(Richard Rohr on Dualistic Thinking)

There are many words for it –

dualistic thinking, associational thinking…

It’s all about our human need for resolution, judgment, ‘understanding’…

The end-product of ‘understanding’? Accusations of ‘heresy’ (one side of the debate is superior, the other inferior)…

Heresy must be destroyed – hence most disputes, wars, violence.

In the last 500 years we’ve accumulated 40,000 Christian denominations (‘all but our group are wrong’). Our aim: to make others exactly like us: and in the process, to borrow from Jesus, making them twice as fit for hell as we are…

If we Christians can’t talk to one another what hope is there for the rest of the world? If we can’t see the Divine image in Christian-others we certainly won’t be able to see it in non-Christians…

Remember: God’s sun shines on the good and the bad; God’s rain falls on the just and he unjust

(Did you know there wasn’t a word for non-violent in either English or German until relatively recently? Similarly we didn’t have a word in the West for non-dualistic thinking).

~~

The contemplative journey – with the saints and mystics – involves another level of thinking - non-dualistic… Essentially it’s accepting with love and faith what I don’t understand.

And it’s the only way we’ll deal with love, death, suffering, God, infinity and Grace…

~~

Exercise: observe your own mind:

You were trained to eliminate mystery:

You make comparisons:

Eg. racism: there’s a ‘lowest to highest’ level – even Christian believers have bought the notion of black-skinned = lowest, white-skinned = highest. It led to 200 years of Christians in the US, who believe in the unconditional love of God, justifying slavery!!!

If you don’t trade-in your ‘receiver’ you can justify anything from as little as one line in the Bible, making it mean what the ego wants it to mean.

~~

How you see anything is how you do everything…

Read/listen to someone mashalling arguments to prove the other wrong: we do that in churches, with pastors, and political leaders…

It’s a way of preventing us going outside our comfort-zone: someone says something, and you respond with ‘But…’ (ie. oppositional thinking): you yield to the temptation of finding contrary evidence…

Contemplatives tend to be good listeners, leaving the field open, building on the 10% one knows is ‘true’…

~~

The contemplative mind refuses to label. It is not paranoid, self-referential. It’s all about dying, letting go…

I don’t need that opinion to defend myself. (An opinion is a set of ideas we wrap ourselves around eg. demonizing liberals or conservatives, straights/gays – you-name-it – naming anyone outside my group as totally wrong…

~~

Jesus was the Western world’s first non-dualistic thinker

And before we had ‘systematic theology’ in mainline European thinking, the desert fathers and mothers and Celtic spirituality helped us stay in touch with Jesus’ non-dual, nature- and story-based approach

It was more about love than right-vs-wrong ‘truth’

It was more about the surprise of wonder, than closing one’s right-vs-wrong ‘nothing can enter here I don’t already agree with’ mind

It’s about getting rid of class-systems, laities, Catholics vs Protestants (my group has the whole truth, the other’s going to hell)..

The best individual exponents of Jesus’ way: Francis, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross (unfortunately after the 16^th century there’s been no large-scale teaching on contemplation, even in monasteries)

Did you know that in the year 1400 there were 1400 Franciscan hermits scattered throughout Europe?

~~

IOW it’s all about living the life of ‘and’ – both contemplatively (alone) and actively (with others)

Both/and

Everything’s sacred… Which is why Francis moved towards lepers/outsiders, towards non-Catholics, non-Italians…

Ditto Jesus with non-Jews

~~

How?

1. Practise the “I don’t need to be right’ lifestyle with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the morning – allowing our lustful/negative/angry/judgmental/right-wrong/up-down/opinionated thoughts to dissipate into the love of God

Nothing is the doorway to something – actually, everything

In silence we make room for paradox, for the Other, for God, who is mystery

(Let’s not kid ourselves: Richard led a retreat with monks at Gethsemane, but when he quoted Merton they looked down/away…  ‘Why?’ he asked a friend. ‘Oh, they’re ambivalent about Thomas Merton, because he suggested they weren’t real contemplatives, only introverts’…)

2. When Eckhart talked about ‘living in the Now’ he was accused of being ‘New Age’/’pagan’/’secular’. But Jesus said something about that.

‘The sacrament of the present moment’

The ‘naked now’

The dualistic mind is more preoccupied with either the past (conservative, nostalgic) or the future (liberal, self-preoccupied, idealistic). As Shakespeare might say: fie on both their houses… The contemplative eye sees with a ‘3^rd eye’ – to a vista not either/or but both/and…

So Ann Frank can be happy in a concentration camp

Francis, with his body falling apart, can write a Canticle to the Sun.

Now  is ‘home base’.

 ~~

The gist of Richard Rohr: The Art of Letting Go (and summarized in his audio-book Living the Wisdom of St Francis )

~~

(As I write, Leunig’s cartoon in this morning’s The Age newspaper depicts a little family with big noses staring up at a large billboard which says WE ARE GOOD AND THEY ARE BAD. ALWAYS. )

Rowland Croucher

25 July 2014

jmm.org.au