RICHARD ROHR - BREATHING UNDERWATER ----(FULL VIDEO)

they asked this um this theme breathing underwater be my topic for this short session so um why don't i begin with the poem that entitled the book i i first used this poem i think it was i was my last year in cincinnati in 1986 or 85 and they asked me to talk on what i believed were the connections between the gospel and the 12 steps of bill wilson and i had recently read this poem by an english nun sister carol balleck and it was all there as so often is the case with good poetry so in that first set of what were cds that that's i mean uh that's at that time i used it and it just continued to speak to people so i made a second then cd said how do you breathe underwater and uh that continued to be responded to so a year ago they said put it in writing so this is the book in writing but here's the poem i built my house by the sea not on the sands mind you not on the shifting sand but i built it of rock a strong house by a strong sea and we got well acquainted the sea and i good neighbors not that we spoke that much we met in silences respectful keeping our distance silences but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand always the fence of sand was our barrier always the sand between us and then one day and i still don't know how it happened the sea came without warning without welcome even not sudden and swift but a shifting across the sand like wine less like the flow of water than the flow of blood slow but coming slow but flowing like an open wound and i thought of flight and i thought of drowning and i thought of death and while i thought the sea crept higher till it reached my door and then i knew there was neither flight nor death nor drowning that when the sea comes calling you stop being neighbors well-acquainted friendly at a distance neighbors and you give your house for a coral castle and you learn to breathe underwater so for me i became an image of what the uh addicted person has to do but the more i worked with it the more i i recognized that addiction is is not something unique to people with substance abuse issues as we call them today my contemplative work has helped me see that really what i think religion at the more mature levels is saying is we're all addicts now maybe that isn't the word you would have used they use the word sin they're approximately talking about the same thing i am convinced a lot of people don't like the word sin today but addict makes a lot of sense to us but what mature religion is saying is that the universal addiction we have every one of us in this room whether i know you or not well i unfortunately don't know most of you but we're all addicted to our way of thinking that's the universal addiction and that's why religion at the higher levels said you've got to find a way to detach from that or you won't get very far that was called meditation or contemplation changing the the software up here so you didn't process things as i said at the mass with the usual uh self as the reference point until you can displace this single grain of wheat and its preferences and its hurts and its agenda and its needs you will remain addicted to your own way of thinking everything that gets in is through your filters it becomes sort of obvious once you say it you don't even have to prove it to people and your filters are your own fears your own cultural agenda your own biases your own anger your own limitedness your own lack of education in a certain area which blinds us all and who of us is not blind in certain areas and uh so i was honored you talked about freedom because i do believe that is the work of authentic religion and it's yet it's been a word that most of religion is very afraid of very afraid of freedom that and with good reason let me tell you why if you're at the mass what i was saying up above was that we've largely dealt with the false self well you'd you'd do well to be afraid of the freedom of the false self because it's going to do all kind of stupid things so when you don't get to basic transformation in religion of changing the seer what we're calling these days the change that changes everything when you don't get to the true self you have to be afraid of freedom once you get people to their true self you don't have to be afraid of freedom that's why augustine can say love god and do what you want i mean catholic bishops are scared to death to quote the great saint augustine [Music] but he did say it love god and do what you want paul says the same thing in approximately three different places almost identical same thing galatians and romans but we just weren't trained to to handle that kind of freedom to know that we could have that kind of freedom because we ourselves we're trained to mistrust ourselves and again i'm going to repeat you you almost have to uh if you're still living out of the false self which is to live out of an addictive personality that sees everything through a set of blinders of what i want what i need what hurts me what i prefer oh they say other teachers than i have certainly said better than i you know every preference every stated preference every emotional expectation is a resentment waiting to happen right so what a what a uh what a spiritual teacher do says well just get rid of all your preferences you know that i have to be this to have this to be happy or i have to be this way to you know get through the day you really don't but once you set that up you're setting yourself up for being unhappy most of your life because it's not always going to go that way and and so the the way of freedom is is to move beyond that whereas i said you know it's not all about me so anyway back to the 