Speaker 1: As long as the ego is in place, you will
Speaker 1: justify what pleases your ego on the left or the right.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 1: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 1: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 1: Father Richard Roar, a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness
Speaker 1: to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial tradition.
Speaker 1: He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province
Speaker 1: and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation Richard's
Speaker 1: teaching is grounded in the Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy practices of
Speaker 1: contemplation and self emptying, expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly
Speaker 1: for the socially marginalized. He is the author of numerous books,
Speaker 1: including The Naked Now, Falling Upward, Immortal Diamond, and his
Speaker 1: newest book, The Divine Dance, The Trinity and Your Transformation.
Speaker 1: If you value the content we put out each week,
Speaker 1: then we need your help. As the show has grown,
Speaker 1: so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one
Speaker 1: you Feel dot net slash support and make a monthly donation.
Speaker 1: Our goal is to get to five percent of our
Speaker 1: listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five
Speaker 1: percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep
Speaker 1: putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your
Speaker 1: help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again,
Speaker 1: that's one you feed dot net slash Support. Thank you
Speaker 1: in advance for your help. And here is part one
Speaker 1: of our interview with Father Richard Rore, recorded live at
Speaker 1: the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned in the upcoming weeks for part two. Hi, Father Richard,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Good to be with you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: We are here at your Center for Contemplation and Action
Speaker 1: in Albuquerque, New Mexico, doing this live, so thanks so
Speaker 1: much for having us out. We're really excited to do
Speaker 1: this conversation. You've been writing about the Christian faith, about mysticism,
Speaker 1: about how to live a good life for a long time,
Speaker 1: and we will get very p ccific on some of
Speaker 1: your writings here shortly. But let's start like we always do,
Speaker 1: with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson.
Speaker 1: He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of
Speaker 1: us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
Speaker 1: the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 1: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and
Speaker 1: he thinks about it for a second, and he looks
Speaker 1: up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which
Speaker 1: one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I just like to start off by asking you
Speaker 1: what that parable means to you in your life and
Speaker 1: in the work that you do. Oh, that's very well put.
Speaker 1: I just finished a book called Just This and in
Speaker 1: the opening ages I talked about maybe the same thing,
Speaker 1: not as cleverly as that, I called it the two reservoirs. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it all depends on which reservoir is filled at
Speaker 1: any one moment. If you're negative, one with brackish or
Speaker 1: toxic water has been the one you've been filling, that's
Speaker 1: what's going to determine your reaction. So it's the same point.
Speaker 1: And I think what the tradition probably meant by daily prayer.
Speaker 1: I know that word has been trivialized and probably overused,
Speaker 1: but was to somehow do almost as it were, a
Speaker 1: scan of what are you holding right now? What is
Speaker 1: your primary energy? Is it negative? Is it positive? And
Speaker 1: if you don't do that with some regularity, all the evidences,
Speaker 1: even from neuroscience, is that the negative voices dominate. There's
Speaker 1: even some kind of attraction in us too, feelings of
Speaker 1: justified hurt or resentment or anger. And we look at
Speaker 1: our world and that's not hard to believe. So I
Speaker 1: very much agree with that. That's a beautiful way of
Speaker 1: making the point, which wolf do you feed? Which reservoir
Speaker 1: is full or have full or empty? Well, I'll be
Speaker 1: looking forward to in that book when it comes out.
Speaker 1: I want to start by talking about something that you
Speaker 1: actually say. It's a fixation of yours, and it's something
Speaker 1: that I think about a lot and talk about and
Speaker 1: write about, um, which is what the middle way or
Speaker 1: I've heard you refer to it as non dualistic thinking,
Speaker 1: the third eye. Lots of different things, but I think
Speaker 1: the term the middle way comes from the Buddha, and
Speaker 1: I think it's maybe one of the wisest teachings out
Speaker 1: of that tradition. So I'd like to start off by
Speaker 1: exploring that concept a little bit with you and and
Speaker 1: getting your take on it. You've certainly said that for yourself,
Speaker 1: if you're not careful, you can go into black and
Speaker 1: white thinking, and that a lot of the troubles in
Speaker 1: your life have come from exactly that. I talk about
Speaker 1: that in my book The Naked Now, where I recognize
Speaker 1: that I'm a perfectionist. I'm an idealist. I want to
Speaker 1: do the best thing, the right thing. How that sounds
Speaker 1: so wonderful, but it's really terrible because because it it
Speaker 1: uh makes you ignore a lot of your own inner evidence. Uh.
