Christianity and Unknowing, Richard Rohr

[Music] so I don't have very long let me share just a little bit and I hope it can be helpful and as you might have read in the abstract I think Christianity once understood non duality although we never used that word the word in mainline was unit of consciousness but non dual describes it very well when I wrote my book - naked now where I was trying to introduce this word to Christians I expected a whole lot of pushback because all Richards become a Buddhist or a Hindu as if that's bad but they uh that would have been the criticisms I would have expected and they never came and it's almost as if it was a liberation for a lot of Christians at least a lot of Christians who were sincerely seeking so I'm going to give you and I hope it won't be a boring or be labored but a little bit of the history of how we had it how we lost it why we lost it and why it's being so magnificently retrieved in our time but it's still unknown to the vast vast majority of Orthodox Catholic and Protestant Christians especially I have to say the Protestant tradition because it came along so late wasn't its fault but it's no accident we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation of course this year it was simultaneous with the invention of the printing press huh and we're all historical accidents in so many ways but of course the printing press made us for 500 years enamored with words and words are inherently dualistic that isn't a put-down I'm using words right now we need words but they are to distinguish this from that and once your concentration is to use words to distinguish yourself or clarify your thought you move toward argumentativeness endless clarification of what did that word really mean and so we see that the older traditional who are much more as we just heard so beautifully body based intuitive based based in poetry and dance and music and art all primitive religion which now we see maybe was not so primitive seemed to understand this not we have to move to a different level of consciousness now I'm convinced the very word prayer which of course all of us have heard all of our lives but originally meant a different operating system Christians will still say you know I'm going to pray about that now I think what they mean is I got to get out of my argumentative dualistic egocentric mind and put on a mine that is bigger broader more accessible as the heart math solution teaches us but those became pretty much separated even though what you were just beautifully talking about the heart that's the Desert Fathers in the 2nd and 3rd century that this was our own Christian tradition it's amazing how much they used the word heart and yet in our time heart became associated with Valentine's Day and infatuation and emotion and anything but integration it was another kind of over subjectivity instead of the place of integration holding together the body and the mind and the soul and the person as it were so anyway I don't think I see any evidence that Jesus ever systematically taught what we would call non dual thinking but he did exemplify it right and that's even better when he says I am the father are one his classic line of unitive consciousness with God he says without any apology and of course even then he is called bad names for making such a daring assertion when he says things like my father's Sun shines on the bad and the good his rain falls on the just and the unjust or when you must love your neighbor as yourself what you do to the least of the brothers and sisters you do to to me you it's unit of consciousness all over the place huh and how we in organized Christianity got in trouble is we largely read and I mean largely overwhelmingly read the words of Jesus who was talking non dually mystically if I not use those words almost interchangeably we're at him with a dualistic mind an argumentative mind which meant from the get-go to misunderstand what he was talking about so we see the first great I think separation from the much more you read Jesus metaphors and examples 90 some percent of them are all nature based he isn't an academic teacher using concepts and ideas like I'm afraid I'm doing now but he is referring to the natural world and using this to exemplify universal truths much closer to what we later disparagingly called paganism but the Pagani and I'm sure this is from Italian or wrote yeah probably simply math the people who lived out in the country it wasn't a put-down it was that the cities got Christianized first and those who lived out in the country where the Pagani are the pagans and that for centuries became a put-down well he's a pagan which usually man he or she was a moral degenerate or something but it actually might mean someone who's much closer to what we later called natural theology but after the word we moved into anything but natural theology was in many ways very unnatural so we have Jesus exemplifying it and the first great compromise if I can call it that and I'm sure you've heard of this from various preachers and although Roman Catholics like I am usually don't admit it but our first great compromise was called the Constantinian compromise around 3:13 we move from the catacombs to the basilica's we move from the lower class to the upper class we move to an identification with power and money and war that's why we were called Roman Catholics because the Roman Empire pretty much took over the show and we needed an imperial God who could unify Europe and the Middle East and you know what this name and I emphasize name this name Jesus fifth bill even though it had almost nothing to do with his teaching and in many ways was absolutely contrary to his teaching I mean any of you familiar with the Sermon on the Mount you can't make that by any stretch of the imagination into an imperial world view or an exclusionary world view you know or a mental world view it's it's entirely intuitive love based nature based community based unitive consciousness if you will but that's when the mauricio mentioned monks were actually called friars doesn't make a great deal of difference but the Friars lived in the city with the people the monks usually live out in the country but it all starts after that great compromise in 313 where we move into the upper class into Imperial thinking and