Richard Rohr

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Father Richard Roar, a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial tradition. He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation Richard's teaching is grounded in the Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy practices of contemplation and self emptying, expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly

for the socially marginalized. He is the author of numerous books, including The Naked Now, Falling Upward, Immortal Diamond, and his newest book, The Divine Dance, The Trinity and Your Transformation. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you Feel dot net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five percent of our

listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here is part one of our interview with Father Richard Rore, recorded live at the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. Stay

tuned in the upcoming weeks for part two. Hi, Father Richard, Welcome to the show. Good to be with you. Thank you. We are here at your Center for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico, doing this live, so thanks so much for having us out. We're really excited to do this conversation. You've been writing about the Christian faith, about mysticism, about how to live a good life for a long time, and we will get very p ccific on some of

your writings here shortly. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like

greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I just like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh, that's very well put. I just finished a book called Just This and in the opening ages I talked about maybe the same thing,

not as cleverly as that, I called it the two reservoirs. Uh, And it all depends on which reservoir is filled at any one moment. If you're negative, one with brackish or toxic water has been the one you've been filling, that's what's going to determine your reaction. So it's the same point. And I think what the tradition probably meant by daily prayer. I know that word has been trivialized and probably overused, but was to somehow do almost as it were, a

scan of what are you holding right now? What is your primary energy? Is it negative? Is it positive? And if you don't do that with some regularity, all the evidences, even from neuroscience, is that the negative voices dominate. There's even some kind of attraction in us too, feelings of justified hurt or resentment or anger. And we look at our world and that's not hard to believe. So I very much agree with that. That's a beautiful way of making the point, which wolf do you feed? Which reservoir

is full or have full or empty? Well, I'll be looking forward to in that book when it comes out. I want to start by talking about something that you actually say. It's a fixation of yours, and it's something that I think about a lot and talk about and write about, um, which is what the middle way or I've heard you refer to it as non dualistic thinking,

the third eye. Lots of different things, but I think the term the middle way comes from the Buddha, and I think it's maybe one of the wisest teachings out of that tradition. So I'd like to start off by exploring that concept a little bit with you and and getting your take on it. You've certainly said that for yourself, if you're not careful, you can go into black and white thinking, and that a lot of the troubles in

your life have come from exactly that. I talk about that in my book The Naked Now, where I recognize that I'm a perfectionist. I'm an idealist. I want to do the best thing, the right thing. How that sounds so wonderful, but it's really terrible because because it it uh makes you ignore a lot of your own inner evidence. Uh. It makes you overly judge and expect the positive or the negative, and that's never good. We always say every

expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. So I've had to face that for many years, much of my life, that my very gift of a certain kind of per per not perfectionistic idealistic thinking, has a perfectionistic streak to it. And that's not good. It's it's uh, it's too dualistic. It's too all or nothing, it's too oppositional, it's too binary.

To use the language we use today. Yeah, you know, the middle way for me is not just balancing the opposites, which I think is what a lot of people assume, but it's holding them. Now. I say that as a Christian, where I see that as the very meaning of the cross. The holding of the tension of opposites that we see in Jesus is really uh different. He doesn't balance it out, He suffers it. He he holds it till it transforms him, which we call resurrection. And that's much harder to teach.

You know. For years, I myself thought it was a balancing act, and I seek to be more balanced. And that's good. That is the middle way too. We used to say in Latin in medio stop virtuous virtue stands in the middle. But holding it, oh God, that takes years of practice. You know how to do it. I'm not sure I'm there yet. Yeah, you say in one of the books, I want to emphasize that it's a holding of a real tension, not necessarily a balancing act, a closure, or any full resolution. It is agreeing to

live without resolution, at least for a while. And I think that living without resolution is probably part of the reason it's so hard too not think do listically, because I think we just were wired to want an answer. We're wired to want certaintys. Well, you know what the human psyche does, grabbing for identity. It identifies with things, doesn't relate to them, It identifies with them. It wraps around him, it grabs onto them. Those are different words

we use. And identification is is always a game. It's not really your identity. It's searching for an identity. And but we stopped right there and we get all, you know, elated about this opinion or how terrible that person is or whatever, and it's an over identification. Finally, Yep, you also use the tail in the Garden of Eden as a way to talk about this sort of thinking, as in the um the apple from the tree being the

dualistic thinking. The knowledge of good versus evil not to me is so evident, and that's probably arrogant to me to say it, But I'm amazed that the tradition has not made more of that point that in our creation story. In the Judeo Christian tradition, Yahweh, the God of Israel, says to supposedly Adam and Eve, you may eat of all of the trees in the garden. That's a huge act of permission. It's a lot of them. Wow, it's saying you can make mistakes. There's only one. I'm really

