Stephen Cope: The Night Sea Journey

This is a powerful and wise quote that I am moved to post once again. I have experienced firsthand this "night sea journey" over many years now. I've also witnessed, personally and professionally, the process of healing and awakening of countless others who have courageously undertaken this pathway into our deeper selves. Yes, it can be incredibly painful to open our hearts to what we may have long neglected or denied and to instead agree to gradually learn how to "exile nothing." That said, it is my belief that remaining disassociated, fragmented, and split off within ourselves ― which also inevitably results in our lack of intimacy and deep connection with others ― is what causes us the greatest suffering. May courage and compassion and kindness be contagious. May we all be increasingly engaged in this amazing lifelong journey of coming home to ourselves, of opening our hearts to love, and of experiencing the sacred thread which connects us with all of life.

With warmest blessings to us all

on our journeys. 💗 Molly

Photo by Molly: Moonset over the Pacific

The Night Sea Journey

The "night sea journey" is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness... The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.

― Stephen Cope 

I found this quote in Bessel Van Der Kolk's book,

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and 

Body In the Healing of Trauma 

https://besselvanderkolk.net/the-body-keeps-the-score.html

John O'Donohue: The Heart of Holiness

Photo by Molly

The Heart of Holiness

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation. 

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.

* * * * *

When you become vulnerable, any ideal or perfect image of yourself falls away. 

Many people are addicted to perfection, and in their pursuit of the ideal, they have no patience with vulnerability. 

When you trust yourself enough to discover and integrate your strangeness, you bestow a gift on yourself. Rather than annulling a complex part of your heart which would continue to haunt you, you have thrown your arms around yourself to embrace who you are. This is at the heart of holiness. Holiness  is not complacent refuge in the glasshouse of pieties. To be holy is to enter the dense beauty of passionate complexity.

* * * * *

Beauty does not linger, it only visits. Yet beauty's visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life.

When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see. 

The beauty of the true ideal is its hospitality towards woundedness, weakness, failure and fallback. Yet so many people are infected with the virus of perfection. They cannot rest; they allow themselves no ease until they come close to the cleansed domain of perfection. This false notion of perfection does damage and puts their lives under great strain. It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long, deep mirror of one's own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance, and forgiveness. On that day one breaks through the falsity of images and expectations which have blinded one's spirit. One can only learn to see who one is when one learns to view oneself with the most intimate and forgiving compassion.

One of the greatest treasures in the world is a contented heart.

* * * * *

The beauty of the earth is the first beauty. Millions of years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory.

The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigor and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here. 

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere — in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves. No one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. Some of our most wonderful memories are of beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul.

The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.

— John O'Donohue

Quotes from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace 

John O'Donohue: In Praise of the Earth

 For Earth Day. 🙏 Molly

Photo by Molly

In Praise of the Earth

 

Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth,
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.

 

And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the Earth
Brightened beneath a vision of color.

 

When the ages of ice came
And sealed the Earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the Earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.

 

Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.

 

  Let us salute the silence
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.

 

The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed’s self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.

 

The humility of the Earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.

 

 The kindness of the Earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.

 

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.

 

Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.

 

  That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the Earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit, and light.

 

— John O'Donohue

From To Bless the Space Between Us:

A Book of Blessings

Jeff Brown on Eckhart Tolle and the Dangers of Spiritual Bypassing

I am called once again to revisit what it is to be engaged in spiritual bypassing and the harm it causes. I am especially moved to do this post, and others that will follow, in the wake of the tragic death of the adult daughter of old friends of ours... which has triggered so much grief for so many. Here I am highlighting that those who promote spiritual bypassing are among the spiritual leaders and teachers, the New Age healers, the therapists and counselors who lead us astray and sometimes with devastating consequences.

Many years ago I was totally pulled in by faux spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle. I read his book The Power of Now, I listened with rapt attention to his 10 tapes (before everything was on our phones), I tried to share the information with my oldest son (who recognized its shortcomings long before I did), and, at the time, I believed Eckhart Tolle to be among the significant teachers in my life. 

That was then, before I recognized the barriers that are embedded in these teachings to fully embracing what is often multi-generational and cultural trauma. With the focus on witnessing, rising above, transcending "negative emotions," labeling some of our emotions as "negative," and on and on — the end results are building more obstacles to healing and to being fully embodied human beings. I have experienced this harm myself, in those I love, and others. And I am channeling my anger at the harm caused to vulnerable and wounded people by again illuminating the dangers of spiritual bypassing.

