whoa slow down, easy on that trigger finger on
Speaker 1: the fast forward button on your podcast player, because I've
Speaker 1: got more good news. Was very Casey case Some of
Speaker 1: you it was pretty good. I used I love my boy.
Speaker 1: That was it. I do love Casey Caseum, and I
Speaker 1: can't form a complete sentence when you bring him up
Speaker 1: where he could. He was very good at forming very good.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. The winner of the first week of the
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Speaker 1: And now back to the wonderful show with Richard Roar.
Speaker 1: Some people call him Papa Bear, so I'm not quite
Speaker 1: sure why, but just leave it alone. Chris hop a bear.
Speaker 1: Actually this is the rest of the show with Papa Bear,
Speaker 1: Part two, because last week was Papa Bear Part one.
Speaker 1: A lot of us turned to spirituality with the hope
Speaker 1: of never hurting again, and I think that's why a
Speaker 1: lot of people. It feels to me like on a
Speaker 1: spiritual bunny hop one thing to the next to the next,
Speaker 1: because I'm waiting for it to take all the pain away.
Speaker 1: And as I've gotten older, I think I've recognized it's
Speaker 1: going to take unnecessary pain away, but it's not going
Speaker 1: to take the pain. And my mother died away, right,
Speaker 1: That's gonna happen. It's just the way life is. And
Speaker 1: the comfort I think comes from knowing that's part of
Speaker 1: being human and not taking that stuff personally. And I
Speaker 1: think that's what, like, you know, your work does. I
Speaker 1: think for people also, it's like, this is going to
Speaker 1: happen and it's not personal. You know, I take what's
Speaker 1: rather common American occurrence, but I've just known so many
Speaker 1: people just in the last year, the dumb thing of
Speaker 1: a car wreck. Uh, why did that have to happen
Speaker 1: to me? And why now I was on the way
Speaker 1: to this It was a normal day, and my entire
Speaker 1: not just day, but the next few months are thrown
Speaker 1: into complete disarray because if that stupid guy ran a
Speaker 1: red light. Oh you want to talk about unnecessary suffering,
Speaker 1: but of a mundane nature. You know you aren't even hurt. Maybe,
Speaker 1: but it's a lot of pain insurance and sucks. But
Speaker 1: but we do have a we do have a very
Speaker 1: strong tendency to make it worse. I'd be the same way.
Speaker 1: I'd be pissing and moaning if I got hit by
Speaker 1: a car. I've never been in a serious accident because
Speaker 1: we like to go on the course we're on, don't we,
Speaker 1: And we don't want anything to be in a re
Speaker 1: doing it. Yep. And I guess that is human nature.
Speaker 1: That can be the power of suffering is that it
Speaker 1: interrupts your course. You have to you don't have to
Speaker 1: think as as you know, I preached in much of
Speaker 1: the world for many years, and without any doubt, people
Speaker 1: in the poor countries and poor villages are much more
Speaker 1: practiced and not getting their own way. They just don't
Speaker 1: show that immediate pushback and resent what that we do.
Speaker 1: It said, Oh, yeah, well this is what every day is.
Speaker 1: I don't get my own way. Yeah. I was watching
Speaker 1: The Sopranos and in the show there's this fascinating part
Speaker 1: where there's a Russian woman who's talking to Tony Soprano
Speaker 1: and she says, the problem is you Americans expect that
Speaker 1: nothing bad is going to happen, and the rest of
Speaker 1: the world we expect that mostly bad is going to happen,
Speaker 1: and it ends up sometimes being a grace. Now. I
Speaker 1: know it can be fatalism. I know it can be
Speaker 1: a negative worldview, but very often they can maintain peace
Speaker 1: easier than weekend. And I think if you tying it
Speaker 1: back to this middle way thinking is to to recognize
Speaker 1: it's not all suffering and it's not all wonderful, it's
Speaker 1: very good, very good. I want to talk about clear seeing,
Speaker 1: about seeing things clearly as another phrase. I think that
Speaker 1: comes through your work a lot. And you say that
Speaker 1: postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted as it
Speaker 1: was for the ancients. We have to do all the
Speaker 1: enchanting ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused and doubtful. You
Speaker 1: know Allen Barfield, who was the spiritual teacher of J. R. R. Tolkin, C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis and T. S. Elliott. He spoke of original participation
Speaker 1: and he says there's strong evidence that the ancient people's
Speaker 1: who naturally felt that they belonged to the forest, to
Speaker 1: the family, to the universe, to the sky. It was
Speaker 1: an enchanted universe for them and they were a part
Speaker 1: of the enchanted salvation came to use that Christian word
Speaker 1: overused word, Uh, it came much more naturally we grow
Speaker 1: up and you use the word postmodern too. We grew
Speaker 1: up in a world that is disenchanted where we're in.