Speaker 1: It makes you overly judge and expect the positive or
Speaker 1: the negative, and that's never good. We always say every
Speaker 1: expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. So I've had
Speaker 1: to face that for many years, much of my life,
Speaker 1: that my very gift of a certain kind of per
Speaker 1: per not perfectionistic idealistic thinking, has a perfectionistic streak to it.
Speaker 1: And that's not good. It's it's uh, it's too dualistic.
Speaker 1: It's too all or nothing, it's too oppositional, it's too binary.
Speaker 1: To use the language we use today. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: the middle way for me is not just balancing the opposites,
Speaker 1: which I think is what a lot of people assume,
Speaker 1: but it's holding them. Now. I say that as a Christian,
Speaker 1: where I see that as the very meaning of the cross.
Speaker 1: The holding of the tension of opposites that we see
Speaker 1: in Jesus is really uh different. He doesn't balance it out,
Speaker 1: He suffers it. He he holds it till it transforms him,
Speaker 1: which we call resurrection. And that's much harder to teach.
Speaker 1: You know. For years, I myself thought it was a
Speaker 1: balancing act, and I seek to be more balanced. And
Speaker 1: that's good. That is the middle way too. We used
Speaker 1: to say in Latin in medio stop virtuous virtue stands
Speaker 1: in the middle. But holding it, oh God, that takes
Speaker 1: years of practice. You know how to do it. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I'm there yet. Yeah, you say in one
Speaker 1: of the books, I want to emphasize that it's a
Speaker 1: holding of a real tension, not necessarily a balancing act,
Speaker 1: a closure, or any full resolution. It is agreeing to
Speaker 1: live without resolution, at least for a while. And I
Speaker 1: think that living without resolution is probably part of the
Speaker 1: reason it's so hard too not think do listically, because
Speaker 1: I think we just were wired to want an answer.
Speaker 1: We're wired to want certaintys. Well, you know what the
Speaker 1: human psyche does, grabbing for identity. It identifies with things,
Speaker 1: doesn't relate to them, It identifies with them. It wraps
Speaker 1: around him, it grabs onto them. Those are different words
Speaker 1: we use. And identification is is always a game. It's
Speaker 1: not really your identity. It's searching for an identity. And
Speaker 1: but we stopped right there and we get all, you know,
Speaker 1: elated about this opinion or how terrible that person is
Speaker 1: or whatever, and it's an over identification. Finally, Yep, you
Speaker 1: also use the tail in the Garden of Eden as
Speaker 1: a way to talk about this sort of thinking, as
Speaker 1: in the um the apple from the tree being the
Speaker 1: dualistic thinking. The knowledge of good versus evil not to
Speaker 1: me is so evident, and that's probably arrogant to me
Speaker 1: to say it, But I'm amazed that the tradition has
Speaker 1: not made more of that point that in our creation story.
Speaker 1: In the Judeo Christian tradition, Yahweh, the God of Israel,
Speaker 1: says to supposedly Adam and Eve, you may eat of
Speaker 1: all of the trees in the garden. That's a huge
Speaker 1: act of permission. It's a lot of them. Wow, it's
Speaker 1: saying you can make mistakes. There's only one. I'm really
Speaker 1: forbidding you to eat from. Only one, and it's the
Speaker 1: tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So for me,
Speaker 1: that's a warning against uh, what has been the bane
Speaker 1: of every religion thinking. It knows what perfect good is,
Speaker 1: what perfect evil is. It knows who's going to heaven
Speaker 1: and who's going to hell. I've had to say to
Speaker 1: some of my evangelical friends who seem preoccupied with answering
Speaker 1: that question, I said, you do know it's none of
Speaker 1: your business, don't you. Why do you make that you're
Speaker 1: concerned that you have to decide, and you have to
Speaker 1: know who's going to have it and who's going to hell.
Speaker 1: You know, all you need to do is keep growing
Speaker 1: up yourself and leave that to God. So I think
Speaker 1: we find at the beginning of the Judaeo Christian Bible
Speaker 1: a warning against dualistic all or nothing moralistic absolutes. And
Speaker 1: the statement is very strong. If you eat of this tree,
Speaker 1: you almost surely die. It's the death of the soul,
Speaker 1: it really is. You don't grow anymore after that because
Speaker 1: you can't deal with the subtlety, the ambiguity that real
Speaker 1: life always is, always without exception. I mean, Jesus says
Speaker 1: that in the Gospels, why do you call me good?