The below are the well articulated writings of author Jeff Brown and his critique of Eckhart Tolle. Here it is clearly illuminated the harm brought on through spiritual bypassing and all those who direct us away from embracing with courage, compassion, and great love the trauma, grief, and loss that is part of the human experience. May we all move more deeply into who we most deeply are and what it is to be wholly human.

Bless us all on our journeys,

Molly

Jeff Brown: In Grounded Spirituality, I critically review Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. It is my personal view that it is a first stage awakening manual, that is calling itself “A guide to spiritual enlightenment”. It begins with Tolle’s story of years of shifting from suicidal depression to his “true nature” in the course of a single night. In the attached article, Tolle endeavors to make a distinction between “spiritual bypassing” and “avoidance”. It doesn’t work. Because spiritual bypassing IS self-avoidance… masquerading as awakening. Critique below…

Eckhart Tolle: Awareness or presence is never avoidance. In awareness, you allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel; you do not repress it in any way. Do you sense unresolved pain within? How are you going to resolve the pain except by allowing yourself to feel it?

Jeff Brown: Actually, awareness/presence can be AVOIDANCE, if the motivation of our quest for it is primarily to avoid elements of the human experience that are painful and uncomfortable, or if the techniques employed prevent a true access to all that we are holding emotionally/energetically. 

An emotionally blocked person’s experience of presence is not the same as one whose entire being is energetically fluid and present. We may believe we are “present”, but we cannot be fully present if we are not able to access — somatically, energetically, emotionally — our unhealed traumas. If we have spent years burying our stuff somatically, and trying to rise above it with an addiction to witnessing and meditation, then we are not fully present. We are actually quite the opposite. We are trapped inside the witnessing mind (and confusing that head-tripping game with presence), and somewhat or altogether dissociated from the world of feeling. 

Only through deep, enlivened, embodied feeling can we open the gate to presence. Presence is a whole-being experience, and it’s also a full-energy experience. 

In Power of Now, Tolle says, “silence is an even more potent carrier of presence.” This idea is very common in the patriarchal spiritual traditions, as is the suggestion that our ego, the mind, our ‘stories,’ our feelings, somehow prevent us from being present. In truth, we cannot be fully present if all of our aspects aren't welcome. Nor can we be fully present if we confine ourselves to silence or stillness alone. Those states only access some threads of the human experience. Others arise through sound, energy, vitality, activity. 

We can understand why some bypassers and trauma-survivors would choose to elevate silence as the path. It may be less triggering for them, particularly if they were wounded by word and tone. It’s a way to control their environment, so that the triggers momentarily subside. But its only accessing one level of presence. Because we are built to move, and to sound, and to shout, and to also access feeling in these ways. 

To put it simply, most of us cannot access the true and inclusive “power of now”, because we are still ruled — individually and collectively — by the “power of then”. If we want to be truly present, we must…. come back to life in all regards and clear our emotional debris. Detachment is a tool — it’s not a life.

Eckhart Tolle: I believe it was Carl Jung who said, “The fundamental problems are never solved but they are outgrown,” which means you reach a different level of consciousness and there the problem is no longer that important. You grow out of it.

Many problems cannot really be solved. Psychoanalysis tries to solve all the unresolved issues in your life, but you can go on and on with that because the more you delve into it, the more things you’ll discover and at some point you have to step into another state of consciousness that is simply awareness. And then, those things are transcended. You don’t suppress; they’re no longer that important. And some things will subside and dissolve.

Jeff Brown: It is true that some problems cannot be solved, and that psychoanalysis is not the solution to many problems. Because excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. 

But the answer is not to ‘transcend’ our issues, nor is it to ‘turn around’ our stories. It’s to go deeper into them, through feeling-based practices — in the hopes of healing and transforming them. 

Repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons. If we don’t work through our material, we can’t actually grow as spiritual beings. Because emotional and spiritual maturity are synonymous. We can’t grow or become more truly present if we keep ‘rising above’ our stuff. We can't become fully "aware", if we limit our range of e-motion to silence and stillness. 

What he is talking about is what I call the “transcendence bypass”, which I define as so: The tendency to bypass reality through ‘transcendent’ means: a rising above, a ‘heightened’ quest, an ungrounded flight of fancy. Common amongst those who identify themselves as “spiritual,” the transcendence bypasser has abandoned healthy detachment, floating off into the dissociative abyss until reality brings them back to the ground. 

The great irony is that transcendence bypassers are actually the ones most controlled by earthly matters. Their addiction to the above is driven by their unresolved issues down below. They have actually trance-ended nothing. It’s all still waiting for them here on Mother Earth.