12-step stuff i in some ways although i'm sure i'm addicted to the same things many of us are addicted to uh what we're used to in our way of thinking i i never belong to a formal 12-step program so probably have no right to write a book like this but my when i first moved to albuquerque in 1986 i lived in a little house downtown and my back door opened uh where another back door opened where the alcoholics met almost every night of the week and they would be hanging out smoking as you know before before and after the meetings right behind my door so i couldn't help but meet them all over the years and they were just nice people i liked them because they were honest and so several years into it they knew they were breaking the rules they have what they call open meetings and closed meetings and to come to a close meeting you're supposed to be a bona fide alcoholic or addict you're supposed to be able to stay at home and say hi i'm richard i'm a drunk or something like that you know they said well we know richard you're not formally but we want you to come in and see what's happening here so i started attending these meetings and as a priest who was used to sanctuaries and churches i would come out for these meetings and say whatever's happening here feels a lot more like church should feel than what's happening in the sanctuary on sunday morning and that's not an exaggeration it was just obvious to me there is much more humility and there is much more honesty and when you have humility and honesty you can build when you have either of those lacking you can't build on anything it's building on sand as the poet says so um it it was just a conviction of mine that this guy bill wilson you know in akron ohio in the 1930s i would say it without any i think was a man inspired by god and and he didn't come at it like we did by studying philosophy and theology and eventually sometimes getting down into real life but he started as my father saint francis did at the bottom where the pain is at and where jesus in fact was uh and and and tried to make sense out of life right at that point he went where the pain was which is where jesus went that's what jesus healings mean that he's always moving to wherever the pain is instead of running away from it or denying it or pretending it isn't true so um i made a statement somewhere that i was quoted on an awful lot in subsequent years i said i really believe the 12 steps so pragmatic so american so practical so down to earth so real so honest that they're going to go down in the history of world spirituality as the american contribution there's something so american about it and what i mean by that is it doesn't get lost in metaphysics and doctrine and dogma transubstantiation it just get how can we transact people you know instead of nothing wrong with doing it to the bread but but as as a augustine also said we do it to the bread and then we feed it to the people so the body of christ knows it's the body of christ so you are what you eat but we put all of the emphasis on we can do it to the bread you know and and we didn't emphasize well are we doing it to the people which is the whole point uh the sacraments are for the people we were told you know just for the celebration of the sacraments as an end in themselves so the theology the practice of 12 steps became very sacramental for me because i saw the transformation of peoples that took place not in all cases we can't be naive but with an amazing success rate that uh has made so many other groups around the world imitate uh what bill wilson said among the many a good things he said in the blue book the big book whichever one you might have read he says that we can't be satisfied and this is where people in religion started taking him seriously he said we can't be satisfied with merely overcoming the substance addiction until you achieve what he first called emotional sobriety right you're not really in recovery until your emotional life stops going up and down that's what contemplation is teaching you know how to take charge of this self-referential world which is up and down and in and out all the time uh and then he finally said that until you have had a vital spiritual experience now he only said this in the last later i believe editions of the book he doesn't believe it the recovery went to any depth or or affected any long-term transformation vital spiritual experience and he describes that at some length that this small world has to be shaken up and somehow you become aware i am a part of something much bigger and all i am is a part and i'm being led i'm being guided and he was wise enough to not get in any food fight with organized religion by naming god you know it doesn't really appear that god is too fussy about his name or her name it really all the evidence is that's our problem it's not god's problem you know all you got to do is get the relationship right that you're in you're in in relationship to grace to freedom to life but not the name and the name has caused too much violence too much mistrust so bill wilson was a genius he says okay we're just going to call it the higher power you name it what you want but there's a power bigger than you and until you learn how to plug into that and he said with great genius very similar to the christian mystics until an experience leads you to the edge of your own resources that day where you say you know damn it i can't do it i just can't do it i can't get over this anger or this whatever it might be or this grief you will not plug into the big source you won't and that became step one which you're i hope familiar with you know and you've got to start with the experience of powerlessness