Speaker 1: The philosophers call it the state of alienation. You know
Speaker 1: that we don't feel we belong to the universe, to
Speaker 1: the forest, to the animals, to to even our families.
Speaker 1: I mean, most people are alienated. I'm told most people
Speaker 1: have strong alienation from their own family, you know, just
Speaker 1: because we don't have the skills of human relationship even
Speaker 1: at that level. So that creates a very incoherent universe
Speaker 1: where you're grasping for belonging, meaning, goal, purpose, identity. It's
Speaker 1: no surprise to me we have such a high amount
Speaker 1: of mental and emotional illness. I'm sure any of us
Speaker 1: can name ten people we know who, frank you, we're
Speaker 1: not trying to put them down, but they're not real,
Speaker 1: stable or not real. One of them might be behind
Speaker 1: a microphone or I don't think so. But it breaks
Speaker 1: are my heart the amount of unhappy, unstable people our
Speaker 1: culture is producing. And I find, as someone who has
Speaker 1: worked in the healing ministry trying to pray for people's
Speaker 1: healing and counsel them toward healing, that it's very hard
Speaker 1: to heal an individual when the whole culture is so unhealthy.
Speaker 1: You send them back after a wonderful weekend retreat, and
Speaker 1: they're right back into the cynicism, the negativity, the consumerism
Speaker 1: is going to make me happy, which will never work,
Speaker 1: but everybody thinks it will, so they buy it again.
Speaker 1: You know, it works temporarily, just for a few minutes.
Speaker 1: It didn't work at all. That's a good way to
Speaker 1: foot it if it did. But it works. The teams
Speaker 1: attle bit enough, just yeah, placebo. What is clear seeing?
Speaker 1: What is? Oh? Yeah, that was your question. See, you're
Speaker 1: being so kind to me, you're letting me off. A look.
Speaker 1: Clear seeing would be that sounds obvious. It would be
Speaker 1: to see the whole picture without my filters of rejection, denial, resembment, blocking,
Speaker 1: filtering out. It is what it is, what it is,
Speaker 1: what it is now. We all have created our filters.
Speaker 1: You have to to survive. But when your filters so
Speaker 1: dominate that all it gets in is what you already
Speaker 1: agree with, what does not threaten your ego, And we'll
Speaker 1: give you immediate comfort. You're seeing is so narrow, so limited,
Speaker 1: You're you're going to be stupid. I have to say
Speaker 1: it all right, You're not gonna see reality or yourself
Speaker 1: or other people very well. So much of the work
Speaker 1: of teaching contemplation is helping people recognize those blockages, those resistances,
Speaker 1: those filters, and quietly let go of them. So what
Speaker 1: can get in is both the good and the bad,
Speaker 1: which everything holds. I don't have to just let in
Speaker 1: the good now. Once you can learn that, frankly, you're
Speaker 1: capable of love. So I don't think you can love
Speaker 1: just perfect things. Love applies to imperfect, ordinary, broken human things.
Speaker 1: And I don't know why someone didn't tell us that early.
Speaker 1: If you're not a non dual thinker, you can't love anything.
