Falling Upward

Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life contains many wonderful insights that I am going to share below. He theorizes that our failings can be the foundation for ongoing spiritual growth. Rohr explains how the heartbreaks, disappointments, and first loves of life are actually the stepping stones to the spiritual joys that the second half of life has in store for us. This article summarizes Falling Upward

and ALL language, thoughts, and explanations in this article are those of Richard Rohr, and not my own. However, the pictures are my own. I took these photos on my Camino de Santiago pilgrimage and feel they bring Rohr's words to life for me.

The Invitation to a Further Journey:

A journey into the second half of our own lives awaits us all. Most people's concerns remain those of establishing their personal identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seems like significant people or projects. But these first half of life tasks are merely the starting gate, the warmup, not the full journey.

Introduction:

We are a "first-half of life culture," largely concerned about surviving successfully.

We all try to establish an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and a building a proper platform for our only life. But when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives.

None of us go into our spiritual maturity completely of our own accord, or by a totally free choice. We are led by a mystery, some deep invitation to "something more," and set out to find it by both grace and daring. Most get little reassurance from others, or even have full confidence that they are totally right. Setting out is always a leap of faith. The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently. Many of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take on a further journey. We are more struggling to survive than thrive. Many learn our "survival dance" but never get to our "sacred dance."

Sacrifice of something to achieve something is almost always the pattern. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. When we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere.

Losing, failing, falling, is, and the suffering that comes from these experiences all a necessary and even good part of the human journey. If you are very rich or very religious you may try to steer your own ship and avoid falling down.

We grow much more spiritually by doing it wrong than doing it right. By denying their pain, and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves form their spiritual depths and therefore also their spiritual heights.

Chapter 1: The Two Halves Of Life:

Nobody else can do your journey for you. You cannot skip the first journey or you will never see its real necessity and limitations. We all need some successes, response, and positive feedback early in life, or we will spend the rest of our lies demanding it or bemoaning its lack from others. So you need to get mirrored well early in life so you don't spend the rest of your life looking for it.

In the first half of life, success, security and containment -- looking good to ourselves and others are almost the only questions. But we have to be careful, or they totally take over and become all-controlling needs, keeping us from further growth.

The most common one-liner in the Bible is "DO NOT BE AFRAID."

If we we not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction, and survival (the fear based preoccupations of the lizard brain) we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development. We will not get to the contents of our lives.

Growth and development have a direction and are not a static "grit your teeth and bear it." Jesus's first preached message is clearly change! He told his listeners to "repent," which literally means to "change your mind."

The intelligence of animals is determined by their ability to change and adjust their behavior in response to new circumstances. Those that don't, become extinct.

Chapter 2: The Hero and Heroine's Journey:

1. They live in a world that they presently take as given and sufficient.

2. They have the call or courage to leave home for an adventure of some type -- not really to solve any problem, but just to go out beyond their present comfort zone.

3. On this journey or adventure, they in fact find their real problem.

4. He or she "falls though" what is merely his or her life situation to discover his or her Real Life, which is always a much deeper river, hidden beneath the appearances. This deeper discovery is what religious people mean by "finding their soul."

5. The hero or heroine then must pass the lessons learned on to others - or there is no real gift at all.

Merely to survive and preserve our life is a low-level instinct that we share with good little lizards, but it is not heroism in any classic sense. We were meant to thrive and not just survive. You need to get out of the house, your castle and comfort zone, to find the journey has a life and death of its own. The crucial thing is to get out and about, and into the real and bigger issues. We must complete the tasks in the first half of life well to move forward. Many of us cannot move ahead because we have not done the first task, learned from the last task, or had any of our present accomplishments acknowledged by others.

Chapter 3: The First Half of Life:

Every culture throughout history values law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need. Without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally.

Too many people, especially woman and disadvantaged people, have lived warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet. We have extremes in our society: those that make a sacrificial and heroic life their whole identity, and others in selfish rebellion refuse to sacrifice anything. If you stay in the protected first half beyond its natural period, you become a well disguised narcissist or an adult infant. The Western person today has either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.

Why are we not doing the first half well??

We need limit situations. We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because you learn how to recover from falling by falling. People who have never allowed themselves top fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. We cannot flourish in early in life in a totally open field. Children need a good degree of order, predictability and coherence to grow up well. Without laws, human life would be anarchy and chaos. We need limit situations and boundaries to grow up.

We need a foil, a goad, a wall to butt up against to create a proper ego structure and a strong identity. Such a foil is the way we internalize our own deeper values, educate our feeling function, and dethrone or own narcissism. Butting up against limits actually teaches us an awful lot. We are creatures who love the familiar, the habitual, our own group, and most people will not leave the safety and security of their home unless they have to.