so huge amounts of Western Christians go off to the deserts of Egypt Syria Palestine and Cappadocia which is which is eastern Turkey and there is where Christianity flourished plus these little outlying places like Ireland and Scotland which were not a part of the Roman Empire that's why there's so much fascination with much more nature-based Celtic spirituality today it wasn't romanized so when the Protestant Reformation comes along and it was much needed I'm not here to put that down at all it brought a kind of critical thinking to a Catholicism that didn't have at that point much self-critical thinking ah it it moved us in a in a very different direction you might you might say but I would say after the the desert period what we would call unitive thinking our non-dual thinking our the balancing of knowing with not knowing is only systematically taught in some monasteries where it maintains some form of identity and it was usually taught in this way and this might be a central point that will help you understand forgive these two big words but there was there were two main lines of spirituality inside of formal Christianity one was called the katha fatik way whereby you knew through words and concepts and ideas and clarity through light through knowing but it was balanced in this magnificent biblical concept of faith which evolved inside the Bible itself it was balanced by the apathetic way which means knowing by not knowing are not needing to know knowing through darkness we got to be honest the whole mystical tradition of knowing through darkness that we see in Dionysius in the early centuries and the Cloud of Unknowing in the 14th century for the last 500 years once we got into the food fights of the Reformation and that's what they were all right we're right you're wrong our denomination is saved and your denomination is not saved I'm going to make a strong statement but I don't think it's much of an overstatement that was the death of the contemplative mind once you need to prove that you're right and someone else is wrong that you're the end group and they're the out group what you have is the dominance of ego and once the ego is center stage there is no possibility there's no possibility of contemplation it's it's all about you it's all suffer of parental and thinking declines and let's be honest we're seeing it in our present politics just could we have imagined that human civil conversation could go this low but that's all you have left when you have dualistic thinking paramount in fact it's the only game in town as a Franciscan as a priest it tells me religion has not been doing its work we are not transforming this culture and the judeo-christian tradition is still supposed to be the foundational religion of Western civilization where whether it really is or whether it ever was I don't know I'm not here to make that point but you know a civilization cannot survive if it is actively involved in in hatred toward its own spirituality and that's pretty much where we're at now but for understandable reasons huh that um that it just wasn't doing the job it was more what spiral dynamics would call tribal thinking blue level consciousness where it wasn't about being a transformed person it was about belonging to a try uh-huh and we were the Catholic tribes some of you were the Protestant tribes some of you were the Jewish tribe and that became the be all in the end all affirming the boundaries of your tribe why it was right which left is at a pretty low level of knowing so again I want to repeat I didn't develop it enough a moment ago but when you have balanced knowing with not knowing and not needing to know the ordinary arrogance of the mind which by the way I think Genesis warns us against you know there's a most unlikely line in the creation story of the Jewish people where Yahweh tells them you know if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will most surely die now that's a really shocking statement when I mean I I had four years of moral theology I got a degree in eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil goodness and what I think it was a warning to tell a religion you better be humble about your knowledge of who's right and who's wrong who's in and who's out warning right in the first chapters of the Bible against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we've been eating of it for centuries you know voraciously and when when you only have the Cata Phatak way certitude clarity concepts of and opinions about which i can be right and you can be wrong you have the death of darkness non knowing I have to say the only place where that was consistently taught was in the mystics huh the Mystics that they Ravel I'm people like John of the Cross and Teresa of ávila you know they revel in the language of darkness huh they called it learned ignorant learned ignorance isn't that interesting huh the freedom not to have to know in fact give space around your knowing that allows you to move to the heart to the intuitive but this arrogance around knowing pretty much has controlled the field you know I'm sure you've heard that line that if you want to tell a lie and get away with it tell a really big lie we've had some evidence of that in the last in last year you know and ironically people are more ready to believe really big lies than little ones I don't know the logic of that but that was certainly true in the whole degeneration of the biblical notion of faith when faith meant comfortably not knowing and we turned that around 180 degrees into being certain about everything which has reached its low point of what we call fundamentalism which is not just true in Christianity but really it's research in all of the major world religions huh in this in this confusing confusing world the need for a certitude so I know that I'm on solid ground and I'm purposeful and and smart that's that's where we're at and I think why so much religion eyes religion in general Christianity in particular has just lost the respect of a lot of and when I use the word thinking people I'm not meaning they got to be highly intelligent or academic but just people who are using what I'd call Christian common sense but we weren't trained in Christian common sense you know we were trained in ideology which overrode the heart the intuitive