Speaker 1: Only God is good? Stop this idle flattery of naming
Speaker 1: people good. I need to be thought of as good. St.
Speaker 1: Francis told us. I've got it actually in a poster
Speaker 1: in my little house on the wall. Do you not
Speaker 1: think of yourself as good? And do not need other
Speaker 1: people to think of you as good? Absolutely, then you're free.
Speaker 1: But as long as you're living up to persona, you're
Speaker 1: really not in love with God. You're in love with yourself.
Speaker 1: I much it takes probably half of your life to
Speaker 1: recognize that that's true. And we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: true self, false self and the two parts of life.
Speaker 1: Uh here here in a little bit um. Another word
Speaker 1: for you know, holding these things is paradox. And you've
Speaker 1: got a wonderful definition of paradox. You say, a paradox
Speaker 1: is something that initially appears to be inconsistent or contradictory,
Speaker 1: but might not be a contradiction at all inside of
Speaker 1: a different frame or scene with a different eye. I
Speaker 1: deeply believe that, and I believe that what the great
Speaker 1: religions have done and is almost always present people with
Speaker 1: with paradoxes, you know, that they have to resolve it
Speaker 1: took the form of Cohen's in Zen Buddhism, parables in Jesus,
Speaker 1: or even the great major doctrines of Christianity. Jesus fully
Speaker 1: human and fully divine. That's that's a paradox, that's a contradiction.
Speaker 1: You know, our Catholics, we believe the bread is Jesus.
Speaker 1: But it's bread that is not resolved. It's it's a
Speaker 1: leap of faith that puts the two together, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's where a lot of people, myself included,
Speaker 1: can get lost in the spiritual world is because I
Speaker 1: go that doesn't make any sense, right, And it's because
Speaker 1: I'm coming from a logical rational brain. You you talk
Speaker 1: about something transrational, can you can you share more about transrational? Well,
Speaker 1: let's first of all, distinguished transrational from irrational. Those are
Speaker 1: two different words because are two different realities. Irrational would
Speaker 1: be its contrary to reason. Transrational means that the dualistic
Speaker 1: logical form, largely by the Greek notions of logic that
Speaker 1: eliminate the third Always, the rational mind doesn't have any
Speaker 1: knowledge of the transrational. It believes if it's transrational beyond
Speaker 1: access to rational mind, that it's irrational. And that's a falsity,
Speaker 1: you know, because your mind can't get to it doesn't
Speaker 1: make it irrational. So now there were different words for
Speaker 1: that in history, the contemplative mind, the intuitive mind, the
Speaker 1: non dual mind. In my opinion, all the world religions
Speaker 1: at the higher levels discovered that we needed a different processor,
Speaker 1: a different thinking cap as the nuns used to tell us,
Speaker 1: to access the great things. Now I talk about the
Speaker 1: great things in the Naked now being five, I've out
Speaker 1: of the six since then, love, death, suffering, any honest
Speaker 1: notion of God and any honest notion of infinity or eternity.
Speaker 1: The human mind can't form such thoughts. It can't. I
Speaker 1: got six. It's sex. I added sexuality since I wrote
Speaker 1: the book that I believe sexuality is in the realm
Speaker 1: of mystery, and much of the faulty sexual teaching of
Speaker 1: so many religions that tend to be dualistic is because
Speaker 1: we haven't dealt with sex as a mystery. We've tried
Speaker 1: to deal with it rationally, by logical rational morality, and
Speaker 1: almost everybody ended up losing because we're dealing with something
Speaker 1: that isn't rational. So you need you need a different
Speaker 1: set of rules. It's one even calling rules. So those
Speaker 1: are the six that I would call in the realm
Speaker 1: of the transrational love, suffering, God, death, eternity, and sexuality.
Speaker 1: That you have to put on a different mind. Now,
Speaker 1: the way most historic Christians spoke of that is I
Speaker 1: have to pray about that. Now. They didn't realize what
Speaker 1: they were saying, But what they were saying is they
Speaker 1: got to put on a different hat, a different processor. Now,
Speaker 1: no one taught him the different processor. So so they
Speaker 1: usually said their prayers with a dualistic mind. Do you understand?
