by Richard Rohr
Dualistic thinking is the well-practiced pattern of knowing most things by comparison. And for some reason, once you compare or label things (that is, judge), you almost always conclude that one is good and the other is less good or even bad. Don't take my word for it; just notice your own thoughts and reactions. You will see that you will move almost automatically into a pattern of up or down, in or out, for me or against me, right or wrong, black or white, gay or straight, good or bad. It is the basic reason why the “stinking thinking” of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, religious imperialism, and prejudice of all kinds is so hard to overcome and has lasted so long—even among nice people!
At the risk of being too cleverly alliterative (though it may help you remember), here is the normal sequencing of the dualistic mind: it compares, it competes, it conflicts, it conspires, it condemns, it cancels out any contrary evidence, and it then crucifies with impunity. You can call it the seven C's of delusion, and the source of most violence, which is invariably sacralized as good and necessary to “make the world safe for democracy” or to “save souls for heaven.”
Nondualistic or contemplative thinking was put off or fully denied in the first half of life for the sake of quickly drawn ego boundaries and clear goals, which created a nice clean “provisional personality.” Dualistic thinking works only for a while to get us started, but if we are honest, it stops being helpful in most real-life situations. It is fine for teenagers to really think that there is some moral or “supernatural” superiority to their chosen baseball team, their army, their ethnic group, or even their religion; but one hopes they learn that such polarity thinking is recognized as just an agreed-upon game by the second half of life. Your frame should grow larger as you move toward the Big Picture in which one God creates all and loves all, both Dodgers and Yankees, blacks and whites, Palestinians and Jews, Americans and Afghanis.
The trouble is that a lot of people don't get there! We are often so attached to our frame, game, and raft that it becomes a substitute for objective truth, because it is all we have! Inside such entrapment, most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are. In my experience, this is most of the world, unless people have done their inner work, at least some shadow work, and thereby entered into wisdom, or nondualistic thinking. Through centuries of meticulous and utterly honest self-observation, Buddhism has helped people see this in themselves probably better than most of the world religions. Jesus saw it, but we did not see him very well.
In the first half of life, the negative, the mysterious, the scary, and the problematic are always exported elsewhere. Doing so gives you a quick and firm ego structure that works for a while. But such splitting is not an objective statement of truth! It is just helpful for your private purposes. Eventually this overcompensation in one direction must be resolved and balanced. This integration, or “forgiveness of everything” as I like to call it, is the very name of growth, maturity, and holiness.
In the second half of life, all that you avoided for the sake of a manufactured ego ideal starts coming back as a true friend and teacher. Doers become thinkers, feelers become doers, thinkers become feelers, extroverts become introverts, visionaries become practical, and the practical ones long for vision. We all go toward the very places we avoided for the last forty years, and our friends are amazed. Now we begin to understand why Jesus is always welcoming the outsider, the foreigner, the sinner, the wounded one. He was a second-half-of-life man who has had the unenviable task of trying to teach and be understood by a largely first-half-of-life history, church, and culture.
Listen to his dangerous and inclusionary thinking: “My Father's sun shines on the good and the bad, his rain falls on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). Or “Don't pull out the weeds or you might pull out the wheat along with it. Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:29–30). If I had presented such fuzzy thinking in my moral theology class, I would have gotten an F!
Jesus, I am convinced, was the first nondualistic religious thinker in the West (there were philosophers like Heraclitus), but his teachings were quickly filtered through Greek dualistic logic! Nondualistic wisdom is just not helpful when you are trying to form a strong group, clarify first principles, or demonstrate that your idea is superior to others' ideas. At that stage, real wisdom appears to be pious and dangerous poetry. And at that necessary early stage, such warnings are probably right! But that is also why clergy and spiritual teachers need to be second-half-of-life people, and why so many of us have mangled, manipulated, and minimized the brilliance of Jesus when we heard him in our early stage of development.
So we need first to clarify before we can subtly discriminate. Dualistic thinking gets you in the right ball park (“You cannot serve both God and mammon”), but nondualistic wisdom, or what many of us call contemplation, is necessary once you actually get in the right field. “Now that I have chosen to serve God, what does that really mean?” Nondualistic thinking presumes that you have first mastered dualistic clarity, but also found it insufficient for the really big issues like love, suffering, death, God, and any notion of infinity. In short, we need both.
