Center for Action and Contemplation - Father Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation "Splitting and Denying" for Wednesday, 19 March 2014

Center for Action and Contemplation - Father Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation "Splitting and Denying" for Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Everything specific and concrete in this world is always a mixture of darkness and light, good and bad, death and life. 
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Dualistic Thinking"
"Splitting and Denying"
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Dualistic thinking works only as long as you stay on the level of abstraction. But once you go to the specific and concrete, you find that everything in this world is always a mixture of darkness and light, good and bad, death and life. If you’re honest about it, you can say, “This is what is good about it, and this is what is bad about it.” But if you stay at the level of dualistic thinking, you won’t allow yourself to hold a necessary and life-giving tension. You’ll split to give yourself mental comfort and say, for example, “America is entirely good. America’s wars are always good wars.” It will give your ego superficial comfort, but there is no truth to it.
The dualistic mind is not adequate to the task of life. It cannot deal with subtlety, it cannot see or deal with the dark side of things, it cannot “discern spirits”—one of the gifts of the Spirit that St. Paul speaks of (1 Corinthians 12:10). The dualistic/splitting mind cannot deal with contradictions, with paradox, with inconsistency, with mystery itself—which is just about everything. 1
Ultimate Reality cannot be seen with any dual operation of the mind, where we eliminate the mysterious, the confusing—anything scary, unfamiliar, or outside our comfort zone. Dualistic thinking is not naked presence to the always-available Presence, but highly controlled and limited seeing. 2
1. Adapted from A New Way of Seeing, A New Way of Being: Jesus and Paul (CD, MP3 download)
2. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 74
Gateway to Silence: Be not afraid 
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