now that here that's very un-american in a way uh it's about as counter-intuitive for the american psyche as you can get because we're into climbing achieving succeeding power and to say you know you can't even start this thing till something in your life leads you to experience your utter powerlessness i cannot get through this alone and if you're on schedule i mean i don't have to program it for you it will normally happen somewhere between 30 and 55 or you know if you're listening at all it's happening if you don't experience that powerlessness one death or one tragedy or something you just i can't fix it i can't change it i can't explain it i can't understand it damn it that's when you learn to plug into the higher power or the bigger source but back a few more words about emotional sobriety uh when you just stop drinking but you don't really go deeper with it and and take some creative control over the swings of your emotions it's what's called by some i may i don't think they mean it unkindly the dry drunk now you've probably all met a dry drunk in your life what it what it means is someone who formally is off drugs is off narcotics is off drink but they're still to put it very straightforwardly they're miserable to live with right they're and what characterizes it and this got me into the non-dual thing too is all or nothing thinking you might be one yourself much of the human race is they're not pleasant to live with uh if it isn't perfect it's terrible if it absolutely isn't right it's heresy at least if you're a catholic you know just there's no middle ground there's no where everything is happening where everything really is so that's why it doesn't deal with real life you know it's all this black and white thinking and and they could they tend to call it all or nothing thinking brothers and sisters if any of you are afflicted with this addiction you want to be healed of this i'm telling you you're never going to be a happy person i'm telling you with all the authority i can tell you with you're going to be a miserable old man right you're going to be a old woman you are if you don't if you're if you don't get beyond all or nothing thinking and if you can't deal with subtle consciousness with the gray matter which is almost everything now that's what the eastern religions and how we're discovering we just we call it unitive consciousness but they describe it much more or uh correctly or are precisely in a way this is what we'll talk about tonight they called it non-dual thinking just to just to describe it that you stop differentiating everything from something else the world of comparing and competing and you do it in your mind and not only do you do it immediately and i'm going to impress you now i actually checked this out with dr oz yes he listens to my stuff and uh when i was in new york a few years ago he had me stay at his house so i because i didn't have a scientific education you know i had our medical education i had to check out the things i say is this true now what i'm saying he says and on this one he said it's absolutely true the mind is a binary system the word tall when you first hear it as a little two-year-old only makes sense and counter distinction to the word short and most people never go beyond that for the sake of ordinary daily conversation tall and short is enough even though most of us in this room don't really fit one or the other you know but we don't but we don't want to be bothered with subtle consciousness you see what we would call in in christianity the gift of discernment where you go to a little deeper level and and say what's really happening here for ordinary conversation the ordinary guy on the street is content with his dualistic mind or the all or nothing thinking of the alcoholic and again you see where what religion intuited at the more mature levels is now in our century uh a great part of the last century too i mean being validated by science and medicine and biology and wouldn't that make sense i mean truth is one if it's true it's true that's what it means to be true it's true all the time everywhere or it's not true so if it's true then philosophy should be seeing it theology should be seen but all from their different angle from their different vocabulary and now thank god surprise of surprises science is seeing it who we used to think was our enemy you know and not at all quite the contrary right now it's very very exciting so here's where i think learning to breathe underwater can be helpful to all of us to uh really recognize that you and i are addicted to our to our binary jumping back and forth all or nothing you have to recognize how quickly you do it by the time you're in your 20s it's pretty much automatic already because it's the only way you've been trained how to think even by a university to go to university is to get a phd in dualistic thinking do you understand normally normally yeah it is that's why religion distinguished education from transformation they're not the same thing you can be educated and not transformed and you can be uneducated and be profoundly transformed you understand uh you'd think we would have known that you think we would have understood that but we confused i'll just get them educated just send them to a jesuit college and then you know i have a jesuit cuban friend in albuquerque the pastor of the jesuit parish he says yeah we trained them in dualistic thinking you know in the best jesuit university in havana and overnight lost all of it no because they joined sides either totally against it or totally for it but christianity no longer fit in the equation because we hadn't taught them wisdom we just made them good phd jesuit trained