1. PRAYER
Psalm 23
A psalm of David.
1 The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3 he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,[a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
2. Meditation
3. SONGhttps://youtu.be/H9_0jiO5ZRM?si=XWXX_pEhNH_ePGXX
4. NARRATIVE
A Change in Consciousness
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Rather than making dogmatic statements about how to get to heaven, Jesus modeled and taught how to live on earth in a loving way, and he said that this was indeed heaven! But Christians have all too often pushed heaven into the future. We’ve made Jesus’ death and resurrection into a reward/punishment system for the next world, which creates tremendously self-absorbed and self-preoccupied people. It doesn’t transform anyone into compassionate, loving individuals. Instead it leads to a kind of morbid self-analysis in which people feel guilty, inferior, and inadequate or superior and self-righteous.
This dualistic approach has corrupted the true meaning of the Gospel. I would go so far as to say that by sending Christians on a path of well disguised but delayed self-interest, we prostituted the entire spiritual journey from the very start. You cannot easily get to love when you begin with threats and appeals to fear. The driving energy is completely wrong. Rather, you come to love by attraction. Change must begin with positive energy or the final result is never positive.
Maybe the Buddha didn’t talk about God because he didn’t want his teaching to be interpreted as a method of earning or losing God’s love. He emphasized awareness and experience more than winning a prize. Words, which are by nature dualistic, tend to get in the way of actual experience. Thomas Merton said, “Buddhist meditation, but above all that of Zen, seeks not to explain but to pay attention, to become aware, to be mindful, in other words to develop a certain kind of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal formulas—or by emotional excitement.” [1]
Both the Buddha and Jesus were constantly telling people to be compassionate, to let go, to detach. The difference is that Buddhists were taught that they could not do any of these things with a dualistic consciousness. If you were raised Christian, on the other hand, you were given the impression that you could be a forgiving person with a dualistic mind. You can’t! In effect, Christians were given commandments about mercy, compassion, loving enemies, and forgiveness without being taught the nondual consciousness necessary for living most of those commandments.
Because the Church usually did not enable any actual change of consciousness, most people had to split. In effect, we became hypocrites (the word first meant “actors”); we had no other choice. We have to pretend that we love our enemies, because Jesus said we should. We have to pretend to be nonviolent, when in reality Americans are all part of a highly militaristic culture. But the real teaching of Jesus is ignored, is innocuous, and is boring to us, because frankly, with the dualistic mind, most of it is unlivable and impossible. You can give people all the pious Christian teaching you want, but without a transformation of consciousness, they don’t have the energy or the capacity to carry it out.
Thankfully, we are now in an age where we can be open to learning from other world religions like Buddhism, which have long been teaching the non-dual consciousness that Christianity stopped teaching in a systematic way for the last five hundred years. [2]
Gateway to Silence:
“The suchness of each moment is the infinite mercy of God.” —Paul Knitter
References:
[1] Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions: 1968), 38.
[2] Richard Rohr, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), disc 4 (CD, DVD, MP3 download).
The Dualistic Mind
Sunday, January 29, 2017
If we are trying to rebuild Christianity from the bottom up, we need to try to understand Jesus, the one who began it all (even though he probably never intended to start a new religion). I am convinced that Jesus was the first nondual religious teacher of the West, and one reason we have failed to understand so much of his teaching, much less follow it, is because we tried to understand it with dualistic minds. In his life and ministry, Jesus modeled and exemplifiednonduality more than giving us any systematic teaching on it. Our inability to fully understand him and seriously follow him may be partly because we have not been taught how to see nondually ourselves. We thought highly of the “mind of Christ” but there was little practical knowledge of how to get there. This week I will try to shed some light on the meaning of dualistic and nondual thinking, because until you put on wide-lens nondual glasses you cannot see in any genuinely new way. You will just process any new ideas with your old operating system.
Dualistic thinking, or the “egoic operating system,” as my friend and colleague Cynthia Bourgeault calls it, is our way of reading reality from the position of our private and small self. “What’s in it for me?” “How will I look if I do this?” This is the ego’s preferred way of seeing reality. It is the ordinary “hardware” of almost all Western people, even those who think of themselves as Christians. The church has neglected its central work of teaching prayer and contemplation, allowing the language of institutional religion itself to remain dualistic and largely argumentative. We ended up confusing information with enlightenment, mind with soul, and thinking with experiencing—yet these are very different paths.
The dualistic mind is essentially binary, either/or thinking. It knows by comparison, opposition, and differentiation. It uses descriptive words like good/evil, pretty/ugly, smart/stupid, not realizing there may be a hundred degrees between the two ends of each spectrum. Dualistic thinking works well for the sake of simplification and conversation, but not for the sake of truth or the immense subtlety of actual personal experience. Most of us settle for quick and easy answers instead of any deep perception, which we leave to poets, philosophers, and prophets. Yet depth and breadth of perception should be the primary arena for all authentic religion. How else could we possibly search for God?
We do need the dualistic mind to function in practical life, however, and to do our work as a teacher, a nurse, a scientist, or an engineer. It’s helpful and fully necessary as far as it goes, but it just doesn’t go far enough. The dualistic mind cannot process things like infinity, mystery, God, grace, suffering, sexuality, death, or love; this is exactly why most people stumble over these very issues. The dualistic mind pulls everything down into some kind of tit-for-tat system of false choices and too-simple contraries, which is largely what “fast food religion” teaches, usually without even knowing it. Without the contemplative and converted mind—honest and humble perception—much religion is frankly dangerous.
Gateway to Silence:
We are oned in love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing: 2016), 98-99;
Yes, And . . . : Daily Meditations (Franciscan Media: 2013), 406; and
The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 34-35.
5. Meditation
7. PRAYER AND INTENTIONS
New International Version
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
https://youtu.be/EuL0lgVP_Ew?si=A4oacIB5w-KWG2aT
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