Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
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Read between October 30 - November 10, 2020
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The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.
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The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.
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We all want and need various certitudes, constants, and insurance policies at every stage of life. But we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth.
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If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, 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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This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.
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All that each of us can do is to live in the now that is given.
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I am sure many slaveholders in the South were “self-made men” and perhaps never in their entire lives had to face a situation where they did not “succeed.” Such a refusal to fall kept them from awareness, empathy, and even basic human compassion. The price they paid for such succeeding was an inability to allow, join, or enjoy “the general dance.” They “gained the whole world, but lost their soul,” as Jesus put it. They did their survival dance, but never got to the sacred dance, which by necessity includes everybody else. If it is a sacred dance, it is always the general dance too.
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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. What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting.
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Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings. Check it out yourself. Why would Jesus' love be so unconditional while he was in this world, and suddenly become totally conditional after death?
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The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to any economy of grace, where merit or worthiness loses all meaning.
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We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.
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Second simplicity has its own kind of brightness and clarity, but much of it is expressed in nonverbal terms, and only when really needed. If you talk too much or too loud, you are usually not an elder.
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“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”
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Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.
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Whenever ministers, or any true believers, are too anti anything, you can be pretty sure there is some shadow material lurking somewhere nearby.
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Buddhist nun and writer Pema Chodron says that once you create a self-justifying story line, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples!
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The saint is precisely one who has no “I” to protect or project. His or her “I” is in conscious union with the “I AM” of God, and that is more than enough. Divine union overrides any need for self-hatred or self-rejection. Such people do not need to be perfectly right, and they know they cannot be anyway; so they just try to be in right relationship. In other words, they try above all else to be loving. Love holds you tightly and safely and always.
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People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them,
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The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.
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When I say that almost all groups and institutions are first-half-of-life structures, I say that not to discourage you but in fact just the opposite. I say it first of all because it is true, but also to keep you from being depressed or losing all hope by having false expectations. Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose. The most you can hope for is a few ...more
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Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.
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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.
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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.
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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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Don't accept your first responses at face value. The only final and meaningful question is “Is it true?”