The Naked Now E-Book

Richard Rohr

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 233

Beschreibung

For Christians seeking a way of thinking outside of strict dualities, this guide explores methods for letting go of division and living in the present. Drawn from the Gospels, Jesus, Paul, and the great Christian contemplatives, this examination reveals how many of the hidden truths of Christianity have been misunderstood or lost and how to read them with the eyes of the mystics rather than interpreting them through rational thought. Filled with sayings, stories, quotations, and appeals to the heart, specific methods for identifying dualistic thinking are presented with simple practices for stripping away ego and the fear of dwelling in the present.

Leseprobe

There are two trees in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

— Genesis 2:9 —

The Crossroad Publishing Companywww.crossroadpublishing.com

© 2009 by Richard Rohr

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ISBN: 9780824520618

EPUB ISBN: 9780824520618MOBI ISBN: 9780824520625

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Contents

Preface:Why I Am Writing This Book

PART ONE

1. The Gift Is Already Given

When You Surrender to Fear and Distraction

When You Joyfully Surrender to God

Discover Your Birthright

Prayer — Practicing Heaven Now

2. The Great Unsaying

3. Three Ways to View the Sunset

The Urgent Need for Contemplative Seeing

What It Means to Be a Mystic

4. We Should Have “Known” Better

Knowing Worse: All-or-Nothing Thinking

Knowing Better: Contemplation and Presence

Mystical Christianity: A Critique from Within

5. A Lesson from the Monks

The Limitations of Individualism

A Debate Everyone Can Win

6. Glimpses of Wonder: The Quest Is Begun

7. But We Have to Make Judgments, Don’t We?

We See What We Are Ready to See

The Radical Perceptual Shift: Is It True?

8. Yes, But

9. Not Many Things, but One Thing

Getting Thrown Off Your Horse: Sudden Conversion

Gradual Conversion

How Martha Becomes Mary: Willfulness and Willingness

PART TWO

10. What about Jesus?

The Prayer of Jesus

Not Here, Not There

The Two Heels of a Christian Achilles

11. Conversion: Begin by Changing the Seer

Healing the Observer

Three Levels of Conversion

12. Change Your Mind

The Ego Hates Change

Different Religions, Same Ego Resistance

Inertia Resists Change

Heaven and Hell: You Must Change Again and Again

13. Things “Too Good to Be True”: From Polarity Thinking to Prayer

Reframing False Dilemmas

Alternative Consciousness

Prayer Is Resonance

Experience Impossible and Improbable Things

14. The Lost Tradition

The Decline of Contemplation

More Recent Rediscoveries

15. Faith Is More How to Believe Than What to Believe

16. Opening the Door: Great Love and Great Suffering

PART THREE

17. What Nondual Thinking Is Not

18. The Watchful Gaze: What Do We Mean by Being “Awake”?

19. The Meaning of Spiritual Love

20. Sinners, Mystics, and Astrophysicists: How to Celebrate Paradox

The Value of Paradox

Greek Logic

Trinity

Physics and Astrophysics

What It Means to Follow Jesus

21. What Every Good Leader Knows

22. The Principle of Likeness: In the End, It All Comes Down to This

AppendicesPRACTICING THE NAKED NOW

Appendix 1 | Levels of Development

Appendix 2 | Training for the “Third Eye”

Appendix 3 | Litany of the Holy Spirit

Appendix 4 | Practicing Awareness

Appendix 5 | Christian Tantra: The “Welling Up” Exercise

Appendix 6 | The Prayer of the Self-Emptying One

Appendix 7 | The Virgin Prayer

Appendix 8 | Walking Meditation: The Mirror Medallion

A Joyful Mind

The Shining Word “And”

Notes

PREFACE

Why I Am Writing This Book

No man can say his eyes have had enough of seeing, his ears their fill of hearing.

— ECCLESIASTES 1:8

I am a man born between ages, moving between cultures, seeing between religions, but also happily a Christian. I love what I see: life excites me. Yet I know there is still so much more to see and hear, so much more to know and do. 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 Council II tried to reform Catholicism; the therapeutic movement tried to reform the psyche; and the War Against Poverty 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 — or as a “collision of opposites.” It feels as though it is written in my genes — 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 ordained in a Catholic Church on the very site of Stone’s Folly in Topeka, Kansas, seventy years after they began speaking in tongues at that spot in 1900. 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 trying to build 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 countercultural to live these values at any depth. Whether in church life or politics, neither conservatives nor liberals are doing this very well today. Both are too dualistic — they do not think or see like the mystics.

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. It is that “perennial philosophy,” as Aldous Huxley called it, that I hope to draw upon in this book, along with insights from developmental psychology, theology, philosophy, history, the mystics of all religions, community-building experiences, and the giving and receiving of spiritual direction.