Speaker 1: You'll wait around for I don't know, Mr Perfect, or
Speaker 1: you know, a princess or something, and then you'll find
Speaker 1: out she hasn't a princess anyway. It's just we were
Speaker 1: done such a number by being given this expectation of
Speaker 1: finding odd jecks that would be worthy of our immense
Speaker 1: and perfect love. And in fact, what God gives us
Speaker 1: things which makes us learn how to love because they're imperfect,
Speaker 1: and that grows us both up hopefully, So that's clear
Speaker 1: seeing to see, you know, when Jesus has some of
Speaker 1: his banquet stories, he tells the disciples to go out
Speaker 1: the highways and the byeways and invite everybody to the banquet,
Speaker 1: good and bad alike. In Matthew's Gospel, it says good
Speaker 1: and bad alike. I think to have your your table
Speaker 1: fully set, as it were, the table of your mind
Speaker 1: and heart, you have to invite everybody to the table,
Speaker 1: both good and bad. The parts of yourself you like,
Speaker 1: and there's there's qualities of my temperament and personality that
Speaker 1: I started disliking when I was nineteen, and like my
Speaker 1: one energy on the angiogram, I wish I weren't that way,
Speaker 1: that I'm so idealistic, perfectionistic, pushy, judgmental, demanding mostly of myself.
Speaker 1: Now I admit at this age it's become my greatest
Speaker 1: gift too, but I still suffer that it's my greatest fault.
Speaker 1: That's I don't know. You can untie those two, that's
Speaker 1: my point. You got it. You cannot untie those two.
Speaker 1: I have to carry the big black bag of what
Speaker 1: I don't like about myself. Some of the medieval Catholic mystics,
Speaker 1: in their writings, spoke of carrying the burden of self.
Speaker 1: It was a common phrase, the burden of self. Now.
Speaker 1: You and I were raised on a psychological age where
Speaker 1: we thought we could heal the self, and you can
Speaker 1: to believe me, I've had wonderful therapists in my life,
Speaker 1: wonderful spiritual directions, wonderful healing programs. But I still have
Speaker 1: to carry the burden of Richard, you know, and I
Speaker 1: think we all do. And I when when when we
Speaker 1: say Jesus was fully human and fully divine, I think
Speaker 1: the divinity of Jesus had to carry the burden of
Speaker 1: the humanity of Jesus, and he loved it. He accepted it,
Speaker 1: He forgave it. All the evidences, but most of us
Speaker 1: had little training. We thought it was to eliminate the
Speaker 1: human part, which largely amounts the sexual part, the emotional part,
Speaker 1: the physical part, the eliminated. No spirituality of of elimination
Speaker 1: and exclusion is over. We tried it for too many
Speaker 1: centuries and all it created was an exclusionary religion which
Speaker 1: was always looking for you know, who are the sinners
Speaker 1: or heretics or black people, are gay people that we
Speaker 1: can exclude? Now, there was always a group that we
Speaker 1: could exclude. The world doesn't have time for that anymore.
Speaker 1: You use the word sin there, and I've heard you
Speaker 1: at different points refer to it in a variety of
Speaker 1: different ways. That's a place that is really easy to
Speaker 1: get hung up on, is you know, if you're a sinner,
Speaker 1: it means you're this bad, worthless person, right, And you
Speaker 1: put you put it in terms to me that seemed
Speaker 1: like a useful like I look at that, and I go, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't want to be like that. That's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, so what you want to hit me with
Speaker 1: a couple of your few little things? Okay. First of all,
Speaker 1: the word that's used in the Bible hamartia in Greek
Speaker 1: literally means when you're shooting an arrow and you miss
Speaker 1: the bull's eye. All right, that's very helpful, And that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean a culpable thing that makes God not like you.