Speaker 1: So it didn't help. Hey, everybody, don't hit the fast
Speaker 1: forward button like you normally do. Over the part where
Speaker 1: I ask for donations, because boy, that thing with the
Speaker 1: books worked well, So we're gonna try it again. So
Speaker 1: we're going to run a contest from this episode till
Speaker 1: next episode. So from the moment this goes live till
Speaker 1: the next episode goes live, I will pick one person
Speaker 1: who I will send five books from authors who have
Speaker 1: been on the show. Your odds are pretty good to
Speaker 1: win in this because last week about fifteen people made
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Speaker 1: five books in addition to the other gifts you get
Speaker 1: and the joy of supporting the show. So go to
Speaker 1: one you feed dot net slash support, donated any level,
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Speaker 1: from our authors. So when you feed dot net slash support,
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Speaker 1: it is incredibly good for your health. I've heard that
Speaker 1: it reduces blood pressure up to ten points if you
Speaker 1: contribute to this show. I'm trying to get a guest
Speaker 1: who will validate that for me. But we'll keep working
Speaker 1: on it. Thanks and now the rest of the interview
Speaker 1: with the wonderful Richard Roar. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: engaging in the world in debate, discussion, activism. You know,
Speaker 1: this opposing things right because on one hand you get
Speaker 1: a message that says, go beyond right and wrong. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got this non dual message, all is one right,
Speaker 1: God allows everything. And then on the other hand you've
Speaker 1: got the what I would consider more the activist virtues
Speaker 1: of Christianity, where Jesus is talking about how you treat
Speaker 1: other people. And we are at a point in our
Speaker 1: country where, boy, it's a it's a tough time right now.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like we know how to talk to
Speaker 1: each other at all across the spectrum right now. And
Speaker 1: I'm curious because I wrestle back and forth with here's
Speaker 1: the action I need to take, here's what I believe in,
Speaker 1: And you say it yourself a bunch of times you
Speaker 1: say something along the lines of you go too deep
Speaker 1: into dual thinking with people, you go too deep into
Speaker 1: the fight with people, that's who you become. So how
Speaker 1: do we do both? How do we stand out there
Speaker 1: and you know, be active but also not how do
Speaker 1: we not hate our enemies. How do we you know?
Speaker 1: I'm just it's a tough time. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are wrestling all very much. So I had
Speaker 1: the students on site last week and it's much of
Speaker 1: what we talked about the whole week. Uh, let me
Speaker 1: say it this way. You have to first succeed at
Speaker 1: clear headed, rational, logical, dualistic thinking or otherwise it's just amorphous.
Speaker 1: Nothing means nothing. You understand, there's nothing wrong with being
Speaker 1: clear headed and having a certain degree of logic and
Speaker 1: reasonableness or otherwise. People aren't going to take you seriously,
Speaker 1: nor should they. But as I said before, you hit
Speaker 1: a ceiling. So then to deal with the issues that
Speaker 1: come up inside of your dualistic argumentation, you need another mind,
Speaker 1: another level, another spirituality, whatever it might be, to actually
Speaker 1: know how to respond to those Let again, because Jesus
Speaker 1: is my primary teacher, give him as an example. He
Speaker 1: will make very dualistic statements like you cannot serve God
Speaker 1: and mammon, that's dualistic. It's harder for a rich man
Speaker 1: to get into the Kingdom of God than a camel
Speaker 1: to pass through the eye of a needle. Wow. If
Speaker 1: you'll notice where he's always dualistic. He's on issues of
Speaker 1: justice because there are people want to get away with murder. Literally,
Speaker 1: we're not so inclined towards issues of justice. So he
Speaker 1: will make strong statements like that. But then the actual
Speaker 1: people are the situations that he finds himself in, he
Speaker 1: will deal with very compassionately, very mercifully, very non dually
Speaker 1: in his response. So my father's son shines on the
Speaker 1: good and the bad. His rain falls on the just
Speaker 1: and the unjust. He will name reality with with utter clarity,
Speaker 1: particularly in regard to two major issues of justice. But
Speaker 1: then his response to people is always merciful, for giving, compassionate,
Speaker 1: and inclusive, nondual. So if I wouldn't put it that way,
Speaker 1: you could rightly accuse me of being dualistic. If I'm
Speaker 1: going to say dualistic thinking is wrong and nondual is right,
Speaker 1: that's not true. They're both right, right, They're both needed,
Speaker 1: they're both needed, and we have to say that. And
Speaker 1: this is sometimes a legitimate critique of people we call conservatives,
Speaker 1: of people we call liberals, and sometimes liberals really do
Speaker 1: not believe there is any basis and truth, truth is
Speaker 1: what you make it relative it's all relative. And and
Speaker 1: we push the right farther to the right when we
Speaker 1: deny all truth claims, and many progressive people deny all
Speaker 1: truth claims, and that creates a very amorphous, scary world
Speaker 1: for the psyche. Uh and we're in it now. Like
Speaker 1: I said, I feel I feel concerned about policies that
Speaker 1: I see. I feel more concerned about the way I
Speaker 1: see everybody talk to each other. You know, the right
Speaker 1: picks the worst example of the left justify the you know,
Speaker 1: the left are looters right and the left pick white supremacists,
Speaker 1: and and that is the representation that each side holds
Speaker 1: of the other. And just flummixed by how do we
Speaker 1: how can we move towards a middle ground again? As
Speaker 1: a as a society, It's just a very tough time.