Primarily I am concerned here with why people do not see very well — and how we perhaps can. What is it that keeps us humans from reading reality truthfully, humbly, and helpfully? Why do we — including people at the highest levels of church, education, and state — appear to be so imprisoned in ourselves? In effect, why have the world religions stopped doing their job of spiritually transforming people and cultures? 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 into our minds” (1 Corinthians 2:9)?

Along with the resources already mentioned, I will draw upon my own journey of trying to see myself and my world honestly, more lovingly, and in ever broader and less self-serving frames. Much of what I see comes from my own mistakes too numerous to count. Failure, sin, humiliation, and shadow work are very good teachers if we allow them to be. I present this investigation in a series of ways, including reflections, stories, sayings, interpretations from Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and finally concrete practices. This book can be read from cover to cover, but you may also prefer to read one section at a time and reflect on how the message relates to your own seeing. Pick a chapter heading that seems to speak to you, because many of them can stand alone.

All of the issues above have led me to the overall message in this book:

ALL SAYING MUST BE BALANCED BY UNSAYING, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing. Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent.

ALL LIGHT MUST BE INFORMED BY DARKNESS, and all success by suffering. St. John of the Cross called this Luminous Darkness, St. Augustine, the Paschal Mystery or the necessary Passover, and Catholics proclaim it loudly as the mystery of faith at every Eucharist. Yet it is seldom an axiom at the heart of our lives.

The early but learned pattern of dualistic thinking can get us only so far; so all religions at the more mature levels have discovered another “software” for processing the really big questions, like death, love, infinity, suffering, and God. Many of us call this access “contemplation.” It is a nondualistic way of seeing the moment. Originally, the word was simply “prayer.”

It is living in the naked now, the “sacrament of the present moment,” that will teach us how to actually experience our experiences, whether good, bad, or ugly, and how to let them transform us. Words by themselves will invariably divide the moment; pure presence lets it be what it is, as it is.

When you can be present, you will know the Real Presence. I promise you this is true.

And it is almost that simple.

March 20, 2008

Holy Thursday

THE NAKED NOW

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Gift Is Already Given

Our hope is not deceptive. The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

— ROMANS 5:5

You already know. The Spirit is with you and the Spirit is in you.

— JOHN 14:17

The future is by definition the unsayable and the uncontrollable, filled with paradoxes, mysteries, and confusions. It is an imperfect world at every level. Therefore the future is always, somehow, scary. We attempt to build for ourselves many protections against this imperfection, even in the patterns of our mind. This unsayable future — preparing for it and also fearing it — determines much of our lives. Thus we search for predictability, explanation, and order to give ourselves some sense of peace and control.

Even much of religion itself has become a search for social order, group cohesion, and personal worthiness, or a way of escaping into the next world, which unfortunately destroys most of its transformative power. 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 what we are searching for has already been given! I did not find it; it found me. It is Jacob’s shout of Eureka! at the foot of his ladder to heaven in Genesis 28:16–17.

Union and perfection are two different journeys with very different strategies. Common religion seeks private perfection; the mystics seek and enjoy the foundation itself — divine union, totally given. Personal perfection insists on private knowing and certitude. Surprisingly, union is a much better way of knowing. It is a shared knowing that is much more solid and consoling. I promise you that this will make more sense as the book unfolds, but in the meantime just ask anyone in love if this is not true.

The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection — and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. This is what makes Jesus so counterintuitive to most eras and cultures, and why most never perceived the great good news in this utter shift of consciousness. That failure to understand his core message, and a concrete program by which you could experience this truth for yourself, is at the center of our religious problem today. We looked for hope where it was never promised, and no one gave us the proper software so we could know hope for ourselves, least of all in disorder and imperfection! Worst of all, we did not know that hope and union are the same thing, and that real hope has nothing to do with mental certitudes.

WHEN YOU SURRENDERTO FEAR AND DISTRACTION

If you surrender to the fear of uncertainty, life can become a set of insurance policies. Your short time on this earth becomes small and self-protective, a kind of circling of the wagons around what you can be sure of and what you think you can control — even God. It provides you with the illusion that you are in the driver’s seat, navigating on safe, small roads, and usually in a single, predetermined direction that can take you only where you have already been.

For far too many people, no life journey is necessary because we think we already have all our answers at the beginning. “The church says,… the Bible says, etc.”

A second group tries a different approach. They choose to whistle in the dark, look the other way, or just keep busy — seeking various ways of being important, or as Jesus put it, trying to “build bigger barns.” For them, life becomes a series of manufactured dramas, entertainment, and diversionary tactics intended to help them avoid the substantial questions. Here, what some call intensity is frequently an avoidance of what I will call presence — intimacy with ourselves, with life, and with others. This avoidance is symbolized by what we call the consumer culture, which in our current economic situation appears to be falling apart.