Speaker 1: And now that's the way if any of us were
Speaker 1: raised Christian, that's the way. In my early understanding of sin,
Speaker 1: there's certain actions somewhat arbitrary. I might add that this
Speaker 1: whimsical God has decided upset him. I don't know, if
Speaker 1: you've read my recent book on the Trinity Divine Dance,
Speaker 1: you know and that's the reason we use him, because
Speaker 1: we don't have a trinitarian notion of God. You make
Speaker 1: God masculine almost all the time. So I was mainly
Speaker 1: concerned about upsetting God as if I could. You know,
Speaker 1: it was giving myself an awful lot of power that
Speaker 1: I could upset God culpability. So it built on parental
Speaker 1: practices of parenting, which if I were a parent, I
Speaker 1: probably do the same thing. But most parenting until the
Speaker 1: very recent West, and I mean very recent West, and
Speaker 1: I don't mean all of the West, even more of
Speaker 1: the sophisticated West, and even there, most parenting was punitive
Speaker 1: and shaming. That's the way you controlled children. I probably
Speaker 1: would have done the same thing if I'd been a
Speaker 1: young parent, because in the short run it works. So
Speaker 1: all of that got projected onto God, the father, you know,
Speaker 1: especially if you had a shaming father too. You were
Speaker 1: just programmed to believe that. That's why I make so
Speaker 1: much of prayer, because unless you go on an inner, interior,
Speaker 1: mutual give and take journey of prayer with God, most
Speaker 1: people will settle with the shaming, judging, guilt based notion
Speaker 1: of God. It's such a waste of time. It really is.
Speaker 1: Takes much of your life to get beyond it. But
Speaker 1: once you see that clergy and here I'm going to
Speaker 1: be very critical of my own group. I don't think
Speaker 1: we were that motivated to move people beyond that. And
Speaker 1: you probably know what I'm gonna say. It kept the
Speaker 1: laity code dependent. To use that very good word, which
Speaker 1: only emerged thirty years ago. By the way, this understanding
Speaker 1: of how you create relationships based on guilt and shame
Speaker 1: and you owe me, it's not love. It passes for love,
Speaker 1: but it isn't. And I mean, I've been a priest
Speaker 1: forty seven years and I've worked with every group. Much
Speaker 1: of religion, Catholic and Protestant, is massive code dependency of
Speaker 1: the laity upon the clergy. And we perpetuate that. I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to be cynical or unkind, I'm really not,
Speaker 1: but we perpetuate that without realizing it, and largely in
Speaker 1: the name of job security. If we want to keep
Speaker 1: him coming back every Sunday, the best way to keep
Speaker 1: the tether, to keep him tied to us is shame
Speaker 1: and guilt and fear of God, fear of going to Hell.
Speaker 1: The lowest level of motivation and so what when you
Speaker 1: appeal to the lowest level of motivation. I'm sorry to
Speaker 1: say this, but you get a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the Christian world who are very lowly motivated people. You
Speaker 1: follow the logic of any world, any Yeah, any world,
Speaker 1: any world. I don't think we can get by And
Speaker 1: if there is a future to Christianity with motivating people
Speaker 1: by fear of God, because the God they end up
Speaker 1: with is not God. So the whole thing falls apart.
Speaker 1: The real people who pray, the mystics all know that
Speaker 1: God is infinite love infinite remember that's one of the
Speaker 1: five We can't form concepts of infinity, so we don't know.
Speaker 1: We don't know how to imagine infinite love. So we
Speaker 1: pulled God down into a quid pro quote tipfort's out. Okay,
Speaker 1: if I obey the ten commandments, then he'll love me.
Speaker 1: Who of us wasn't trained to think that way. But
Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with the Gospel. It's not
Speaker 1: the Gospel at all. It's cleaning up, but it's not
Speaker 1: growing up. It's not waking up, and it's not showing up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you talk about you say the shape of evil is
Speaker 1: much more superficiality and blindness than the usually listed hot sins.
Speaker 1: You know, I've even we find that a little bit
Speaker 1: in recent maybe it's what we've been through the last
Speaker 1: eighteen months, but I find the evil is almost always
Speaker 1: absolutely sure of itself. Evil suffers no so of doubt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a Virtrand Russell quote. Right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: miss it. The problem with the world is that the
Speaker 1: cockture so uh full of certainty, and the the other
Speaker 1: are so full of doubt. It's the same point, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: And and see faith as I understand, the biblical concept
Speaker 1: of faith is to balance knowing with not knowing. Now,
Speaker 1: when I say Protestantism didn't teach the not knowing very
Speaker 1: well at all, that's what we're up against in fundamentalist Christianity.
Speaker 1: This insistence on knowing and being absolutely certain. That's the
Speaker 1: character of evil. What you and I, if we're gonna
Speaker 1: be people of faith but we have to endure, is faith.
