Immortal Diamond E-Book

Richard Rohr

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 273

Beschreibung

Dissolve the distractions of ego to find our authentic selves in God In his bestselling book Falling Upward, Richard Rohr talked about ego (or the False Self) and how it gets in the way of spiritual maturity. But if there's a False Self, is there also a True Self? What is it? How is it found? Why does it matter? And what does it have to do with the spiritual journey? This book likens True Self to a diamond, buried deep within us, formed under the intense pressure of our lives, that must be searched for, uncovered, separated from all the debris of ego that surrounds it. In a sense True Self must, like Jesus, be resurrected, and that process is not resuscitation but transformation. * Shows how to navigate spiritually difficult terrain with clear vision and tools to uncover our True Selves * Written by Father Richard Rohr, the bestselling author of Falling Upward * Examines the fundamental issues of who we are and helps us on our path of spiritual maturity Immortal Diamond (whose title is taken from a line in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem) explores the deepest questions of identity, spirituality, and meaning in Richard Rohr's inimitable style.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

That Nature Is a Heraclitian Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Title Page

Copyright

Invitation: The Immortal Diamond of the True Self

Preface

The Appendixes: Practice-Based Experience

Chapter 1: What Is “The True Self”?

Clues and Evidence

Soul, Our Inherent Identity

The Great Allower

The Spacious Soul

Chapter 2: What Is “The False Self”?

Discovering the False Self: Therapy Versus Spiritual Direction

Continuing the Walkabout

Diversionary Tactics

The Proccupations of the False Self

The Myth of Separateness

A Parable

The Song of True Self

Chapter 3: What Dies and Who Lives?

Chapter 4: The Knife Edge of Experience

Resurrection

The Dance of Breath and Clay

Our Destination

Love and Truth

Chapter 5: Thou Art That

The Common Detours and Dead Ends

A Mystery of Participation

Participation and Consciousness

The Pearl of Great Price

The Divine Indwelling

Chapter 6: If It Is True, It Is True Everywhere

Chapter 7: Enlightenment at Gunpoint

Death and Fear

About Dying

Attachment and Detachment

God and Death

Chapter 8: Intimate with Everything

Chapter 9: Love Is Stronger Than Death

Mary Magdalene

Yes Must Precede No

Epilogue

Appendix A: The True Self and the False Self

Appendix B: A Mosaic of Metaphors

Appendix C: Watching at the Tomb: Attitudes for Prayer

Appendix D: Head into Heart: “The Sacred Heart”

Appendix E: Adam's Breathing: Praying from the Clay

Appendix F: Twelve Ways to Practice Resurrection Now

Bibliography

The Author

Index

Advertisement

That Nature Is a Heraclitian Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Fall to the residuary worm; world's\break wildfire leave but ash;

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

Cover image: Randy Plett Photographs / istockphoto

Cover design: Rule29 Creative

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Rohr. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rohr, Richard.

Immortal diamond : the search for our true self / Richard Rohr.— 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-30359-7 (cloth); 978-1-118-41978-6 (ebk); 978-1-118-42154-3 (ebk); 978-1-118-43414-7 (ebk)

1.Self— Religious aspects— Christianity. 2. Identification (Religion) 3. Self-knowledge, Theory of. 4. Theological anthropology— Christianity. I. Title.

BT713.R64 2013

233′.5— dc23

2012030242

FIRST EDITION

Excerpts from “They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection” in Threatened with Resurrection: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan, by Julia Esquivel. Copyright © 1982, 1994, Brethren Press, Elgin, Illinois. Used with permission.

“Tilicho Lake” from Where Many Rivers Meet by David Whyte. Printed with permission from Many Rivers Press, www.davidwhyte.com. Copyright © Many Rivers Press, Langley,Washington.

Excerpt from “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets by T.S Eliot. Copyright © 1943 by T.S. Eliot. Copyright renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“The Way It Is” from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems by William Stafford. Copyright © 1998 by the Estate ofWilliam Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolf.org.

Invitation: The Immortal Diamond of the True Self

The fact that life and death are “not two” is extremely difficult to grasp, not because it is so complex, but because it is so simple.

Ken Wilber

We miss the unity of life and death at the very point where our ordinary mind begins to think about it.

