Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between October 28 - November 2, 2021
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“We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!”
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As good poetry does, myths make unclear and confused emotions brilliantly clear and life changing.
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“God has no grandchildren. God only has children,”
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Higher stages
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always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!
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You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.
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the most common one-liner in the Bible is “Do not be afraid”;
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“More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”
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“transcend and include.” That is the infallible sign that you are enlightened, psychologically mature, or a truly adult believer.
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Jesus the Jew criticizes his own religion the most, yet never leaves it!
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those at deeper (or “higher”) levels beyond you invariably appear wrong, sinful, heretical, dangerous, or even worthy of elimination.
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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!
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We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.
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“In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.”
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“the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” as William Butler Yeats put it.
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I have seen many Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists do it much better, but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time.
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The world mythologies all point to places like Hades, Sheol, hell, purgatory, the realm of the dead. Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven.
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But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way. The
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One of the major blocks against the second journey is what we would now call the “collective,” the crowd, our society, or our extended family. Some call it the crab bucket syndrome—you try to get out, but the other crabs just keep pulling you back in.
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To move beyond family-of-origin stuff, local church stuff, cultural stuff, flag-and-country stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity.
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It takes therapists years to achieve the same result and reestablish appropriate boundaries from wounding parents and early authority figures, and to heal the inappropriate shame in those who have been wounded.
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exclusion. The more room you have to include, the bigger your heaven will be.
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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!
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Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death?
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worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do.
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After almost seventy years, I am still a mystery to myself!
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There is still darkness in the second half of life—in fact maybe even more. But there is now a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety.
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By the second half of life, you have learned ever so slowly, and with much resistance, that most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot, and incites a lot of push-back from those you have attacked.
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Law is still necessary, of course, but it is not your guiding star, or even close. It has been wrong and cruel too many times.
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Creating dramas has become boring.
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At this stage, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment.
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Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.
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I am actually surprised there are not more clergy scandals, because “spiritual leader” or “professional religious person” is such a dangerous and ego-inflating self-image.
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The Zen masters call it “the face you had before you were born.” This self cannot die and always lives, and is your True Self.
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Neither our persona nor our shadow is evil in itself; they just allow us to do evil and not know it.
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Thus truly holy people are always humble people.
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This denied and disguised self takes so much energy to face, awaken, and transform all one's life that you have little time to project your fear, anger, or unlived life onto terrorists, Muslims, socialists, liberals, conservatives, or even hate radio.
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In our work with men, we have found that in many men this inability or refusal to feel their deep sadness takes the form of aimless anger.1 The only way to get to the bottom of their anger is to face the ocean of sadness underneath it. Men are not free to cry, so they just transmute their tears into anger, and sometimes it pools up in their soul in the form of real depression.
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People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.
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you are on course at all, your world should grow much larger in the second half of life. But I must tell you that, in yet another paradox, your circle of real confidants and truly close friends will normally grow smaller, but also more intimate.
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Groups of any kind have to be concerned with such practical things, but that is exactly why you will become impatient with such institutions, including the church, as you grow older and wiser.
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You can belong to such institutions for all the good that they do, but you no longer put all your eggs in that one basket.
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In fact, if your politics do not become more compassionate and inclusive, I doubt whether you are on the second journey.
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one God creates all and loves all, both Dodgers and Yankees, blacks and whites, Palestinians and Jews, Americans and Afghanis.
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Inside such entrapment, most people do not see things as they are; rather, they see things as they are. In
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it is only those who respond to the real you, good or bad, that help you in the long run.
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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.
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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.
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I believe Thomas Merton is probably the most significant American Catholic of the twentieth century, along with Dorothy Day.