This group also represents a large percentage of humanity, especially in the developed world. Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called “bread and circuses.” They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those “weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith” (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls.

A third group does seek various forms of transcendence and spirituality, but in a mixture of mature and immature ways. One major theme in this book is that, unfortunately, so much religious seeking today is immature transcendence, dualistically split off from any objective experience of union with God, self, or others — what Owen Barfield would have called “the desert of nonparticipation.”1

If it is authentically experienced, Christianity is the overcoming of the split from God’s side once and for all! Sadly, most of us remain split inside of a heady set of formulas and religious jargon, a place where deep constant hope cannot be found — to say nothing of joy. We need to leave the desert for a much better land, a “final participation” that can be partially enjoyed now.

WHEN YOU JOYFULLY SURRENDER TO GOD

Mature transcendence is an actual “falling into” and an “undergoing” of God, as James Alison so brilliantly names it.2 God is “done unto us,” and all we can do is allow it, as both the similar prayers of Mary at the Annunciation and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane make clear. What we fall into is what Christianity would call both “an abyss” and an “utter foundation.” What a paradox! But in God, they are not opposites.

When we do get there, we almost wonder how we got there. We know we did not do anything nearly as much as we know we were done unto. We are being utterly and warmly held and falling helplessly into a scary mystery at the very same time — caught between profound desire and the question, “Where is this going to take me?” It has been said many times that, after transformation, you seldom have the feeling you have found anything. It feels much more like Someone found you!

You find yourself having been grabbed, being held, and being Someone’s beloved. At first, you do not even know what is going on. All you know is that it is a most wondrous undergoing, but an undergoing nevertheless. You know you have been “had” (see Jeremiah 20:7–9 or Isaiah 6:4–7). You are in Someone Else’s grip. How else will anybody freely and rightly give up control? They won’t. They’ll use religion itself as a disguised way of taking control, or try to control God by their good behavior.

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. “Human approval means nothing to me,” Jesus said. “Why do you waste time looking to one another for approval when you have the approval that comes from the One God?” (John 5:41, 44). Henceforward, as Teresa of Avila said, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God,” a discovery that precedes, outdoes, and undercuts all of the best psychology in the world. Think of the thousands of dollars you can save in therapy!

Most people in our whimsical culture live in a hall of mirrors, and so we find ourselves with fragile and rapidly changing identities, needing a lot of affirmation. We see this especially in so many young people. Their identities are built on feelings, moods, and ideas that are easily manipulated by everything around them, including advertising and its selling of superficial images.3

You have been given something so much better, so much more joyful and more substantial than that! Divine presence, and the faith, hope, and love that accompany it, are a gift — you cannot control it — but nevertheless a gift that can and should be asked for (Luke 11:13). 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. Most people, quite sadly and with disastrous consequences, do not know that the gift is already theirs. The teachers of the early Christian centuries, along with many of the later saints and mystics, were clear about this. Yet most Christians today still seem to be like the citizens of Ephesus in apostolic days, saying in effect, “We did not even know there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:2).

DISCOVER YOUR BIRTHRIGHT

It’s true that you cannot risk telling people with an immature or dualistic consciousness about the Great Indwelling before they have actually experienced it, because they will always abuse it or trivialize it for purposes of superiority, libertinism, or control. This is probably what Jesus meant by one of his more offensive images, “throwing pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). At the same time, we surely did not have to deny it or keep it such a big secret! Perhaps this occurred because many of the clergy had themselves never experienced divine union and so could not teach others about it. Catholics and Orthodox make the Holy Spirit depend on membership and sacraments; Protestants make the Spirit depend on a personal decision or faith as a technique. In both cases, we are back in charge; we are the doers. There is no undergoing.

Only people who have undergone some level of conversion can be told they have the Holy Spirit and be prepared to understand what one is talking about. Life will then “fan it into flame” (2 Timothy 1:6), but they will always and forever know that the fire was given from Elsewhere. There is absolutely nothing you can do to earn or get the Holy Spirit; there is nothing at all you can do to attain the divine indwelling (e.g., Romans 8:10, Galatians 3:1–5).4 Don’t try to “believe” in the Holy Spirit as one doctrine among others. Instead, practice drawing from this deep well within you, and then you will naturally believe. Put the horse first, and it will draw the cart.