Kathleen Dowling Singh

In the first aborted ending to Mark's Gospel—the oldest Gospel—the text ends on a very disappointing, and thus likely truthful, note: “They ran away from the tomb frightened out of their wits. They said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid” (16:5–8). What a strange response after having just talked to an angel who told them not to be afraid!

Such running from resurrection has been a prophecy for Christianity, and much of religion, just as in these early Scriptures. I interpret this as the human temptation to run from and deny not just the divine presence, but our own true selves, that is, our souls, our inner destiny, our true identity. Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn't make it so.

We are made for transcendence and endless horizons, but our small ego usually gets in the way until we become aware of its petty preoccupations and eventually seek a deeper truth. It is like mining for a diamond. We must dig deep; and yet seem reluctant, even afraid, to do so. Note that even the ending that was later added to Mark's Gospel still states three times that the disciples did not believe in the Resurrection (16:11–15). And Jesus “reproached them for their incredulity and their obstinacy” (16:14). This is no high note or happy ending by which to begin a new religion. The first disciples themselves were not the “true believers” that we now try to be. One can only presume it was historically true or they never would have said it this way. (Or maybe it is a recognition that doubt is the necessary partner to real faith.)

The question the three women ask in this first moment of would-be resurrection is still ours: “Who will roll away the rock?” (16:3). Who will help us in this mining operation for True Self? What will it take to find my True Self? How do I even know there is an “immortal diamond” underneath and behind all this rock of my ego, my specific life experience, my own culture? Up to now, it has been common, with little skin off anyone's back, to intellectually argue or religiously believe that Jesus' physical body could really “resurrect.” That was much easier than to ask whether we could really change or resurrect. It got us off the hook—the hook of growing up, of taking the search for our True Selves seriously.

As many in the Perennial Tradition1 have said in one way or another, when the “wrong person” uses the right means, even the right means will work in the wrong way. But when the “right person” uses the wrong means, he or she will know how to do midcourse corrections and make it right. I would preferably work with the second person anytime. You must get the “self” right. Otherwise even seemingly good and moral actions will have a tight, stingy, and corrosive character to them. Conversely, the right “self” can even do the wrong thing, and somehow it can always be worked out. You know this from your own experience. We must know who is doing the action and who is doing the reflecting. Is it “your” self? The God self? Or a mere chameleon? That question is foundational to mature spirituality of any stripe.

There is one other thing to take note of here. Mark also says that Jesus “had showed himself under another form” (Mark 16:12). Could the radical transformation that resurrection implies be the problem? Is that why so many could not recognize Jesus? I think it is, and it is also our first major clue on our search for the True Self.

We are not so at home with the resurrected form of things despite a yearly springtime, healings in our bodies, the ten thousand forms of newness in every event and every life. The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

Somehow resurrection—which I am going to equate with the revelation of our True Selves—is actually a risk and a threat to the world as we have constructed it. After any “raising up” of our True Selves, we will no longer fit into many groups, even much of religious society, which is often obsessed with and yet indulgent of the False Self, because that is all that it knows.

Whether human beings admit it or not, we are all in love with—even addicted to—the status quo and the past, even when it is killing us. Resurrection offers us a future—dare I say a permanent future—but one that is unknown and thus scary. Humans find it easier to gather their energy around death, pain, and problems than around joy. I know I do. For some sad reason, it is joy that we hold lightly and victimhood that we grab onto.

The True Self and its resurrection are always a threat. In the Resurrection of the Christ Body, we are not talking about the resuscitation of an old thing, but the raising up of what will always appear to be an utterly new thing. Resurrection is not about a man returning to his body, nearly as much as a universal man leading us into a universal future—and doing that by making use of all the past and transforming it (Ephesians 4:15–16). Note in all the Resurrection accounts in the four Gospels, the marvelous images of running, rushing, excitement, joy, eating, catching a huge harvest, and jumping naked and free into the water. This is all freedom for the future, because the past is over, gone, and totally forgiven.