Speaker 1: This is going to demand of the person a kind
Speaker 1: of radical conversion on the left or the right from
Speaker 1: their egocentricity. That's why both Buddha and Jesus would so
Speaker 1: emphasize this. Unless the grain of wheat diet remains just
Speaker 1: a grain of wheat and will not bear any fruit.
Speaker 1: You know, as long as the ego is in place,
Speaker 1: you will justify what pleases your ego on the left
Speaker 1: or the right, and you'll find all the arguments to
Speaker 1: just by your conservative position. And our last year in
Speaker 1: America has proven this, you know. But a high percentage
Speaker 1: of people, even people with pH ds on both sides,
Speaker 1: if they're not converted. Who cares. You can have all
Speaker 1: the PhDs you want. Transformation, enlightenment. Conversion is not the
Speaker 1: same as education, and I'm all for education. I couldn't
Speaker 1: talk here if I hadn't been well educated by the Franciscans.
Speaker 1: But we've confused information with transformation, and transformation is very different.
Speaker 1: It's what the religions of the world, at the higher levels,
Speaker 1: not the lower level. At the higher levels are talking
Speaker 1: about along the same lines. One of the guiding principles
Speaker 1: of your center, it's written, the best criticism of the
Speaker 1: bad is the practice of the better. You say, I
Speaker 1: learned this from my father St. Francis. That's very much
Speaker 1: Franciscan and spirituality. It's called soft prophecy. Hard prof to
Speaker 1: see is, you know, denouncing the king or whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. And there might be a place for that,
Speaker 1: someone better do it now and then. But soft prophecy
Speaker 1: is what I, frankly more see in Jesus or for example,
Speaker 1: he just ignores the Roman Empire. He never directly attacks it.
Speaker 1: He gives it no credence, he gives it no incense,
Speaker 1: he he offers it no respect. That's almost a deeper
Speaker 1: way of subverting it. But most Western Christians have to
Speaker 1: now be taught that because we've been taught to sort
Speaker 1: of bow before the powers that be, we haven't been
Speaker 1: taught how to withdraw our allegiance from false power. Maybe
Speaker 1: churches like the Amish or the Mennonites are good at that.
Speaker 1: Most of the mainline Christians or mainline Judaism often doesn't
Speaker 1: know much about that. It's pretty much a part of
Speaker 1: the system. There's a phrase that has been used for
Speaker 1: what you were just describing something about the type of
Speaker 1: belief that that is when you're sort of mainstream and
Speaker 1: you're using your spirituality is a way of getting additional
Speaker 1: material things well, the prosperity gospel. That's that's the common
Speaker 1: in America. I mean, most of people have been given
Speaker 1: what I would call as a Catholic imperial Christianity, the
Speaker 1: view from the empire down. You know, how to maintain
Speaker 1: the status quo, which always just happens to be privileging me,
Speaker 1: you know so, so I love to say, you know,
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as being non political. There's no
Speaker 1: such thing to to pretend everything is beautiful is a
Speaker 1: political statement. It's a maintaining of the status quo. That's political, right, right.
Speaker 1: I wish Christians could see that most of them are
Speaker 1: intensely political while having a self image of being a
Speaker 1: political because I don't dirty my hands by criticizing the
Speaker 1: president or anybody else. We can't get away with that
Speaker 1: any longer. And and Christianity by not critiquing the bad
Speaker 1: by doing it differently, and that you don't have to
Speaker 1: directly denounce, as I said, but just do it differently,
Speaker 1: which means maybe you don't. I totally think capitalism and
Speaker 1: Christianity are the same thing. To use a very contemporary example,
Speaker 1: a lot of Christians have never critiqued capitalism one percent.