Speaker 1: And the word faith implies not knowing, you understand and
Speaker 1: being able to live with not knowing because quite frankly,
Speaker 1: God knows, and I can trust God's goodness enough. If
Speaker 1: God knows, then I can live with it. Unders and
Speaker 1: I don't need to know. So it's not only not knowing,
Speaker 1: but not even needing to know that you grow in.
Speaker 1: That's the journey you see in Mother Treece at the
Speaker 1: end of her life. You see it, Thomas Murder, You've
Speaker 1: see it all the great mystics that I would respect.
Speaker 1: They can live without being certain, but people who do
Speaker 1: evil suffer no uncertainty. Yeah, and that this has invaded
Speaker 1: so much of fundamentalist Christianity is what scares me. That
Speaker 1: they call themselves believers, not in the classic sense. They're
Speaker 1: believing in a system that aggrandizes them, but believing in
Speaker 1: a loving God despite all the contrary evidence. I don't
Speaker 1: see much of that because anything that's outside their comfort zone.
Speaker 1: People have never another as people on the other side
Speaker 1: of the border, people who are handicapped, they don't seem
Speaker 1: to have much love for them. You know, that's the
Speaker 1: giveaway that we're not dealing with faith anymore. One of
Speaker 1: your phrases, we moved from wondering to answering, which has
Speaker 1: not served as well at all. The other definition of
Speaker 1: sin that you've used was um refusing to go into
Speaker 1: depth on particularly hold of things. You know, I've said
Speaker 1: that for many years that I think the great sin
Speaker 1: of America's superficiality. We're we're not malicious people, were really
Speaker 1: not and we're really very kind. In terms of generalized
Speaker 1: charity and phil philanthropy. We surpassed most countries. We really are.
Speaker 1: There's so much good about America. But I would still
Speaker 1: say that the stereotype that most people have of Americans
Speaker 1: is we're nice people, but very superficial. And I think
Speaker 1: that's true. And that's what happens when you cannot embrace
Speaker 1: the dark side of things. You're you have to me
Speaker 1: in on the likable superficial level. To go to the
Speaker 1: depth of anything is to see its dark side. And
Speaker 1: I don't mean that means you have to hate it.
Speaker 1: I just means you see it's not perfect. Now, I
Speaker 1: could also say the contrary, to go to the depths
Speaker 1: of anything is to see it's good side. Uh so
Speaker 1: maybe they're both paradise equally true, equally true. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what do they say? That? Are most of our television,
Speaker 1: the commercials and the vocabulary of even of the evening
Speaker 1: news and all the sitcoms are aimed for fourteen year olds,
Speaker 1: fourteen year old minds. What can we expect. But what
Speaker 1: we're getting now when the constant pandering is to dumb
Speaker 1: down the population, and that you know, even Thomas Jefferson said,
Speaker 1: this whole thing of democracy would only work if we
Speaker 1: had an educated populace, some degree of awareness. Let me
Speaker 1: just use the word awareness, so it doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: I'm talking about you got to go to Harvard. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying Harvard, but to have the beginnings of critical thinking,
Speaker 1: the beginnings of seeing things at a level of truth
Speaker 1: and not just a level of how do they advantage me?
Speaker 1: So a lot of this, We've talked about contemplation, We've
Speaker 1: talked about prayer, We've talked about non dual thinking. What
Speaker 1: are some of the practices in these things. So people
Speaker 1: who listen to the show have been exposed to plenty
Speaker 1: of Buddhist meditation teachers, so I think that that part
Speaker 1: has been colored. I'm interested in the things from the
Speaker 1: Christian tradition that that that are under this umbrella. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you the big difference. Even though I have
Speaker 1: learned so much from my Buddhist friends and Eastern religions
Speaker 1: about shedding of thoughts and letting go of of my
Speaker 1: filters and all you know if the Spanish word for
Speaker 1: emptiness or nothingness is not a the Spanish word for
Speaker 1: somethingness or things is cosa. And we Franciscan's in particular
Speaker 1: said ours isn't the way of nothingness, it's a way
Speaker 1: of finding God in things. That's the incarnation why God
Speaker 1: came ever Christians belief as a person, a thing, a human.