Unless you let the truth of life teach you on its own terms, unless you develop some concrete practice for recognizing and overcoming your dualistic mind, you will remain in the first half of life forever, as most of humanity has up to now. In the first half of life, you cannot work with the imperfect, nor can you accept the tragic sense of life, which finally means that you cannot love anything or anyone at any depth. Nothing is going to change in history as long as most people are merely dualistic, either-or thinkers. Such splitting and denying leaves us at the level of mere information, data,, and endlessly arguing about the same. “My facts are better than your facts,” we yell at ever higher volume and with ever stronger ego attachment.
Wisdom was distinguished from mere knowledge by Isaiah (11:2), by Paul (1 Corinthians 12:8–9), and by Scholastic philosophy, which spoke of analytic intelligence and intuitive or “connatural” intelligence (“like knows like”) as two very different levels of consciousness. We live in a time when we are finally free to appreciate how right they all were.
Now much of modern science recognizes the very real coherence between the seer and what is seen or even can be seen. Wisdom seeing has always sought to change the seer first, and then knows that what is seen will largely take care of itself. It is almost that simple, and it is always that hard.
Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.
Chapter 13
Falling Upward
How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world….
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, BOOK OF HOURS
Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite. What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.
It is not a loss but somehow a gain, not losing but actually winning. You probably have to have met at least one true elder to imagine that this could be true. I have met enough radiant people in my life to know that it is fairly common. They have come to their human fullness, often
against all odds, and usually by suffering personally or vicariously. As Jesus describes such a person, “from their breasts flow fountains of living water” (John 7:38). These are the models and goals for our humanity, much more than the celebrities and politicos whom we care so much about today.
I recently watched a documentary on the life of the blind and deaf woman, Helen Keller. She seems to have leaped into the second half of life in the chronological first half of her life, once she discovered her depths and despite her severe limitations. She lived an entire life of rather amazing happiness and generativity for others. She was convinced that life was about service to others and not about protecting or lamenting her supposedly handicapped body.
That seems to be the great difference between transformed and nontransformed people. Great people come to serve, not to be served. It is the twelfth and final and necessary step of the inspired Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Until and unless you give your life away to others, you do not seem to have it yourself at any deep level. Good parents always learn that. Many of the happiest, most generous and focused people I know are young mothers. This is another one of those utter paradoxes! We seem to be “mirrored” into life by the response, love, and needed challenge of others. Thank God Anne Sullivan knew how to beautifully mirror Helen Keller, at great loving cost to herself. We all need at least one such mirror if we are to thrive.
Mirroring
Somewhere in my late forties, I realized that many people loved and admired me for who I was not, and many people also resented or rejected me for who I was not. Conversely, many loved me for who I really was, warts and all, and this was the only love that ever redeemed me. Many others rightly criticized me for who I really was, and revealed to me my shadow, which was always painful but often very helpful. But in all cases, it became apparent that their responses said much more about them and the good or bad quality of their own mirroring than about me at all!
Beauty or ugliness really is first of all in the eye of the beholder. Good people will mirror goodness in us, which is why we love them so much. Not-so-mature people will mirror their own unlived and confused life onto us, which is why they confuse and confound us so much, and why they are hard to love.
At any rate, it is only those who respond to the real you, good or bad, that help you in the long run. Much of the work of midlife is learning to tell the difference between people who are still dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you as you really are. As an older man, carrying the priest title of “Father” besides, I find that I am often carrying people's “daddy” projections, both for good and for ill. It is a double-edged sword, because I can be used to heal them very easily, and I can be allowed to hurt them very easily. But in a certain real sense, it is not about me at all but about me as their mirror, reflection, and projection.
By the second half of life, you learn to tell the difference between who you really are and how others can mirror that or not. This will keep you from taking either insults or praise too seriously. I doubt whether this kind of calm discrimination and detachment is much possible before your midfifties at the earliest. How desperately we need true elders in our world to clean up our seeing and stop the revolving hall of mirrors in its tracks.
We all take what we need, get what we want, and reject what we shouldn't from one another. Don't accept your first responses at face value. The only final and meaningful question is “Is it true?” Not “Who said it?” “When and where did they say it?” “Does the Bible or the pope or my president say it?” or “Do I like it?” The only meaningful, helpful, and humble question is “Is it objectively true?”