forbidding you to eat from. Only one, and it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So for me, that's a warning against uh, what has been the bane of every religion thinking. It knows what perfect good is, what perfect evil is. It knows who's going to heaven and who's going to hell. I've had to say to some of my evangelical friends who seem preoccupied with answering that question, I said, you do know it's none of

your business, don't you. Why do you make that you're concerned that you have to decide, and you have to know who's going to have it and who's going to hell. You know, all you need to do is keep growing up yourself and leave that to God. So I think we find at the beginning of the Judaeo Christian Bible a warning against dualistic all or nothing moralistic absolutes. And the statement is very strong. If you eat of this tree, you almost surely die. It's the death of the soul,

it really is. You don't grow anymore after that because you can't deal with the subtlety, the ambiguity that real life always is, always without exception. I mean, Jesus says that in the Gospels, why do you call me good? Only God is good? Stop this idle flattery of naming people good. I need to be thought of as good. St. Francis told us. I've got it actually in a poster in my little house on the wall. Do you not think of yourself as good? And do not need other

people to think of you as good? Absolutely, then you're free. But as long as you're living up to persona, you're really not in love with God. You're in love with yourself. I much it takes probably half of your life to recognize that that's true. And we're going to talk about true self, false self and the two parts of life. Uh here here in a little bit um. Another word for you know, holding these things is paradox. And you've

got a wonderful definition of paradox. You say, a paradox is something that initially appears to be inconsistent or contradictory, but might not be a contradiction at all inside of a different frame or scene with a different eye. I deeply believe that, and I believe that what the great religions have done and is almost always present people with with paradoxes, you know, that they have to resolve it took the form of Cohen's in Zen Buddhism, parables in Jesus,

or even the great major doctrines of Christianity. Jesus fully human and fully divine. That's that's a paradox, that's a contradiction. You know, our Catholics, we believe the bread is Jesus. But it's bread that is not resolved. It's it's a leap of faith that puts the two together, you know. Yeah, And I think that's where a lot of people, myself included, can get lost in the spiritual world is because I go that doesn't make any sense, right, And it's because

I'm coming from a logical rational brain. You you talk about something transrational, can you can you share more about transrational? Well, let's first of all, distinguished transrational from irrational. Those are two different words because are two different realities. Irrational would be its contrary to reason. Transrational means that the dualistic logical form, largely by the Greek notions of logic that eliminate the third Always, the rational mind doesn't have any

knowledge of the transrational. It believes if it's transrational beyond access to rational mind, that it's irrational. And that's a falsity, you know, because your mind can't get to it doesn't make it irrational. So now there were different words for that in history, the contemplative mind, the intuitive mind, the non dual mind. In my opinion, all the world religions at the higher levels discovered that we needed a different processor, a different thinking cap as the nuns used to tell us,

to access the great things. Now I talk about the great things in the Naked now being five, I've out of the six since then, love, death, suffering, any honest notion of God and any honest notion of infinity or eternity. The human mind can't form such thoughts. It can't. I got six. It's sex. I added sexuality since I wrote the book that I believe sexuality is in the realm of mystery, and much of the faulty sexual teaching of so many religions that tend to be dualistic is because

we haven't dealt with sex as a mystery. We've tried to deal with it rationally, by logical rational morality, and almost everybody ended up losing because we're dealing with something that isn't rational. So you need you need a different set of rules. It's one even calling rules. So those are the six that I would call in the realm of the transrational love, suffering, God, death, eternity, and sexuality.

That you have to put on a different mind. Now, the way most historic Christians spoke of that is I have to pray about that. Now. They didn't realize what they were saying, But what they were saying is they got to put on a different hat, a different processor. Now, no one taught him the different processor. So so they usually said their prayers with a dualistic mind. Do you understand? So it didn't help. Hey, everybody, don't hit the fast

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it is incredibly good for your health. I've heard that it reduces blood pressure up to ten points if you contribute to this show. I'm trying to get a guest who will validate that for me. But we'll keep working on it. Thanks and now the rest of the interview with the wonderful Richard Roar. I want to talk about engaging in the world in debate, discussion, activism. You know, this opposing things right because on one hand you get

a message that says, go beyond right and wrong. You know, you've got this non dual message, all is one right, God allows everything. And then on the other hand you've got the what I would consider more the activist virtues of Christianity, where Jesus is talking about how you treat other people. And we are at a point in our country where, boy, it's a it's a tough time right now. It doesn't seem like we know how to talk to

each other at all across the spectrum right now. And I'm curious because I wrestle back and forth with here's the action I need to take, here's what I believe in, And you say it yourself a bunch of times you say something along the lines of you go too deep into dual thinking with people, you go too deep into the fight with people, that's who you become. So how do we do both? How do we stand out there and you know, be active but also not how do we not hate our enemies. How do we you know?