Speaker 1: I understand one percent. It's all perfectly you think it
Speaker 1: fell from heaven. So we Probably the reason we got
Speaker 1: into this whole is most Christians were not taught the prophets.
Speaker 1: And and why more Jews tend to be self critical
Speaker 1: than Christians is because they learned self critical thinking from
Speaker 1: the prophets, whereas we Christians pretended that the only meaning
Speaker 1: of the prophets was to foretell Jesus. That's about per
Speaker 1: cent if that of their message, you know you missed
Speaker 1: their real message when you think their job is just
Speaker 1: to foretell Jesus. That's very self centered on our part.
Speaker 1: They were talking to contemporary situations with contemporary messages in
Speaker 1: the eighth century, the seventh century, the sixth century before Christ,
Speaker 1: and they weren't just sitting around waiting for Jesus. Now
Speaker 1: did the message they communicate set a trajectory that lead
Speaker 1: to people who could think like Jesus. Absolutely so in
Speaker 1: that sense you can say they foretold Jesus. That's very different,
Speaker 1: very different point. Well, that leads us very well into
Speaker 1: I couldn't have made a better segue myself talking about
Speaker 1: being self critical into a theme I see in a
Speaker 1: lot of your work, is that you say that it's
Speaker 1: kind of at the heart of the message, we need
Speaker 1: to change ourselves and not other people. Right, you say,
Speaker 1: jesus very first message in the Gospels, which is usually
Speaker 1: translated is convert, repent or reform, is the Greek word metanoia.
Speaker 1: How do metanoia, which quite literally means to change your
Speaker 1: mind Jesus the right things. In my book, Thank You,
Speaker 1: Jesus first word to us was change, and at least
Speaker 1: two is the three of the Gospels, the very first
Speaker 1: words out of his mouth. Now again, it's always translated
Speaker 1: reform or repent. And so we all picture somebody walking
Speaker 1: in New York and if the sandwich board and saying
Speaker 1: you're going to hell or something like that. Change your
Speaker 1: mind is the literal metta noia noose's mind or thinking
Speaker 1: go beyond it. Maybe it would be a better go
Speaker 1: beyond your ordinary mind and think differently. Maybe that would
Speaker 1: be a close translation. You look good in a sandwich board,
Speaker 1: by the way, and we uh, this reform just lends
Speaker 1: itself to low level morality. Just stop drinking and burn
Speaker 1: your playboy magazines, and this means you love Jesus. We
Speaker 1: can't call that morality anymore. That's you know, I've been
Speaker 1: using lately, learned from my friend Ken Wilbur, the difference
Speaker 1: seen cleaning up, growing up, waking up, and showing up.
Speaker 1: And we've confused basic cleaning up with growing up and
Speaker 1: waking up. You understand, stop drinking and burn your playboys.
Speaker 1: I hope you do that just to get to some
Speaker 1: minimal level of you know, uh, decent human relationship. But
Speaker 1: I don't call that awakening. It isn't even close. We
Speaker 1: got a long way to lead you beyond that. So
Speaker 1: I like his language, and much of our work here
Speaker 1: at the Center is much more about waking up and
Speaker 1: growing up and the action pieces showing up. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: always sort of presume the cleaning up has our have
Speaker 1: you taken place. But when you see churches that you know,
Speaker 1: there's sermons after ten years of going to church are
Speaker 1: still about stop drinking. Well, this isn't church anymore. That's
Speaker 1: a recovery movement, and there's a place for that. I'm
Speaker 1: all for the recovery movement, as you probably know from
Speaker 1: some of my books, but don't call basic recovery transformation,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, I actually you have so many books
Speaker 1: that you know in preparation. Well, I was really interested
Speaker 1: in reading the your book on the Twelve Steps because
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a recovering alcoholic and addic myself, so
Speaker 1: but I didn't get to it yet. You know, it's
Speaker 1: mainly used in jails and prisons, that's where it sells.
Speaker 1: Just it makes me so happy because as you know,
Speaker 1: so many people in in jails and prisons, they just
Speaker 1: darn it, not their fault, but they had the disease early,
Speaker 1: and it made him make some stupid mistakes. You talk
Speaker 1: about the ego, and we're going to get into false self,
Speaker 1: as I said later, but you say you start to
Speaker 1: recognize the underlying bias of the ego. The ego diverts
Speaker 1: your attention from anything that would ask you to change.