catholics you know and when the real problems came they had no deeper authority as we talked about at math to really know how to how to address it or how to deal with it so this is the pearl of great price this is the change that changes everything so you see how all my themes really sort of come together in a way i think they do i hope they do but one more thing i should mention because i want you to see this in yourself uh because until you see it you'll just argue with me you understand oh i don't know that i agree with him who's he now everything becomes a question of authority does he have the authority to say this which is what they said to jesus by what authority do you talk this way you know so what a good authority does is put you back on your own experience and says okay you just observe yourself don't believe me you just watch your mind for the rest of today this is early stage contemplation and and watch how often you make judgments you state preferences i'm going to say it in different ways it's so immediate it's automatic i like this restaurant not that restaurant you know we're set up for this we have menus you know 55 things on the menu i prefer this and that's good that's okay but don't think it matters do you understand [Laughter] you know you're going to get fed and you're not going to die but these things become ultimate importance for us so first of all maybe what why most great spiritual teachers said do not judge here's probably what you would say they're they're really saying do not label it's the labeling tendency which the mind goes toward immediately it's the base why racism does not go away in low level consciousness and as i said at masses you're going to keep coming back until we transform people you know even liberals in the moment of stress fall right back into their lizard brain you know and they are it's true and we got to say this i've seen too many liberals relapse you know and the racist comment comes out or the uh are the homophobia are the you know sexism it's all the same because they're labeling don't you see until you deal with this the usual liberal issues don't go to any depth that's why i can't give up on religion because we are still qualified to talk about the true self and the false self and get to the foundation clarify things at that level and then most of the justice issues fall in line so not only do you distinguish immediately within the first nanosecond of what you like and what you don't like but within the next five seconds you start labeling why one side is better than another you do you do you do we all do once you distinguish i mean renaissance would call it the scapegoat mechanism for some reason the damn mind and i'm using damn intentionally now you know once it states its preference and distinguishes this from that here from there uh you put one higher and one lower you do you do damn it and and until you catch yourself doing that um deep seeing seeing with the eyes of god doesn't happen really doesn't happen now because i knew most people wouldn't listen to me at that level because it sounds too mystical or something i just talked about emotional sobriety that you've gotta reign in this emotional world which likes and dislikes far too much and then wraps around its likes and its dislikes and identifies with them uh the medieval franciscans would have said attaches to them and once you attach you're trapped you're trapped so you've got to see yourself before the attachment even starts and see how deep the attachment is not i hope that doesn't sound too sophisticated it'll become second nature once it's second nature and and you see yourself going down this this terrible path again of stating your preferences and deciding you know this kind of person is better than that kind of person and then once you do that you will find the evidence to prove it and you will find you'll feel absolutely logical because you've found the evidence you know i'm sure this poor guy in florida you know a victim of his racism or whatever you know he found the evidence that black boys going into white neighborhoods are always bad people he probably thought he was being logical probably thought he was protecting the neighborhood as thomas aquinas says no one intentionally does evil his word was you you always choose an apparent good inside of your little logic inside of your little addictive system in where you're not breathing underwater you know just surviving uh you explain this in your little mind in his little mind he thought he was i guess doing good for some people by shooting another person so that's how we can do evil and not call it evil so this is no small issue this issue of addiction because what it becomes is what jesus would call in the in the new testament blindness because you say you see you remain in your sin this glib assurance that i see correctly or that my seeing is truthful so i hope that gives you just a little taste of it what i what i tried to do was take each of the 12 steps and do a short chapter beginning with a good old testament hebrew scripture quote a good quote from the letters and then a quote from jesus uh so people wouldn't think i was selling out to psychology or selling out to the alcoholics you know because that's what christians want to think oh this is lightweight you know this isn't scriptural well it it's amazing how scriptural it is it was just easy to do in fact i finally in each chapter i had to say okay which is the best hebrew scripture which is the best letter of paul which is the best line from jesus to make the point of step one two three four five it was it was always there so i don't know should we take a few questions or yeah yeah okay