The clarification and rediscovery of what I am going to call the True Self lays a solid foundation—and a clear initial goal—for all religion. You cannot build any serious spiritual house if you do not first find something solid and foundational to build on—inside yourself. “Like knows like” is the principle. God-in-you already knows, loves, and serves God in everything else. All you can do is fully jump on board. I would call that jump consciousness, and I believe the Risen Christ is the icon of full consciousness. In the human mind of Christ, every part of creation knows itself as (1) divinely conceived, (2) beloved of God, (3) crucified, and (4) finally reborn. He carries us across with him, assures us it is okay, and thus models the full journey and final direction of consciousness.2 That is my major thesis about how Jesus “saves us.”

The Perennial Tradition, the mystical tradition that I will be building on here, says that there is a capacity, a similarity, and a desire for divine reality inside all humans. And what we seek is what we are, which is exactly why Jesus says that we will find it (see Matthew 7:7–8). The Perennial Tradition invariably concludes that you initially cannot see what you are looking for because what you are looking for is doing the looking. God is never an object to be found or possessed as we find other objects, but the One who shares your own deepest subjectivity—or your “self.” We normally called it our soul. Religion called it “the Divine Indwelling.”

I believe the Christ is the archetypal True Self offered to history, where matter and spirit finally operate as one, where divine and human are held in one container, “where there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female” (Galatians 3:28). This Christ is going before us into an ever new territory, into “Galilee,” which was the forgotten backwater of the Roman Empire and the Jewish religion.

“You are one of them! Even your accent gives you away,” they say to Peter (Matthew 26:73). “Prophets do not come out of Galilee,” say the chief priests (John 7:52). Yet “it is there that you will see him, just as he told you” (Mark 16:7). Perhaps the True Self—and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)—will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.

Some will think I am arrogantly talking about being “personally divine” and eagerly dismiss this way of talking about resurrection as heresy, arrogance, or pantheism. The Gospel is much more subtle than that. Jesus' life and his risen body say instead that the discovery of our own divine DNA is the only, full, and final meaning of being human. The True Self is neither God nor human. The True Self is both at the same time, and both are a total gift.

Such radical newness is threatening, even though it reveals itself in the oldest, truest, and deepest self that we are. Jesus' Resurrection was an absolute refusal to identify with victimhood or create any victims in retaliation. This is an utterly new story line for history. Unlike Lazarus's resurrection (John 11:1–44), Jesus' Resurrection is permanent and definitive for human history. He is a stand-in for all of us.

In this excerpt from “They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection” Guatemalan poet Julia Esquivel says what I am grabbing for beautifully:

It is something within us that doesn't let us sleep,

that doesn't let us rest,

that won't stop pounding

deep inside,

it is the silent, warm weeping

of Indian women without their husbands,

it is the sad gaze of children

fixed somewhere beyond memory, …

What keeps us from sleeping

is that they have threatened us with Resurrection!

Because every evening

though weary of killings,

an endless inventory since 1954,

yet we go on loving life

and do not accept their death!

… because in this marathon of Hope,

there are always others to relieve us

who carry the strength

to reach the finish line

which lies beyond death.

Join us in this vigil

and you will know what it is to dream!

Then you will know how marvelous it is

to live threatened with Resurrection!

To dream awake

to keep watch asleep,

to live while dying,

and to know ourselves already resurrected!3

Only our True Self can talk this way and mean it. To the False Self—the self driven by ego and its limited concerns—such poetry is surely and merely poetry, a cheap greeting card, forgettable, and a poor attempt to whistle in the dark. But there is a True Self, a risen presence, and it is “something here within us which doesn't let us sleep.” So let's try now to roll away the rock, clear the debris, and get back to mining for our True Self. You will find a diamond.

Notes

1 I will use Aldous Huxley's definition of “the perennial philosophy” from his book The Perennial Philosophy (New York: HarperCollins, 1944) as an adequate definition of my own understanding of the same: “The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality, and the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being. This is immemorial and universal” (vi).

2 The significant Scripture here, if Scripture helps you, is the hymn at the beginning of Colossians (1:15–20). Here we are not just talking about the historic Jesus as much as a cosmic figure who “recapitulates” the meaning of creation and is fully identified with Jesus—and, further, Jesus accepts this role and its implications. This is a far more universal notion of the very tribal Jesus than most Christians seem to have today. I will call this the Cosmic Christ (Ephesians 1:3–14 makes the same claim).

3 Julia Esqivel, “Threatened with Resurrection,” in Threatened with Resurrection: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan Woman (1982 Spanish edition).

Preface