Speaker 1: You turn your attention from that to righteous causes that
Speaker 1: invariably ask others to change. It's so evident once you
Speaker 1: hear it, you know the ego wants two things. It
Speaker 1: wants to be separate, define itself as individual and superior,
Speaker 1: separate and superior, And to actually admit it's faults is
Speaker 1: to be dang it like everybody else. So we're not
Speaker 1: good at shadow work, we're not good at admitting our
Speaker 1: own faults. What about the other side of that, going
Speaker 1: too far where you think? Because I've noticed people tend
Speaker 1: to either think it's all everyone else's or all their
Speaker 1: own faults. And actually that's a very good point. Thanks
Speaker 1: for making it early on. Because I speak of them
Speaker 1: as there's projectors who project their faults and other people.
Speaker 1: And there are, as you just wisely said, introjectors who
Speaker 1: who just beat up on themselves endlessly. It goes back
Speaker 1: usually to their early parenting. We're blaming was away and
Speaker 1: you're the fault, and they internalize those voices and they
Speaker 1: take on their mother's critical voice or their father's critical voice,
Speaker 1: and and always blame themselves. So that is an important
Speaker 1: corrective to the point we were making. It's still ego though, right,
Speaker 1: It's still about me. Another good point, see, to need
Speaker 1: to be the worst person in the world is to
Speaker 1: be special. Yeah, it's again I played that. It's a
Speaker 1: again to be ego game. You know, Look how terrible
Speaker 1: I am, and that makes me special in a negative way, right,
Speaker 1: I've seen it. Prayer comes up in a lot of
Speaker 1: different contexts with you, and I think we'll spend more
Speaker 1: time when I move into how do we put on
Speaker 1: the different thinking cap because I think that's where prayer
Speaker 1: comes in. But one of the things you say about
Speaker 1: prayer is it's about changing you, not changing God. And
Speaker 1: that seems to be very different than the way most
Speaker 1: prayers are. You know, again for Christians, it's straight on
Speaker 1: the sermon on the mount. Why do you babble on
Speaker 1: like the Pagans do. Don't you know God already knows
Speaker 1: what you need. He's telling us right there. The prayer
Speaker 1: should not be making announcements to God, trying to talk
Speaker 1: God into things, trying to tell God things things that
Speaker 1: God doesn't know. Yeah, he was pulling out the whole
Speaker 1: rug from beneath. The immature understanding of prayer didn't do
Speaker 1: much good because we went right back to it these
Speaker 1: week Catholics did. But it appears Protestants largely imitated most
Speaker 1: of what we Catholics did. Is because it's the early
Speaker 1: level patterns, early level pattern So, yeah, prayer is much
Speaker 1: more allowing God to change you, to change your glasses,
Speaker 1: your set of eyes. You don't need to change God.
Speaker 1: God is a thousand times more compassionate than you are,
Speaker 1: and more caring than you are, more merciful than you are,
Speaker 1: So you don't need to talk God into caring about
Speaker 1: your sick grandma, or thinking that if we get twenty
Speaker 1: five people to care for sick grandma, God will be
Speaker 1: talked into it. And is said when we're praying, and
Speaker 1: perhaps you've heard this in some of my books, we're
Speaker 1: always and I'm gonna say, seconding the motion, the first
Speaker 1: intuition to raise your heart in trust and love. It
Speaker 1: always comes from God. Always, God is always the initiator.
Speaker 1: Then you think in your mind, oh, I think I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say a prayer. Now you were just touched, do
Speaker 1: you understand, And that's what made you second the motion.
Speaker 1: The prayer is always seconding the motion. Now that is
Speaker 1: so consistent, at least in the great Catholic mystics, you know,
Speaker 1: going back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the medieval saints,
Speaker 1: Teresa Avala, John of the Cross, any of them. You know,
Speaker 1: we're only responding. And once you you develop a subtle
Speaker 1: inner life and you recognize you were just touched, and
Speaker 1: you thought you were initiating the prayer, you are continuing
Speaker 1: the prayer. Master Eckhart, the German mystic, put it so well,
Speaker 1: the eyes with which we look back at God are
Speaker 1: the very same eyes by which God first looked at us.