The Gospel call, again and again, is to leave home, family, and nets.

Holding a Creative Tension:

Creative tension is where you have both law and freedom which are both necessary for spiritual growth. Rohr says very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions.We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is not the way to wisdom, and it is how people operate in the first half of life.

The presumption has been against law and authority for several centuries now. Now we start our kids in a kind of free fall, and hope that by some good luck or insight they will magically come to wisdom. The ego cannot be allowed to be totally in charge throughout our early years, or it takes over. The entirely open field leaves us the victim of too many options, and the options themselves soon push us around and take control. Law and structure, as fallible as they often are, put up some kind of limits to our infantile grandiosity, and prepare us for helpful relationships with the outer world, which has rights too.

None of us can dialogue with others until we can calmly and confidently hold our own identity. None of us can know much about the second-half of life spirituality as long as we are still trying to create the family, the parenting, the security, the order, the pride that we were not given in the first half.

Much of the world stays at the egocentric first stage of life. In post World War II Japan, the communities would do a ritual for the soldiers so that they could rejoin their communities as useful citizens after the war was over. They would call this process "discharging your loyal soldier." This kind of closure is much needed for most of us at the end of all major transitions in life. But we have lost any sense of the need for such rites of passage and most of our people have no clear crossover to the second half of our lives. There is little talk of journeys outward or onward, the kind of journeys that Jesus called people to go on. The loyal soldier is similar to the "elder son" in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. His very loyalty to stout meritocracy, to his own entitlement, to obedience and loyalty to his father, keeps him from the very "celebration" his father has prepared. Both the elder son and the Pharisee are good loyal soldiers, exactly what most of us in the church are told to be, yet Jesus says that both of them missed the major point. Many fall in love with their first place and position, as an extension of themselves, and spend their whole life building a white picket fence around it. The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. The first battles solidly the ego and create a stalwart loyal soldier, the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins.

There is a deeper voice of God that you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound like the voices of risk, of trust, of Surender, of soul, of common sense, of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self.

Our loyal soldier normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of 35-55 if at all, if it happens before that it is usually just rebellion. Normally we do not discharge our loyal soldier until he shows himself to be wanting, incapable, inadequate for the real issues of life.

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul. Instead of being ego- driven, you will be soul driven.

"Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing."

Chapter 4: The Tragic Sense of Life:

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving, but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

The gospel was able to accept that life is tragic, but then graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy.

Chapter 5: Stumbling over the Stumbling Stone:

There is no practical reason to leave ones comfort zone. You can't just try to engineer your own enlightenment or self help. You will only see that you have already decided to look for. You must stumble and fall. In the spiritual world, we do not find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it long for it, choose it and personally find it again, but now on a new level.

Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly slowing stream. There must be, and if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change or even understand. You will be led to the edge of your own private resources. This is the necessary stumbling. This is the only way Life-Fate-God-Grace, gets you to change. Sometimes you will hear former addicts thank God for their former drinking.. They say it was a huge price to pay, but nothing less would have broken down their false self and opened them up to love.

If you do not do the first half of life well, you have almost no ability to rise up from the stumbling stone.

Chapter 6: Necessary Suffering:

Carl Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the "legitimate suffering" that comes from being human. In fact, he said neurotic behavior is usually the result of refusing that legitimate suffering. Ironically this refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run. (We are meant to feel all emotions and that includes pain, empathy, sadness. If you think something is wrong with you because you feel these things, and then try to numb it, then this is where the unnecessary suffering comes in). Once you get the enlightenment, there is no going back, because nothing is better.

Not surprisingly, many of the findings of modern psychology, anthropology, and organizational behavior give us new windows and vocabulary into Jesus's transcendent message.

"Hating" Family

Many people are kept from mature religion because of the pious immature, or rigid expectations of their first-half -of-life family.

One of the major blocks against the second journey is what we would know 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 past majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some call it conditioning or even imprinting. Without very real inner work, most folks never move beyond it. You might get beyond it in a negative sense, by reacting or rebelling against it, but it is much less common to get out of the crab bucket in a positive way. That is what we want here. Jesus uses quite strong words to push us out of the family nest and to name a necessary suffering at the most personal, counterintuitive, and sentimental level possible.

It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what mom and dad always wanted them to be and do. To move beyond family of origin stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity. The pull is too great, and the loyal soldier fills us with appropriate guilt, shame, and self-doubt, which, as we said early, feels like the very voice of God. So Jesus pulls no punches and says you must "hate" your home base in some way and make choices beyond it. It takes therapists years to achieve the same result to reestablish appropriate boundaries. It is often the parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities and civil authorities who fight against them. All the spiritual greats say leave home to find it and they were talking about all the validations, securities, illusions, prejudices, smallness and hurts too.