yeah you're welcome i was just wondering um like we talk about judgment and i'm personally i'm catholic background so i was just wondering it's like there's some kind of judgment on catholics or you know what i mean yes let me talk all right see you can only get to nondual consciousness when you first use basic dual consciousness in other words you have to be able to make value judgments about this is helpful this is not helpful this is real this is unreal we see jesus do this jesus is a dualistic thinker too he is he is much more critical of judaism than i ever am of catholicism i mean he reams them out and this is his own religion what jesus did was bring to religion self-critical thinking which he learned from the jewish prophets when any religion catholicism episcopalians methodist baptists mormons when you don't have self-critical thinking i'm going to make what is almost a blanket statement religion is always idolatrous it always worships itself not god you see so i hope what i'm bringing and forgive me if it didn't sound that way is self-critical thinking to my religion that's the only one i can criticize i'm not free to criticize methodists you understand but i'm i'm still a catholic priest in good standing believe it or not and by the protection of the franciscans but and um so uh i say i offer my criticisms from the inside not as an outsider the way jesus i hope criticized judaism but i hope i'm also making a point that non-dual thinking is not naive false innocence you've gone through the problems of seeing the dark side of of america of catholicism whatever your group is but then you've risen beyond it and can also still be a part of it which is non-dual so you have to be in the end both a dualistic clear-headed thinker and move beyond it that's the best of both worlds thank you rich richard um what i'm hearing from the journey you're talking about is that there's kind of this gaining of saul false self and a death to it okay can you say a word to the about the folks in the world in our society who life is just uh lost from the get-go and what is their spiritual walk like how it can you say something about that i wish i'd spent more time on that in the book of falling upward the amount of people who who aren't even allowed to do the task of the first half of life they're beat up so much abused dismissed denied rejected excluded that if you i are you referring to falling upward or not yeah yeah okay uh they they can't build the container they have no container i was jail chaplain for 14 years in albuquerque and that's these were all young men and young women who were defeated before the get-go you know abused by their dad or their mom or both or our life for the neighborhood so i believe god of course gets to all of us but god does have a much harder time it seems because they've somehow got to build some container of dignity they've got to as we would say to feel good about themselves as a gay person as a black person as a rejected person as a whatever person that abused person that was told they weren't good so you know the way you usually do that is by black and white thinking like here i was the priest of the jail but the last thing sometimes i wanted to talk about was religion and because all these guys would get religion when they you know they'd come oh father i found jesus this week and there was a part of me that rejoiced but a part of me that said oh god now we got our word because the jesus that they found is sort of um it's just a jesus to to now affirm my little world as perfect and right and okay and wonderful and they're still usually hating of the outsider to their group now do you understand it isn't high level consciousness is what i'm saying they often eventually get there if the heart space is open too but if they just get religion in the head this is half the fundamentalist churches in america they just like black and white answers give me total truth you know and don't make me think anymore so there the path of the person who was beat up early is first of all and here's why you've got to be patient and work with them and affirm them and believe in them long enough so they can create what i call in falling upward a container that i can feel good about myself enough to let go of myself as jesus said in the gospel but you got to let go of yourself but you have to have a self to let go of itself you therapists all know that you've got to have an ego to let go of an ego when your ego was taken away from you and beat up as a little boy or a little girl your your path is longer and you need some wise teachers along the way first teachers who tell you to do the first half of life believe in yourself boy you're a good man you're a son of god and in that sense the gospel is wonderful you know god's love is unconditional you're forgiven you're home free and that's why they get so excited about jesus and they should but as i said the jesus they've met is not usually the cosmic christ yet it's you know it's a little self-serving jesus so they need a second teacher and usually life will offer them that through suffering to get them into bigger questions then how am i wonderful you understand how am i wonderful is just to get you started once you know you're wonderful the real goal of it is you know what i've got an excess of energy and i want to now tell other people that they're wonderful that's the goal to not just keep walking around aren't i wonderful that's so big deal see the jews made the same mistake that's why the prophets came along aren't we we're the chosen people you know and isaiah and paul both say the meaning of your chosenness is so that you could have the experience to tell the rest of the