Speaker 1: He wasn't wanting to take us away from the world,
Speaker 1: but trying to help us find God in the things
Speaker 1: of this world. So I would still learn much from
Speaker 1: the practice of Eastern meditation to get Richard out of
Speaker 1: the way so he can see with the clarity you
Speaker 1: talked about. But I still want to see things, and
Speaker 1: I don't need to call those trees secular or merely natural.
Speaker 1: For me, there's nothing merely natural. There's only the supernatural.
Speaker 1: You know. The early Eastern fathers in Christianity, they didn't
Speaker 1: limit the incarnation to the body of Jesus. They say
Speaker 1: the body of Jesus was the symbol of what God
Speaker 1: was doing everywhere all the time. God took on flesh,
Speaker 1: as John one fourteen says, God took on materiality. God
Speaker 1: took on physicality, that matter and spirit are two sides
Speaker 1: of the same mystery that the hiding place for spirit
Speaker 1: is matter, and they've never been separate since the Big Bank.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be my next book. So if you
Speaker 1: hear me getting excited in my talking, because this is
Speaker 1: filling me right now. I've already talked about it, but
Speaker 1: now I've got to make it complete. So Christian meditation
Speaker 1: is the freeing of yourself from yourself so that you
Speaker 1: can see God and everything, even your enemy, even failure,
Speaker 1: even the dark side, that's good seeing. And it freezes
Speaker 1: from this the centuries of Christianity where we've tried to
Speaker 1: get out of this world for heaven, I think that's heresy.
Speaker 1: You look at the life of Jesus, Jesus healing people
Speaker 1: in this world for today. There's hardly any passages where
Speaker 1: he's talking about an evacuation plan for another world. You know,
Speaker 1: you want to talk about destroying the Gospel we did
Speaker 1: it with that. A lot of Christians grew up without
Speaker 1: understanding it was all about an evacuation plan for the
Speaker 1: next world. Once we recognize it's how to live with
Speaker 1: freedom and joy and love today in this world. Now
Speaker 1: you've got a really a real agent of transformation. For
Speaker 1: the world, people who love this world, who love the earth,
Speaker 1: and then don't think of that as being secular. You know,
Speaker 1: I meet people research, scientists and lawyers honestly who don't
Speaker 1: go to church on Sunday and who are more passionate
Speaker 1: about their neighbor and the future of the planet than
Speaker 1: people who go to church every day and Sunday and
Speaker 1: don't care about anybody except their own salvation. I don't
Speaker 1: have time for that Christianity anymore, because I don't think
Speaker 1: it's Christianity. I don't think they learn either. The good
Speaker 1: meditation would have freed them from themselves, and so they
Speaker 1: interpreted the whole Gospel in a very limited, self serving way,
Speaker 1: which allowed them, you know, to barely love themselves because
Speaker 1: they couldn't love their own dark side, but only to
Speaker 1: be able to find God in other people who are
Speaker 1: just like them, which usually meant white, middle class, successful,
Speaker 1: heterosexual and what else not disabled. You know, that means
Speaker 1: God loves very little of God's own world, very little.
Speaker 1: It's not a very big number. No, it's not very hopeful.
Speaker 1: And that we've produced so many Christians who live at
Speaker 1: that level, God must just cry. That's all I can say.
Speaker 1: That we could have missed the message that much. But
Speaker 1: I all I can do is work to do it
Speaker 1: better myself. I can't point the finger to other people
Speaker 1: because I know I've wasted days there. I've wasted more
Speaker 1: than days, weeks and months. Tell me about the true
Speaker 1: self briefly. Oh yeah, I jumped over that. You alluded
Speaker 1: to it before. The true self is your objective self.