the the communal the the unitive so we pretty much you know I was able to talk to Google yesterday hello and I was absolutely amazed you know Jesus has a line I think it's in Luke's Gospel where he says the children of this world are wiser in their ways that are the children of light talk about a critique of religion huh those who think they have the light he said sometimes those who don't make any claims I'm sure many of you know more about Google than I do but it was just like yesterday was like walking in a different universe oh how could all the rules of business be so different and have so many happy people and so many self-initiating staff and creative an excited staff riding their bicycles around the campus oh this is a different model for knowing and I don't see any large religious symbols on the campus but I'll tell you my recent book is on the Trinity right and I want to mention that for a reason see the law of three was made to order to undo the law of two to two is always oppositional two is always antagonistic whenever your mind makes a distinction between Republican Democrat black white gay straight American non-american we can show that within a nanosecond you choose sides it's it's just the dang nature of the mind and it thinks it's smart because it chose one side this is where we're at right now and and it's not not getting us anywhere so I forgot where I was going with that point what was I about to say that doesn't matter if Trinity yes yes okay my god uh yeah uh you know the foundational Christian doctrine about the nature and shape of God and we just made it into a mathematical conundrum which we couldn't resolve so we shelved the whole thing and I remember the Irish nuns who taught me and she held up the Shamrock in the third grade and says God is like this and then she said don't think about it all right now actually this Irish nun was out rather correct really because it it is unthinkable just like we learned about consciousness in the nature of the universe but on the first word and this if you haven't maybe been exposed to formal Christian theology might strike you as heretical or unusual but um it took that early Christian period three centuries to unpackage this gobbledygook language of Jesus where he's talking about being one with the Father but talking to the father as if the father's over there giving you the spirit but being one with the spirit the Spirit is in the father the father gives you the spirit oh and I when I read you know John's Gospel as a priest I can just see all Catholics their eyes just glaze over I don't know what he is talking about what the whole Christian world didn't know what he was talking about but after three centuries in Cappadocia three brilliant theologians - named Gregory one named basil they finally said well here's the best we can do God is like a circle dance peri means around Corey SACEUR choreography means dance so if I said that to you today without quoting the third century for a century you'd think I was really flaky wouldn't you how God is a circle dance well the reason we can talk that way and receive at least a partial receptivity is because of quantum physics and everything you've been talking about here suddenly God as a flow God is a communion God as a inter-community God is an interdependence not a particle but the relationship between the particles my god Christians have this in code form all along and never recognized it I'm predicting in my book the divine dance that that the next century will be the rediscovery of the real shape of God and the irony is I know if you weren't raised Christian or even if you were to talk about Trinity must sound like super super super Christian stuff actually it isn't because most Christians don't understand it and and in fact it opens up the entire world of interfaith dialogue because we have the father as the unknowable one total mystery we have the spirit as the indwelling one incarnate along with Jesus into the physical universe we have God flowing everywhere between no ability and unknowability between psyche and physicality it suddenly is a actually a rather talkable notion of God whereas when I grew up I mean listen to our TV how often have you heard the phrase on American TV the man upstairs it's just to throw the man upstairs madatha and we're supposed to accept that and most Christians are even critique it it's absurd at first he's male and he's almost always a white male usually has a nice white beard too you know it's just it's unworkable it's unworkable you know and then you know I was the last generation of priests that had to learn Latin and you probably know the let the Latin word for God is deus de US does that sound anything like ze u.s. of course it does it's the same concept it's the same word we basically again along with the whole Greco Roman Empire and it gave us many wonderful things but our concept of God never moved much beyond Zeus all right and and Zeus was throwing down Thunderbolts and people he didn't like you know we just Chuck differentiated who the ones where we didn't like pagans and witches and women and heretics and sinners and every culture in every century decided on a different center you know if you look at all always who were the sinners was different but we had to scapegoat somebody because that keeps a group together and when you're at the tribal level that's what you want to do you want to know your right you want to hold your knowing and a safe Enclave so you don't expose it to any non knowing whereas the majority of the mystery of the Trinity is unknowable but we thought we knew God so we sort of push Jesus into the place of the Trinity you know I'm not a heretic in saying this although to some of you it'll sound like it so as Christians day due to formally say Jesus is God is bad theology is incorrect the Trinity in Christian theology is God right and when you pull Jesus out of this and put him up on a big throne that looks like Zeus you no longer have a dynamic universe really that's you no longer have a God who is in the flow of everything but a being in instead of being itself now my early Franciscan tradition name you probably never heard of a man named John Duns Scotus from Scotland taught at Oxford he taught at the University of being you may speak with one voice University you may speak