I'm just it's a tough time. I think a lot of people are wrestling all very much. So I had the students on site last week and it's much of what we talked about the whole week. Uh, let me say it this way. You have to first succeed at clear headed, rational, logical, dualistic thinking or otherwise it's just amorphous. Nothing means nothing. You understand, there's nothing wrong with being clear headed and having a certain degree of logic and

reasonableness or otherwise. People aren't going to take you seriously, nor should they. But as I said before, you hit a ceiling. So then to deal with the issues that come up inside of your dualistic argumentation, you need another mind, another level, another spirituality, whatever it might be, to actually know how to respond to those Let again, because Jesus is my primary teacher, give him as an example. He will make very dualistic statements like you cannot serve God

and mammon, that's dualistic. It's harder for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of God than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Wow. If you'll notice where he's always dualistic. He's on issues of justice because there are people want to get away with murder. Literally, we're not so inclined towards issues of justice. So he

will make strong statements like that. But then the actual people are the situations that he finds himself in, he will deal with very compassionately, very mercifully, very non dually in his response. So my father's son shines on the good and the bad. His rain falls on the just and the unjust. He will name reality with with utter clarity, particularly in regard to two major issues of justice. But then his response to people is always merciful, for giving, compassionate,

and inclusive, nondual. So if I wouldn't put it that way, you could rightly accuse me of being dualistic. If I'm going to say dualistic thinking is wrong and nondual is right, that's not true. They're both right, right, They're both needed, they're both needed, and we have to say that. And this is sometimes a legitimate critique of people we call conservatives, of people we call liberals, and sometimes liberals really do not believe there is any basis and truth, truth is

what you make it relative it's all relative. And and we push the right farther to the right when we deny all truth claims, and many progressive people deny all truth claims, and that creates a very amorphous, scary world for the psyche. Uh and we're in it now. Like I said, I feel I feel concerned about policies that I see. I feel more concerned about the way I

see everybody talk to each other. You know, the right picks the worst example of the left justify the you know, the left are looters right and the left pick white supremacists, and and that is the representation that each side holds of the other. And just flummixed by how do we how can we move towards a middle ground again? As a as a society, It's just a very tough time. This is going to demand of the person a kind of radical conversion on the left or the right from

their egocentricity. That's why both Buddha and Jesus would so emphasize this. Unless the grain of wheat diet remains just a grain of wheat and will not bear any fruit. You know, as long as the ego is in place, you will justify what pleases your ego on the left or the right, and you'll find all the arguments to just by your conservative position. And our last year in America has proven this, you know. But a high percentage of people, even people with pH ds on both sides,

if they're not converted. Who cares. You can have all the PhDs you want. Transformation, enlightenment. Conversion is not the same as education, and I'm all for education. I couldn't talk here if I hadn't been well educated by the Franciscans. But we've confused information with transformation, and transformation is very different. It's what the religions of the world, at the higher levels, not the lower level. At the higher levels are talking

about along the same lines. One of the guiding principles of your center, it's written, the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. You say, I learned this from my father St. Francis. That's very much Franciscan and spirituality. It's called soft prophecy. Hard prof to see is, you know, denouncing the king or whatever it might be. And there might be a place for that, someone better do it now and then. But soft prophecy is what I, frankly more see in Jesus or for example,

he just ignores the Roman Empire. He never directly attacks it. He gives it no credence, he gives it no incense, he he offers it no respect. That's almost a deeper way of subverting it. But most Western Christians have to now be taught that because we've been taught to sort of bow before the powers that be, we haven't been taught how to withdraw our allegiance from false power. Maybe churches like the Amish or the Mennonites are good at that.

Most of the mainline Christians or mainline Judaism often doesn't know much about that. It's pretty much a part of the system. There's a phrase that has been used for what you were just describing something about the type of belief that that is when you're sort of mainstream and you're using your spirituality is a way of getting additional material things well, the prosperity gospel. That's that's the common

in America. I mean, most of people have been given what I would call as a Catholic imperial Christianity, the view from the empire down. You know, how to maintain the status quo, which always just happens to be privileging me, you know so, so I love to say, you know, there's no such thing as being non political. There's no such thing to to pretend everything is beautiful is a political statement. It's a maintaining of the status quo. That's political, right, right.