In the second half of life, you gradually step out of this hall of revolving and self-reflecting mirrors. You can usually do this well only if you have one true mirror yourself, at least one loving, honest friend to ground you, which might even be the utterly accepting gaze of the Friend. But, by all means, you must find at least one true mirror that reveals your inner, deepest, and, yes, divine image. This is why intimate moments are often mirroring moments of beautiful mutual receptivity, and why such intimacy heals us so deeply. Thinking you can truthfully mirror yourself is a first-half-of-life illusion. Mature spirituality has invariably insisted on soul friends, gurus, confessors, mentors, masters, and spiritual directors for individuals, and prophets and truth speakers for groups and institutions.
My Franciscan sister St. Clare of Assisi (1194–1253) seems to have found the mirror to be her most frequent and helpful image for what she saw happening in the spiritual life. She loved to advise her sisters to variously “Place yourself before the mirror,” “Let the Light mirror you,” and “Look upon the mirror [of perfect love] each day.” She clearly understood that spiritual gifts are always reflected gifts. Clare predated Heinz Kohut's “self psychology” and our present knowledge of mirror neurons by eight centuries. Mystics often intuit and live what scientists later prove to be true.
We really do find ourselves through one another's eyes, and only when that has been done truthfully can we mirror others with freedom, truth, and compassion. Jesus himself predated Clare by twelve centuries when he said, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be filled with light” (Matthew 6:22). It is all a matter of learning how to see, and it takes much of our life to learn to see well and truthfully.
In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you, but they also have much less power to control you or hurt you. It is the freedom of the second half not to need. Both the ecstatic mirroring of my youth and the mature and honest mirroring of my adulthood have held up what I needed to see and could see at the time; they have prepared me for the fully compassionate and Divine Mirror, who has always shown me to myself in times and ways that I could handle and enjoy. I fell many times relationally, professionally, emotionally, and physically in my life, but there was always a trampoline effect that allowed me to finally fall upward. No falling down was final, but actually contributed to the bounce!
God knows that all of us will fall somehow. Those events that lead us to “catastrophize” out of all proportion must be business as usual for God—at least six billion times a day. Like good spiritual directors do, God must say after each failure of ours, “Oh, here is a great opportunity! Let's see how we can work with this!” After our ego-inflating successes, God surely says, “Well, nothing new or good is going to happen here!” Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. Success is just the opposite. Communities and commitment can form around suffering much more than around how wonderful or superior we are. Just compare the real commitment to one another, to the world, and to truth in “happy clappy religion” with the deep solidarity of families at the time of a tragic death or among hospice workers and their clients. There is a strange and even wonderful communion in real human pain, actually much more than in joy, which is too often manufactured and passing. In one sense, pain's effects are not passing, and pain is less commonly manufactured. Thus it is a more honest doorway into lasting communion than even happiness.
The genius of the Gospel was that it included the problem inside the solution. The falling became the standing. The stumbling became the finding. The dying became the rising. The raft became the shore. The small self cannot see this very easily, because it doubts itself too much, is still too fragile, and is caught up in the tragedy of it all. It has not lived long enough to see the big patterns. No wonder so many of our young commit suicide. This is exactly why we need elders and those who can mirror life truthfully and foundationally for the young. Intimate I-Thou relationships are the greatest mirrors of all, so we dare not avoid them, but for the young they have perhaps not yet taken place at any depth, so young people are always very fragile.
Many of us discover in times of such falling the Great Divine Gaze, the ultimate I-Thou relationship, which is always compassionate and embracing, or it would not be divine. Like any true mirror, the gaze of God r
eceives us exactly as we are, without judgment or distortion, subtraction or addition. Such perfect receiving is what transforms us. Being totally received as we truly are is what we wait and long for all our lives. All we can do is receive and return the loving gaze of God every day, and afterwards we will be internally free and deeply happy at the same time. The One who knows all has no trouble including, accepting, and forgiving all. Soon we who are gazed upon so perfectly can pass on the same accepting gaze to all others who need it. There is no longer any question “Does he or she deserve it?” What we received was totally undeserved itself.
Just remember this: no one can keep you from the second half of your own life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid. My conviction is that some falling apart of the first journey is necessary for this to happen, so do not waste a moment of time lamenting poor parenting, lost job, failed relationship, physical handicap, gender identity, economic poverty, or even the tragedy of any kind of abuse. Pain is part of the deal. If you don't walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful.
All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring.
God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.
Coda
A Meditation on a Poem by Thomas Merton