Eckhart Tolle: Whatever it is you need to understand about your unresolved issues will come into the light of awareness when you allow yourself to feel what you feel. You may occasionally get an insight into something that happened in the past or that caused the pain. The important thing is that you don’t perpetuate or add to the muddle of painful feelings within through mind-identification and further thinking so that your emotions begin to use your mind.

Jeff Brown: Yes, but we can’t ‘feel what we feel’, if we don’t engage in body-centered practices that access/open the holdings. Simply sitting in silent stillness will not bring us into contact with all of our unresolved issues and feelings. Some of it, perhaps, but not all. It’s too controlled and contained to activate many of the holdings. 

This is why I believe that body-centered psychotherapies like bioenergetics and core energetics are actually spiritual practices that support a full-bodied experience of presence. Because they make us aware of what we are holding within the body, itself. And they provide techniques to excavate the memories, the feelings, the unsaid words, the aliveness (presence) that got buried with the traumas. 

Most of us are graveyards of trauma, and transcendence practices can provide us much needed relief, but they will not bring us fully back to life or save our species. Because we are not automatons — we are beings of deep feeling. We have to go down into the body, and bring ourselves back to life through healing and enlivening practices. 

As for the backwards idea that “mind-identification” is the issue, it is not. The primary cause of our unhappiness is not our thoughts. The monkey mind is not the source of our anxiety. It’s a symptom of it. Forget the monkey mind. The mind is not the enemy—unhealed pain is. 

Men have been blaming the mind for their neuroses for centuries, while deftly avoiding that which sources its maladies — somatic constrictions, and unprocessed emotions stored in the body itself. It’s like losing your keys somewhere in the house, and looking for them in the car. Useless, useless, useless. Until they stop blaming the mind — and recognize that its neuroses stem from the unresolved emotional body — there will be no liberation. 

Shifting out of unhappiness is not a cerebral process — that’s just another ineffective band-aid. It is a visceral full-body experience. It’s the “monkey heart” that’s the issue: the state of inner turbulence and agitation that emanates from an unclear heart. 

The more repressed your emotional body, the more repetitive your thoughts. Flooded with unhealed emotions and unexpressed truths, the monkey heart jumps from tree-top to tree-top, emoting without grounding, dancing in its confusion. Often misinterpreted as a monkey mind, the monkey heart is reflected in repetitive thinking, perpetual anxiety, and negative imaginings. All of which are emanating from the emotional body. 

Bottom line is that you cannot heal and resolve your emotional material with your mind. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. 

Your emotional material does not evaporate because you watch it. I have known many who could watch and name their patterns and issues — as if they were scientists, researching their own consciousness — but nothing fundamentally changed, because they refused to come back down into their bodies and move their feelings through to transformation. It’s safe up there, above the fray, witnessing the heartache without actually engaging it. 

Yes, you may be able to get so skilled at a witnessing consciousness that you can overpower your triggers. But that’s not presence. Real presence comes through the open heart. The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyze them, not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. 

You want to live a holy life? Heal your heart. That’s the best meditation of all.

Eckhart Tolle: You can’t achieve absolute perfection on the level of form. There will always be certain limitations here and there, things that have been around and lived inside you perhaps, since childhood. They may continue. So it’s only really through transcendence that you go beyond whatever is there that is unresolved but still carried around within you. If you don’t add to the pain within, then it gradually subsides and dissolves in the light of presence.

Jeff Brown: NO. Backwards again. 

First of all, we are not here to become perfect. We are here to become real… truly fiercely heartfully human. 

Second, we are ONLY form. The bashing of the allegedly imperfect nature of form is fundamental to patriarchal spiritualities, because they are in so much pain that they elevate formlessness, as though we can actually become that. We can’t become that, until we die. Until then, we are in-form and we must work to heal and integrate all of our aspects. 

Third, what he is saying is that if you float above your humanness for long enough, your pain will simply fade away. This is patently untrue. What actually happens is that it actually concretizes and solidifies, and turns inward against the self in the form of emotional and physical disease. 

And, again, we cannot taste true presence with so many layers of emotional armor and repressed pain clogging up our psycho-emotional, energetic, and somatic structures. What he is describing is not a true presence. He is talking about a meditative stupor that seeks to dissociate from the pain we hold. He is inviting us to rise above our humanness. We can’t. We’re human, and there is no complete experience of the “now”, if we seek to transcend it. Presence is a whole-being experience.

