Center for Action and Contemplation – Father Richard Rohr’s Daily
Meditation – Sunday, 2 February 2014 “Stage Four: My deeper intuitions and felt
knowledge in my body are who I am”
“Levels of Spiritual Development (Part Two)”
“Stage Four: My deeper intuitions and felt knowledge in my body
are who I am.”
Sunday, February 2, 2014
If you can stay in the liminal space between Stage Three and
Stage Four, if you can suffer the shock, humiliation, and necessary failure of
your game falling apart without regressing to earlier, more dualistic thinking,
you will ideally move to Stage Four.
I describe Stage Four as this: My deeper intuitions and the felt
knowledge in my body are who I am. People who have been trained to keep the
heart and head spaces open and to live grounded inside their own bodies and
feel their real feelings are able to pass to Stage Four because they have the
greatest capacity for presence, and presence to what actually is!
For some, this is such a breakthrough, so enriching, grounding,
and self-validating after wallowing around in ego and confusion for so many
years, that it feels like enlightenment itself. Thus, very many become stymied
here and think it’s the whole spiritual journey. They have “depth” compared to
all these hopeless others around them! This can lead to individualism,
self-absorption, and inner work as a substitute for any honest encounter with
otherness or with The Other. In such a place, there is little real social
conscience (beyond verbal political correctness) and usually a lack of
compassion or active concern for what is happening on this earth. This kind of
spirituality is all about my enlightenment and my superiority.
But if you are authentically present at Stage Four, you will
begin to see your shadow self in sometimes humiliating ways. Without humility,
you will run back to Stage Three, and many do. You’ll see your phony
motivation: that you are not as holy as you think you are; that you are largely
doing this for your own self-image, to think of yourself as moral, aware, and
enlightened. Politeness and political correctness pass for actual love. Ken
Wilber calls it “Boomeritis” since it is so true of a certain age group in
America and Europe.
Yet this struggle and humiliation is what is going to lead you
to real non-dual thinking: when you face the enemy and the enemy is you, and
you recognize that you can’t project evil onto other religions, races, classes,
political parties, or genders. I’m the problem. I’m petty, needy,
self-absorbed, or whatever it might be.
If you are unwilling to do some shadow work, to wrestle with the
shadow and see it in all of its humiliating truthfulness, you will not go to
Stage Five.
Adapted from Where You Are Is Where I Will Meet You, disc 1
(CD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence: Open me to wholeness
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Center for Action and Contemplation
1705 Five Points Road SW
Albuquerque, NM 87105 (physical)
PO Box 12464
Albuquerque, NM 87195-2464 (mailing)
(505) 242-9588
cac.org
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