with one voice of the being of the earth of the waters upon the earth the plants that grow from the earth the animals that live on the earth the humans that live on the earth and the angels and God the entire chain of being could be spoke of with one consistent voice as being now a few Protestants think that's heresy go to acts 17 what does Paul say to the smart people on the air out Areopagus in Athens he says God is the one in whom you live and move and have your very being so we thought of God is a being usually an old man upstairs sitting on a throne throwing down Thunderbolts which may create a very unsafe universe by the way it's really very unsafe if God isn't on your side foundationally is God if God is in the ultimate participant so what Trinitarian doctrine does is move us from a God as a critical spectator big C big-ass critical spectator to a God who is ultimate participant big you big P ultimate participant it's nothing to fight about anymore it's nothing to prove there's nothing you need to prove you just need to get into the dance you know I was glad you also use the word Flo Deborah that's probably the word I use in the divine dance more than anything and usually in the first you you do this all without any degree in theology you're around someone five minutes and you can tell whether they're in the flow or whether they're resisting it and blocking it and holding you at arm's length and holding themselves inside you all know that huh and and I don't have to have any Orthodoxy tests to see people who are inside what I'd call the Trinitarian flow and people who are not so to try to sum this up I hope I haven't been all over the place but we have a God who is unknowable and yet Christians would believe because human beings need a face a form a love a smile that they can touch as the first letter of John says that they can look upon Christians believe that this formless one this unknowable one became in Jesus knowable and lovable that you don't have to accept that but you got to know that's what Christian belief is that we needed a moment of no ability to balance out the supreme unknowability of the father and the holy spirit who are like the space between the particles in the atom you know you can't capture mew can't measure him you can't control him you know i live in new mexico and of course as you know that's where the bomb was put together and on July 16 45 it was dropped south of Albuquerque where I live when Robin Robert Oppenheimer observed the the great explosion he he said this site should be called Trinity site and only years later did he himself wonder why he did that he said I just knew the place where we had undone the three atomic particles was somehow connected to this mystery of Trinity huh that if this is the basic building block of everything the law of three which is always dynamic not trying to make you into a Christian I'm trying to help you respect dynamism as opposed to oppositional ISM yeah and that's was the real point and he said when we met when we undo that when we undo the Trinity the the dynamic flow of creation the universal ecosystem that everything is circulatory system gravitational pulls and and sexuality everything is attracted to everything as so many of our mystic said everything loves everything and moves toward union with it when we stop thinking that way I'm afraid Western Christianity largely became a PhD in dualistic thinking and that's what you've grown up with I'm afraid huh and if some of you with great sincerity or great intelligence actually found yourself reacting against it or moving beyond it I have to say I can understand that I was just lucky enough that the Franciscans gave me a nature-based thanks to Francis himself spirituality a man who could speak a brother Sun sister moon sister water brother Fox it was not a subject object world for Francis as it should have been for any mystic it was meeting reality subject to subject center to center where you grant mutuality you grant subjectivity you grant respect and reverence and you let the animals talk back to you you know now if I'd say that to most mainline Catholics I'm sorry to say I wouldn't be invited back you know I've hid and yet they all have their sentimental little pictures of st. Francis talking to the birds and preaching to the fish and everything which he did you see once you're inside the enchanted universe where everything is granted subjectivity let me tell you something I just told the people at Google yesterday and this might be the biggest payoff of all you're never lonely again ideal as a counselor was so much bad effect of human loneliness human cutoff nests and in many ways it seems to be increasing on this earth so when you can grant mutuality conversation dialogue dignity use any of those words to a leaf to a lizard to the sky and see this is the divine dance now if you're Jewish how many of the psalms don't say that the mountains clap their hands the rivers leap for joy that this whole natural universe is the first Bible and that's what the early Franciscans taught and they said if we murdered and mangled and manipulated and destroyed which we've largely done the first Bible how would we possibly have the skills to reverence and use correctly the written Bible and of course the first Bible seems to have been written about fourteen billion years before the second one so I always say did God have nothing to do for fourteen billion years God had nothing to say the message went oh we're just waiting for Roman Catholics to appear you know if come on come on we're not operating out of a scarcity model and unfortunately my Protestant brothers and sisters you didn't reform us in that at all in fact it became more individualistic more righteousness talking about moral behavior will make this God who is Zeus like you hmm it just it was an unworkable proposition so I suppose you're hearing me and saying is he Christian or uh I'm actually very traditional Christian and very critical of of Christianity at the same time I hope your non-dual mind will allow you to hold those two together yeah so thank you thank you you [Music]

Channel: Science and Nonduality

Views: 374,259

Keywords: science and nonduality, consciousness, nonduality, Richard Rohr

Id: MnTC4NNIACk

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2017