world that they're chosen too you follow me and a small percentage of judaism seemed to have gotten there catholicism absolutely imitated judaism down to jot and tittle now we became the only one true holy catholic apostolic church and felt sorry for all you heretics you know [Applause] god just doesn't love you dearly but you know many evangelical churches fortunately the episcopalians usually don't but many evangelical churches they repeat what judaism did what catholicism did all over because that's what you do at early-stage village it's all about you next question yes in in terms of making these immediate judgments what element is related to fear which goes back to the reptilian brain yeah major that's that's really good you put your finger on it um the ego is fear-based at the core because it's whole concern is not to change and not to die when that's your obsession 24 hours a day not to ch have to change and not to ever die protect this little richard thing as long as i can in its present form uh you are automatically fear-based and you made another good connection it is what i call the lizard brain yeah and a certain good percentage of humanity and it's not their fault usually they were beat up or weren't surrounded by wisdom figures in their youth are at the reptilian brain level they don't know it's fear as you know they've lived with it so long they think this is the way everybody is you find that when you deal with fear-based people they think all of us are walking around terrified each moment of what could go wrong what could go wrong that when you look out at life from the fear glasses it pretty much distorts all perception you don't see truthfully so what is the letter to john say perfect love casts out all fear so the first half of life tends for all of us and who of us don't love it in our teenage kids you know i mean you can just see they're so scared of not succeeding not looking good not looking cool and we can all remember being back there they're terrified going to high school every day you know until they can create a container which says i'm good i'm okay i don't have to prove myself anymore you're fear-based so in a certain sense first half of life is fear the goal of religion as ken wilbur says his degrees uh consciousness so we can get more and more people into the second half of life that we can live out of a love motivation instead of a fear motivation and that's that's almost it in a word that's that when you're operating out of love instead of fear you're you're a second half of life person you're mature okay okay richard thank you for this wonderful presentation i just have a short footnote to put to it having spent almost 30 years of my life in the jesuit order this is not a this is not a food fight between franciscans and jesuits i don't want this but i don't think we can really dismiss jesuit education or the jesuit synthesis ignatian synthesis in quite the way he did what the centerpiece of the nation exercises is precisely what you were talking about discernment of the spirits yes and everything underneath it but the student in college didn't do the exercises well maybe not that's right okay that's fine i mean i couldn't agree more listen the jesuits have backed me up since my early cincinnati days because they know i affirm what they're doing but i'm talking about the intellectual game apart from the spiritual game but ignatius as you well know did both you know but to to get a degree from a jesuit university the 30 days are not required unfortunately yeah yeah last question i think hi i'm meg and i am an addict i um thank you so much and i'm looking at the chapter after the 12 steps um after the 12th step and i want to read one paragraph if everybody could just thank god instead of where i where i read love you only know what love is by falling into it almost against your will because it is too scary and too big to be searched out manufactured or even imagined ahead of time love like god is a harsh and dreadful thing according to russian writer dostoyevsky i wonder if that is why we both want it but also avoid a vital experi spiritual experience and my my question is if you could comment on it also comes up in the awful grace of god um that to me um breathing underwater and i hope you didn't already say this but to me breathing underwater is um god is the ocean flooding over us and um not because we want it to but because uh because that's what god does and in order to breathe underwater you have to have a vital spiritual experience i think you picked up something real central that as in the poem she uses the metaphor of the water but becomes the blood it becomes a a a two-sided symbol it's both death and life it drowns you but this drowning is what we would call the drowning of the false self or the addict and so it ends up being the very thing you wanted it doesn't look like it ahead of time so i i think you're understanding it absolutely correctly that the the the drowning the dying uh the losing which is is uh uh first experienced as a submersion or a loss of life you see why we used it for baptism you know is in fact the the carry through experience that transforms you so you're hearing what i hope i'm saying very well thank you

Channel: Richard Rohr University

Views: 11,123

Rating: 4.8933334 out of 5

Keywords: RICHARD ROHR, CAC, WHO GOES TO HEAVEN, WHO GOES TO HELL, ADDICTS, 12 STEPS, RECOVERY PROGRAMS, WHO GETS SAVED, GOD'S JUDGMENT, BREATHING UNDERWATER, THE UNIVERSAL CHRIST, EAGER TO LOVE, ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI, FRANCISCAN PRIEST, HERESY, HETRETIC

Id: rOjTgcTI220

Length: 42min 56sec (2576 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020