I wish Christians could see that most of them are intensely political while having a self image of being a political because I don't dirty my hands by criticizing the president or anybody else. We can't get away with that any longer. And and Christianity by not critiquing the bad by doing it differently, and that you don't have to directly denounce, as I said, but just do it differently, which means maybe you don't. I totally think capitalism and

Christianity are the same thing. To use a very contemporary example, a lot of Christians have never critiqued capitalism one percent. I understand one percent. It's all perfectly you think it fell from heaven. So we Probably the reason we got into this whole is most Christians were not taught the prophets. And and why more Jews tend to be self critical than Christians is because they learned self critical thinking from the prophets, whereas we Christians pretended that the only meaning

of the prophets was to foretell Jesus. That's about per cent if that of their message, you know you missed their real message when you think their job is just to foretell Jesus. That's very self centered on our part. They were talking to contemporary situations with contemporary messages in the eighth century, the seventh century, the sixth century before Christ, and they weren't just sitting around waiting for Jesus. Now did the message they communicate set a trajectory that lead

to people who could think like Jesus. Absolutely so in that sense you can say they foretold Jesus. That's very different, very different point. Well, that leads us very well into I couldn't have made a better segue myself talking about being self critical into a theme I see in a lot of your work, is that you say that it's kind of at the heart of the message, we need

to change ourselves and not other people. Right, you say, jesus very first message in the Gospels, which is usually translated is convert, repent or reform, is the Greek word metanoia. How do metanoia, which quite literally means to change your mind Jesus the right things. In my book, Thank You, Jesus first word to us was change, and at least two is the three of the Gospels, the very first words out of his mouth. Now again, it's always translated

reform or repent. And so we all picture somebody walking in New York and if the sandwich board and saying you're going to hell or something like that. Change your mind is the literal metta noia noose's mind or thinking go beyond it. Maybe it would be a better go beyond your ordinary mind and think differently. Maybe that would be a close translation. You look good in a sandwich board, by the way, and we uh, this reform just lends itself to low level morality. Just stop drinking and burn

your playboy magazines, and this means you love Jesus. We can't call that morality anymore. That's you know, I've been using lately, learned from my friend Ken Wilbur, the difference seen cleaning up, growing up, waking up, and showing up. And we've confused basic cleaning up with growing up and waking up. You understand, stop drinking and burn your playboys. I hope you do that just to get to some minimal level of you know, uh, decent human relationship. But

I don't call that awakening. It isn't even close. We got a long way to lead you beyond that. So I like his language, and much of our work here at the Center is much more about waking up and growing up and the action pieces showing up. Yeah. I always sort of presume the cleaning up has our have you taken place. But when you see churches that you know, there's sermons after ten years of going to church are still about stop drinking. Well, this isn't church anymore. That's

a recovery movement, and there's a place for that. I'm all for the recovery movement, as you probably know from some of my books, but don't call basic recovery transformation, right right, Yeah, I actually you have so many books that you know in preparation. Well, I was really interested in reading the your book on the Twelve Steps because I'm a I'm a recovering alcoholic and addic myself, so but I didn't get to it yet. You know, it's mainly used in jails and prisons, that's where it sells.

Just it makes me so happy because as you know, so many people in in jails and prisons, they just darn it, not their fault, but they had the disease early, and it made him make some stupid mistakes. You talk about the ego, and we're going to get into false self, as I said later, but you say you start to recognize the underlying bias of the ego. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change. You turn your attention from that to righteous causes that

invariably ask others to change. It's so evident once you hear it, you know the ego wants two things. It wants to be separate, define itself as individual and superior, separate and superior, And to actually admit it's faults is to be dang it like everybody else. So we're not good at shadow work, we're not good at admitting our own faults. What about the other side of that, going too far where you think? Because I've noticed people tend to either think it's all everyone else's or all their

own faults. And actually that's a very good point. Thanks for making it early on. Because I speak of them as there's projectors who project their faults and other people. And there are, as you just wisely said, introjectors who who just beat up on themselves endlessly. It goes back usually to their early parenting. We're blaming was away and you're the fault, and they internalize those voices and they take on their mother's critical voice or their father's critical voice,

and and always blame themselves. So that is an important corrective to the point we were making. It's still ego though, right, It's still about me. Another good point, see, to need to be the worst person in the world is to be special. Yeah, it's again I played that. It's a again to be ego game. You know, Look how terrible I am, and that makes me special in a negative way, right,