At the same time, there is nothing you can do to lose the Holy Spirit; the most you can do, as Ephesians cleverly says, is to “grieve” the existing Presence that is “sealed” within you (4:30). You can, therefore, be ignorant of your birthright. You can neglect the gift, and thus not enjoy its wonderful fruits. That seems to be the case with many people, and is what we mean by “sinners.” The word signifies not moral inferiors so much as people who do not know who they are and whose they are, people who have no connection to their inherent dignity and importance. They have to struggle for it by all kinds of futile performances. What a waste. Thus, do not hate “sinners” or look down on them. Feel sorry for what they are missing out on!

Why do we have this gift and yet not realize it? Perhaps God does not want to force anything on us that we do not actually desire or choose for ourselves. So a lovely dance ensues between God and the soul that preserves freedom on both sides. The gift is objectively already within, and yet has to be desired and awakened by the person. But you never know that it is within until after it is awakened! This is another paradox. Faith is often clarified and joy-filled hindsight — after we have experienced our experiences. But the path ahead still demands walking in trust, risk, and various degrees of darkness. Henceforth, you will remember in the darkness what you once experienced in the light. But the path ahead will always be a necessary mixture of darkness and light.

In the Judeo-Christian creation story, humans were created in the very “image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26). Our DNA is divine. The divine indwelling is never earned by any behavior whatsoever or any ritual, but only recognized and realized (Romans 11:6, Ephesians 2:8–10) and fallen in love with. When you are ready, you will be both underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the boundless mystery of your own humanity. You will know you are standing under the same waterfall of mercy as everybody else and receiving an undeserved radical grace, which gets to the root of everything. Without that underlying experience of God as both abyss and ground, it is almost impossible to live in the now, in the fullness of who I am, warts and all, and almost impossible to experience the Presence that, paradoxically, always fills the abyss and shakes the ground.

PRAYER — PRACTICING HEAVEN NOW

“Everything exposed to the light itself becomes light,” says Ephesians 5:14. In prayer, we merely keep returning the divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves (2 Corinthians 3:18). The word “prayer” has often been trivialized by making it into a way of getting what you want. But in this book, I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself. It is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now.

The essential religious experience is that you are being “known through” more than knowing anything in particular yourself. Yet despite this difference, it will feel like true knowing. Throughout this book, we will interchangeably call this new way of knowing contemplation, nondualistic thinking, or “third-eye” seeing. Such prayer, such seeing, takes away your anxiety about figuring it all out fully for yourself, or needing to be right about your formulations. At this point, 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.5 There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.

No wonder all of the great liturgical prayers of the churches end with the same phrase: “through Christ our Lord, Amen.” We do not pray to Christ; we pray through Christ. Or even more precisely, Christ prays through us. We are always and forever the conduits, the instruments, the tuning forks, the receiver stations (Romans 8:22–27). We slowly learn the right frequencies that pick up the signal. The core task of all good spirituality is to teach us to “cooperate” with what God already wants to do and has already begun to do (Romans 8:28). In fact, nothing good would even enter our minds unless in the previous moment God had not already “moved” within us. We are always and forever merely seconding the motion.

To live in such a way is to live inside of an unexplainable hope, because your life will now feel much larger than your own. In fact, it is not your own life, and yet, paradoxically, you are more “you” than ever before. That is the constant and consistent experience of the mystics — their vision that can also be your own. “God, you were here all along, and I never knew it” (Genesis 28:16).

CHAPTER TWO

The Great Unsaying

Do not utter the name of God in vain.

— EXODUS 20:7

I cannot emphasize enough the momentous importance of the Jewish revelation of the name of God. It puts the entire nature of our spirituality in correct context and, if it had been followed, could have freed us from much idolatry and arrogance. As we now spell and pronounce it, the word is Yahweh. For those speaking Hebrew, it was the Sacred Tetragrammaton YHVH (yod, he, vav, and he). It was considered a literally unspeakable word for Jews, and any attempt to know what we were talking about was “in vain,” as the commandment said (Exodus 20:7). Instead, they used Elohim or Adonai in speaking or writing. From God’s side the divine identity was kept mysterious and unavailable to the mind; when Moses asked for the divinity’s name, he got only the phrase that translates something to this effect: “I AM WHO AM.… This is my name forever; this is my title for all generations” (Exodus 3:14–15).

This unspeakability 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.6 The one thing we do every moment of our lives is therefore to speak the name of God. This makes it our first and our last word as we enter and leave the world.

For some years now, I have taught this to contemplative groups in many countries, and it changes peoples’ faith and prayer lives in substantial ways. I remind people that there is no Islamic, Christian, or Jewish way of breathing. There is no American, African, or Asian way of breathing. There is no rich or poor way of breathing. The playing field is utterly leveled. The air of the earth is one and the same air, and this divine wind “blows where it will” (John 3:8) — which appears to be everywhere. No one and no religion can control this spirit.