Speaker 1: You're ontological self. I know that's a big word. Your
Speaker 1: metaphysical self, your eternal self. You're yourself which doesn't rise
Speaker 1: and fall. It's who you are to use religious names,
Speaker 1: it's who you are in the eyes of God, from
Speaker 1: all eternity. You can't do anything to adjust that. You
Speaker 1: can't push it higher, you can't push it lower. It's
Speaker 1: defined eternally with the It's divine d n A as
Speaker 1: a creature of God. It's the anchored self, it's the
Speaker 1: absolute self. I'm just grabbing for different metaphors, different than
Speaker 1: your true self. Yes, we've got to maintain uniqueness, but
Speaker 1: the true self is also utterly united, and it took
Speaker 1: till the seventh century for the Church to put that
Speaker 1: in the creed. I believe in the Communion of Saints
Speaker 1: that's what they were saying, that once you get to
Speaker 1: the true self, we're all one. So I'm glad you
Speaker 1: put it that way, and yet I have to protect uniqueness.
Speaker 1: I'm still rich and you're still Eric, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: That's why the title of my next book is just this,
Speaker 1: Just this. Now. You can only fully understand it in
Speaker 1: contradistinction to the false self. So the false self, first
Speaker 1: of all, let me say it is not the bad self.
Speaker 1: It is not the self to be rejected. I know
Speaker 1: the faults might imply that, but it's just the raw
Speaker 1: material that God uses to break you through to your
Speaker 1: true self. But it's contingent, it's temporary, it's transitional. It's relative,
Speaker 1: it's psychological, it's passing, it's cultural, it's learned. It's your
Speaker 1: Myers Briggs typology or angiogram number, your gender, your gender too,
Speaker 1: And that's what a lot of people can accept. Your
Speaker 1: gender is not your true self. We could have dealt
Speaker 1: with gender issues much better if we'd known that. But
Speaker 1: we define gender even in a binary way, you know,
Speaker 1: eliminating a whole bunch of people who must have had
Speaker 1: very hard lies in all of his Until we started
Speaker 1: talking about it in the last century, just started talking
Speaker 1: about it. That's how attached we are to our binary
Speaker 1: understanding of reality. So many things that we define as
Speaker 1: the essential self, role, title, bodily shape, appearance, skin color,
Speaker 1: those are all the things that are gonna die when
Speaker 1: you die. They're not absolute truth. And we go through
Speaker 1: this world advertising our skin color and our good looks
Speaker 1: and our hair, lack of air, all of that you're
Speaker 1: you're gonna lose. You're gonna lose if you stay there,
Speaker 1: because all of it is passing away, and if you
Speaker 1: don't fall into the true self, the substantial self, the
Speaker 1: god self, the boodh of self. I don't care what
Speaker 1: word you use. You're like a movable famine. You're just
Speaker 1: constantly grabbing for identity, grabbing for who am I? Now?
Speaker 1: Who am I? Now? Can you hear me? Now? Am
Speaker 1: I significant? Now? I do think the Boomer generation that
Speaker 1: immediately followed me, I think the next ten years, I
Speaker 1: can only predict suicide increasing in this country, an addiction increasing,
Speaker 1: because they really, well every generation does, but certainly the
Speaker 1: Boomer generation put all their eggs in the false self basket.
Speaker 1: You know, success, power, money, control, health, good looks. That's
Speaker 1: all the false self again. Let me repeat, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying it's a bad self, but you don't pitch your
Speaker 1: tent there. You transition through it and you don't take
Speaker 1: it too seriously or it ends up making you settle
Speaker 1: for very little. Yeah. I love the word the small self.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like the little it's there, it's real,
Speaker 1: it's important, and it's not even bad, but it's so limited.
Speaker 1: Small self, big self is very good, which is why
Speaker 1: you uncop aalized the oneself and for the other self. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for spending this much time for us,
Speaker 1: having us out to your lovely place. Yeah, glad you
Speaker 1: could come to the land of enchantment. It's been We
Speaker 1: are proud of our state. There's something spiritual about New Mexico.
Speaker 1: Everybody who comes here, not everybody, but awful lot of
Speaker 1: people say that. So thank you, Thank you your joy
Speaker 1: to me. God bless you. Thank you too. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
Speaker 1: a donation to the one you Feed podcast. Head over
Speaker 1: to one you Feed dot net slash support