I've seen it. Prayer comes up in a lot of different contexts with you, and I think we'll spend more time when I move into how do we put on the different thinking cap because I think that's where prayer comes in. But one of the things you say about prayer is it's about changing you, not changing God. And that seems to be very different than the way most prayers are. You know, again for Christians, it's straight on the sermon on the mount. Why do you babble on

like the Pagans do. Don't you know God already knows what you need. He's telling us right there. The prayer should not be making announcements to God, trying to talk God into things, trying to tell God things things that God doesn't know. Yeah, he was pulling out the whole rug from beneath. The immature understanding of prayer didn't do much good because we went right back to it these week Catholics did. But it appears Protestants largely imitated most

of what we Catholics did. Is because it's the early level patterns, early level pattern So, yeah, prayer is much more allowing God to change you, to change your glasses, your set of eyes. You don't need to change God. God is a thousand times more compassionate than you are, and more caring than you are, more merciful than you are, So you don't need to talk God into caring about your sick grandma, or thinking that if we get twenty five people to care for sick grandma, God will be

talked into it. And is said when we're praying, and perhaps you've heard this in some of my books, we're always and I'm gonna say, seconding the motion, the first intuition to raise your heart in trust and love. It always comes from God. Always, God is always the initiator. Then you think in your mind, oh, I think I'm gonna say a prayer. Now you were just touched, do you understand, And that's what made you second the motion.

The prayer is always seconding the motion. Now that is so consistent, at least in the great Catholic mystics, you know, going back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the medieval saints, Teresa Avala, John of the Cross, any of them. You know, we're only responding. And once you you develop a subtle inner life and you recognize you were just touched, and you thought you were initiating the prayer, you are continuing

the prayer. Master Eckhart, the German mystic, put it so well, the eyes with which we look back at God are the very same eyes by which God first looked at us. Who all we're doing is completing the circuit. God looks at you, you receive the loving gaze, Your heart is softened, and you gaze back with love. You're always completing the circuit. It doesn't mean that you're always asking for something or

telling God something. It's just a little interior glance of love, as brother Lawrence puts it, Ah, and it grounds you, it expands you, It opens your heart space, you see, and you're different afterwards. The last thing on this topic of of changing ourselves, I love this line. It's really rang true in my life. If you find yourself resenting the faults of others, stop resenting your own. And boy, I tell you I became a lot easier on people when I became easier on myself. Makes total sense. See,

that's that feeding the bad wolf. You're beating up on yourself of them all. When you open your eyes at six in the morning or whatever it is, that inner reservoir is now filled with negative energy and you're gonna bounce it back onto the first person you run into in the kitchen. You understands just because your inner spaces is death, not life, It's negativity not grace. But that's why I say we gotta scan it. Almost where am I? And you know, yesterday even I woke up, I don't

know if I had bad dreams. I think I did. It's some confusing dreams at least, But I woke up already in a state of that's the best. It's just you know, it was not an embracing of life, but it's sort of pushing it away. And I had nothing bad to look forward to yesterday. He just was inside me already, but I was able to see it. I did my little sit at home at my kennel and and sat and read some spirits you're reading. And I think before I left the house it was recognized and

let go of. Yeah. I wouldn't have let go of it. It would have dominated the morning. I'm sure. One of the questions I asked people in this show a lot, and I'm always sort of trying to get the balance right, is how much should we you describe waking up in a just call it a bad spot, first word right? And I never know, like there's two seems to be a couple approaches that are that are advocated. One is change your mind, look at the positive change. The other

is feel what you're feeling accepted? What does it have to teach you? And I always feel like I sit and kind of look both, and I sometimes I'm not sure which direction to go. Do you have anything that any any thoughts on that? Idea of of when to do which thing, or maybe it's both at the same time. I don't know. I just I'm always curious about it. You know. The first one you mentioned, I call replacement therapy. Were okay, replace your negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Sometimes

that and work. Sometimes it does work. Then there's letting go therapy, and that's primarily what you teach in meditation contemplation, to surrender your obsessive, negative, critical, judgmental thoughts, to just not feed them, as you said right at the beginning. Now, the third one you mentioned are the second one you mentioned was, I would say it in sort of between repressing our emotions and completely indulging yes, yes, uh, what

will we recall that? Just teachable moments because suffering is such I mean, it's one of your big things, right, how important suffering is in transformation for transformation, Yeah, to see everything as a teachable moment. I mean, that's what a lot of us are trying to do. With the political situation in America, that's just okay, are you going to spend the next year is just fighting back or acting as if we've been saved, both of which your illusions. Can we say what can we learn from this and

how can we grow up? That would seem to be a positive way of yeah, yeah, but teachable moment does mean that I'm willing to change, right, I'm willing to let something change me. That's good, yeah, always good. Well, I think that will be a good place to maybe take a brief break and then if you're okay, come back and hit a few more. You take your break, and I'll take mine right back. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation

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