* * * * *

“If you want to live a more spiritual life, live a more human life. Be more truly, fiercely, heartfully human.” — Jeff Brown

 * * * * *

Additional suggested reading: 

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring

Wholeness With the Internal Family

Systems Model

https://www.amazon.com/No-Bad-Parts-Restoring-Wholeness/dp/1683646681

* * *

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind

and Body In the Healing of Trauma

https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748

* * *

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness,

and Healing in a Toxic Culture

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Normal-Illness-Healing-Culture/dp/0593083881

 * * *

Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and

the Heartbreaking Path of Grief

https://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Unbearable-Love-Heartbreaking-Grief/dp/1614292965 

Chelan Harkin: Approach Thirsty

This is one of the stunning poems from her third book, Wild Grace, that Chelan Harkin read when my husband and I saw her on April 12th. Chelan's poetry, courage and wisdom, and deep and courageous heart touches my heart and soul so deeply and is now captivating increasing numbers of people worldwide. So needed and such a gift. Blessed be. 🙏💗 Molly

Chelan speaking at New Thought Center for Spiritual Living, Lake Oswego, OR. April 12th, 2024

Approach Thirsty

Lately I've been praying to Muhammad,

Moses, Krishna,  Buddha, Baha'u'llah, Zoroaster, Jesus―

why be choosy?

I ask any source of true love

and great joy

to throw me as many bones

as they might.

Sometimes I pray to Mozart, Bach or Galileo

to pour music or the stars

through me.

Often I pray to Tahirih,

a great Persian poet and feminist

of the 1800's who would remove

her veil when addressing men

and was martyred

for speaking the irrepressible truth

in her heart.

Her final words were,

"You can kill me as soon as you like,

but you will never stop

the emancipation of women."

I often ask Hafez for a dance

and we go for the most poetic whirls.

Sometimes I ask Rumi

that he pluck me an ancient,

everblooming rose

and I crush its scent

onto the page.

I have a crush on Kahlil Gibran

and ask that he pass me

inspired love notes.

I pray to Harriet Tubman,

that queen of heroism,

for courage

and to Einstein

for out of this world

ideas.

Inspiration is not elitist.

There is no muse

that is off limits,

no genius you should not approach

and ask to be yours.

Oh, beseech whoever you might

that the master keys

that open all hearts

are put in your care,

that your particularly necessary style of expression 

may open new portals of beauty

to the eyes of the world.

Hobnob with all the great

dead poets,

thinkers

lovers,

artists,

heroes of justice,

leaders of truth.

They still want a place

to pour their wonder

into the world,

and you are a worthy vessel.

It's an open bar in the sky.

Approach thirsty,

and ask!

― Chelan Harkin

From Wild Grace

Chelan Harkin: The Worst Thing We Ever Did

Photo by Molly

The Worst Thing We Ever Did

The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sky
out of reach

pulling the divinity
from the leaf,
sifting out the holy from our bones,
insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement
through everything we’ve made
a hard commitment to see as ordinary,
stripping the sacred from everywhere
to put in a cloud man elsewhere,
prying closeness from your heart.

The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.

The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath.

― Chelan Harkin

From Susceptible  To Light

Brian Doyle: Love Is the Story and the Prayer That Matters Most

Photo by Molly

Quotes from Brian Doyle

We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.

Your library is where the community stores its treasures. It’s the house that imagination built. It’s where all the stories that matter are gathered together and celebrated and shared... People come to it communally for something that’s deep and ancient and important beyond an easy explanation. Who you are as a town is in the library. It’s why when you want to destroy a place you burn down the library. People who fear freedom fear libraries.

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

But you cannot control everything... All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference... You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow... That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

Love is the story and the prayer that matters most.

— Brian Doyle

Father Richard Rohr: All Great Spirituality Is About What We Do With Our Pain

Wisdom Quotes 

from Father Richard Rohr

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmute it to those around us.

The journey never happens alone.

A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom.

I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.

We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking" (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, "with me" or "against me," and most of the time you'll be wrong.

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!

If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans.

It has been acceptable for some time in America to remain "wound identified" (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to "redeem the world," as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.

You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.

It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.

You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.

We cannot avoid the globalization of knowledge and information. When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, I could never think about a Buddhist, or a Hindu, or Muslim, or even a Protestant - I grew up in such a Catholic ghetto. That's not possible anymore, unless you live in a cave or something. So either we have knowledge of what the other religions and other denominations are saying, and how they tie into the common thread, or we end up just being dangerously ignorant of other people and therefore prejudiced.

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

You cannot grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation without a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness to not know-and not even need to know. This ever widens and deepens your perspective. This is how you allow and encounter Mystery and move into the contemplative zone.

Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life — prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows — are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what's always happening right in front of you.

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here.

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance.

The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.

There is no path to peace, but peace itself is the path.

https://cac.org/about/our-teachers/richard-rohr/