Tag Archives: Buddhism

richard rohr

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I have quoted Richard Rohr frequently.  Here, he actually gives us permission to quote him freely without regards to copyright!  I will not abuse the privilege but I will quote him more freely.  My main intent today is to sell you on him.  He is a tremendous voice for the Christian faith and you can hear from him daily by going to his web-site and signing up.  He is very astute and very humble.

“You can catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than a barrel of vinegar,” says Francis de Sales.

Enlightenment cannot be manufactured, manipulated, or delivered on demand. It is always passed on from another. Jesus both claims to be the Light of the World and then says the same for us too! (See John 8:12 and Matthew 5:14-16.) It is surprising that most do not connect these two scriptures. Wisdom is not a do-it-yourself project. It is a mystery of transmission, contagion, and the passing on of life, as Francis de Sales did so well through his many loving messages in very hostile 17th-century Geneva.

I always tell people who ask if they can quote me that if it is true wisdom then I have no copyright to it. I learned it from someone else. If it is true wisdom it is always “common domain.”

Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is more about entering a vast mystery than arriving at a mental certitude. Enlightenment knows that grace is everywhere, and the only reasonable response is a grateful heart and the acknowledgment that there is more depth and meaning to everything. A too quick and easy answer is invariably a wrong one.

Rohr understands that faith involves going beyond ideology, even “sacred” ideology and seeking the truth that lies beyond mere words.  For example, the term “jesus” is far removed from the experience of “Jesus.”  Or, as the Buddhists say, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

Now if I can only humbly learn to practice what I here preach.

 

Communication Perils and “Penetrable” hearts.

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“Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  This 70’s era bromide, from Fritz Perls I think, is very astute.  Perls was encouraging us to discover our ability to forego our comfort zone—that safe cognitive haven we have created—and enter the world of sensual experience, the world of feeling.  That “cognitive haven” is the egoic consciousness that Eckhart Tolle has popularized.

And, I admit that this is easier said than done, especially for us who are so firmly ensconced in the cognitive domain.  I practice meditation but it is very hard to quiten that “monkey mind” that the Buddhists speak of—that mind that is always shrieking, chattering, and cavorting about, absolutely unable to embrace the present moment, Tolle’s “Now”.

Shakespeare recognized the need of feeling and its primacy over cognition.  In the famous scene in which his mother is compulsively wringing her hands, he admonished her to “cease wringing your hands and I will wring your heart.  And so I will if it be made of penetrable stuff, if damn custom hath not bronzed it o’er so that it be proof and bulwark against sense” (sense-experience, or feeling).  Here Shakespeare is noting how cognition, one dimension of that “damn custom”, tends to “bronze o’er” the heart and make it “impenetrable.”  When the heart is open to the feeling mode, it is full of “penetrable stuff” and communication can take place.  But when this “damn custom” or cognition predominates, there is only a robot-like exchange of data.  It makes me think of the scene in the movie Rain Man where two autistic men are engaging in a conversation.  But the “conversation” consisted of each man delivering a spiel to the other only to have the other respond with a spiel of his own, a spiel having nothing to do with the other spiel.  I’m reminded from a line from one of T. S. Eliot‘s plays, in which he describes people locked in formulaic, rote conversations as “people too strange to one another for misunderstanding.”

And note the lyrics from the beautiful Simon and Garfunkel song,  “Sounds of Silence”:

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening.

And I close with the words of the Psalmist (Psalms 115:4)

They have mouths but they speak not:

Eyes have they, but they see not;

They have ears but they hear not.

 

 

losing god

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Donovan in the 1960’s made famous a zen koan:  First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.  This is a pithy note about object loss, one important step in the road to emotional and spiritual maturity.  The mountain first exists as a concept, then the mountain is lost, and then it is again.  The experience of “mountain” is transformed in this process—the concept becomes infused with emotion…one might even say with spirit.  Now this idea can be applied to any notion, including even one’s very identity or conception of self.  But, I want to apply it to “God.”  Therefore, to make a long story short, I am saying, “First there is a god, then there is no god, then there is.”  One first learns “god” as a concept but at some point in one’s life it is important that the conception becomes spiritual.  But this must entail a period of “loss”.  Now for some people, this “loss” is dramatic such as with the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.  For most of us this loss is much less dramatic, often appearing as an identity crisis, a period of doubt and confusion, even depression and despair.  But the experience can deepen our faith, taking it into the domain of the “spirit of the law” rather than the domain of the “letter of the law.”

 

If one never undergoes this loss of god, his/her religious expression will merely be whatever he/she happens to have been indoctrinated with.  And even though this indoctrination might be with a very noble ideal or spiritual leader, it will still merely be an idea and one will merit the description “ideologue” or, even better, “fundamentalist.”  Fundamentalists are in love with ideas, mistaking words and ideas for the “thing in itself.”  The “thing in itself” always lies just beyond our reach as words and ideas cannot be wrapped around it.  Or, to borrow a Buddhist line quoted last week, “The finger pointing to the moon must not be mistaken for the moon itself.”