Speaker 1: Who all we're doing is completing the circuit. God looks
Speaker 1: at you, you receive the loving gaze, Your heart is softened,
Speaker 1: and you gaze back with love. You're always completing the circuit.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean that you're always asking for something or
Speaker 1: telling God something. It's just a little interior glance of love,
Speaker 1: as brother Lawrence puts it, Ah, and it grounds you,
Speaker 1: it expands you, It opens your heart space, you see,
Speaker 1: and you're different afterwards. The last thing on this topic
Speaker 1: of of changing ourselves, I love this line. It's really
Speaker 1: rang true in my life. If you find yourself resenting
Speaker 1: the faults of others, stop resenting your own. And boy,
Speaker 1: I tell you I became a lot easier on people
Speaker 1: when I became easier on myself. Makes total sense. See,
Speaker 1: that's that feeding the bad wolf. You're beating up on
Speaker 1: yourself of them all. When you open your eyes at
Speaker 1: six in the morning or whatever it is, that inner
Speaker 1: reservoir is now filled with negative energy and you're gonna
Speaker 1: bounce it back onto the first person you run into
Speaker 1: in the kitchen. You understands just because your inner spaces
Speaker 1: is death, not life, It's negativity not grace. But that's
Speaker 1: why I say we gotta scan it. Almost where am I?
Speaker 1: And you know, yesterday even I woke up, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I had bad dreams. I think I did.
Speaker 1: It's some confusing dreams at least, But I woke up
Speaker 1: already in a state of that's the best. It's just
Speaker 1: you know, it was not an embracing of life, but
Speaker 1: it's sort of pushing it away. And I had nothing
Speaker 1: bad to look forward to yesterday. He just was inside
Speaker 1: me already, but I was able to see it. I
Speaker 1: did my little sit at home at my kennel and
Speaker 1: and sat and read some spirits you're reading. And I
Speaker 1: think before I left the house it was recognized and
Speaker 1: let go of. Yeah. I wouldn't have let go of it.
Speaker 1: It would have dominated the morning. I'm sure. One of
Speaker 1: the questions I asked people in this show a lot,
Speaker 1: and I'm always sort of trying to get the balance right,
Speaker 1: is how much should we you describe waking up in
Speaker 1: a just call it a bad spot, first word right?
Speaker 1: And I never know, like there's two seems to be
Speaker 1: a couple approaches that are that are advocated. One is
Speaker 1: change your mind, look at the positive change. The other
Speaker 1: is feel what you're feeling accepted? What does it have
Speaker 1: to teach you? And I always feel like I sit
Speaker 1: and kind of look both, and I sometimes I'm not
Speaker 1: sure which direction to go. Do you have anything that
Speaker 1: any any thoughts on that? Idea of of when to
Speaker 1: do which thing, or maybe it's both at the same time.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just I'm always curious about it.
Speaker 1: You know. The first one you mentioned, I call replacement therapy.
Speaker 1: Were okay, replace your negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Sometimes
Speaker 1: that and work. Sometimes it does work. Then there's letting
Speaker 1: go therapy, and that's primarily what you teach in meditation contemplation,
Speaker 1: to surrender your obsessive, negative, critical, judgmental thoughts, to just
Speaker 1: not feed them, as you said right at the beginning. Now,
Speaker 1: the third one you mentioned are the second one you
Speaker 1: mentioned was, I would say it in sort of between
Speaker 1: repressing our emotions and completely indulging yes, yes, uh, what
Speaker 1: will we recall that? Just teachable moments because suffering is
Speaker 1: such I mean, it's one of your big things, right,
Speaker 1: how important suffering is in transformation for transformation, Yeah, to
Speaker 1: see everything as a teachable moment. I mean, that's what
Speaker 1: a lot of us are trying to do. With the
Speaker 1: political situation in America, that's just okay, are you going
Speaker 1: to spend the next year is just fighting back or
Speaker 1: acting as if we've been saved, both of which your illusions.
Speaker 1: Can we say what can we learn from this and
Speaker 1: how can we grow up? That would seem to be
Speaker 1: a positive way of yeah, yeah, but teachable moment does
Speaker 1: mean that I'm willing to change, right, I'm willing to
Speaker 1: let something change me. That's good, yeah, always good. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that will be a good place to maybe
Speaker 1: take a brief break and then if you're okay, come
Speaker 1: back and hit a few more. You take your break,
Speaker 1: and I'll take mine right back. If what you just
Speaker 1: heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation
Speaker 1: to the One you Feed podcast. Head over to one
Speaker 1: you Feed dot net slash support