Jesus calls it --losing our very life or losing our "false self." Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real. Such necessary suffering feels like dying.

Your true self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, the face you had before you were born. It is your substantial self, your absolute identity, which can be neither gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula.

Chapter 7: Home and Homesickness:

The fullness and inner freedom of the second half of life is what Homer seemed unable to describe.The goal is to always get the protagonist to come back home after getting to leave in first place. You can go home because you in fact come home to your true and full self. You are free to stop your human doing and can enjoy your human being.

The ancients called this internal longing for wholeness "fate" or "destiny", the "inner voice" or the "call of the gods." In fact heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it.

Rohr summarizes it by the following:

1. We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line.

2. We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half of life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy. We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The shape of evil is much more superficial and blindness than the usually listed hot sins.

3. If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, real, and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from the starter kit of "belief" to an actual inner knowing.

4. This "something real" is what all the world religions are pointing to when they spoke of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. The only mistake is that they pushed it to the next world and not now.

5. These events become the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once you touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the real, has to be forever.

Chapter 8: Amnesia and The Big Picture:

We all seem to suffer from a tragic case of mistaken identity. Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know. It is as though we are all suffering from a giant case of amnesia.

It is religion's job to reach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort, a private performance, or some kind of religious achievement on our part, through our belonging to the right group, practicing the right rituals, or believing the right things.

Mature religious is always trying to get you out of the closing prison-hour of the false self. Spirituality is much more about unlearning than learning.

When you do not know who you are, you push all enlightenment off into a possible future reward and punishment system, within which hardly anyone wins. Only the True Self knows that heaven is now and that its loss is hell - now. The false self makes religion into the old evacuation plan for the next world. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. If you go to heaven alone wrapped in your own private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom. Heaven and hell were primarily eternal states of consciousness more than geographical places of later reward and punishment.

Chapter 9: A Second Simplicity:

Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.

This slow process of transformation and the realizations that came with it are not either or decisions; they were great big both-and realizations. None of it happened without much prayer, self-doubt, study, and conversation, but the journey led me to a deepening sense of what the church calls holiness, what American call freedom and what psychology calls wholeness.

Many people get stopped and fixated at lower levels where God seems to torture and exclude forever those people who don't agree with him or get his name right.

I worry about true believers who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all. To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable.

Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second half of life person. Finally one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs," even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

If you have done it for yourself, forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else.

Chapter 10: A Bright Sadness:

There is still darkness in the second half of life, but now there is a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety.

In the second half, you are not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort everyday is to pay back, to give back, to the world a bit of what I have recited. Erik Erikson calls someone at this stage a generative person, one who is eager and able to generate life from his or her own abundance.

The inner and outer have become one. You can trust your inner experience now because even God has allowed it, used it, received it, and refined it. We do what we are called to do, and then try to let go of the consequences

Now we aid and influence other people; simply by being who we are. Human integrity probably influences and moves people from potency to action more than anything else. We need people's deep and studied passion so much more than their superficial and lily stated principles.

This new passion is what people mean when they say, I must do this particular thing or my life will not make sense.

Chapter 11: The Shadowlands:

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. Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see. The more you have cultivated and protected a chosen person, the more shadow work you will need to do.

Your persona is what most people want from you and reward you for, and what you choose to identify with, for some reason. As you do your inner work, you will begin to know that your self-image is nothing more than just that, and not worth protecting, promoting, or denying. Your self-image is not substantial or lasting, it is just created out of your own mind, desire and choice, and everybody's else's preferences for you.

Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing and full seeing takes most of our lifetimes. We never get to second half of our lives without major shadow boxing. General pattern in stories is that heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do.

Hypocrite is a greek word that simply means actor, someone playing a role rather than being real. We are all in a closet of one kind or another and even encouraged by society to play our roles. The closer you get to the light, the more of the shadow you see, so truly holy people are always humble people.

In the second half of life, you do not let one or another fault in a person destroy your larger relationship. Here you understand the absolute importance of contemplative or nondualisic thinking.

Once you have faced your own hidden or denied self, there is not much to be anxious about anymore, because there is no fear of exposure to yourself or others. The game is over, you are free. There is no longer any persona to protect or project. You are who you are and can be who you are without disguise or fear.

There will always be some degree of sadness, humiliation and disappointment resulting from shadow work, so its best to learn to recognize it and not obsess over it. It is the false self who is sad, humbled.

Humans come to their full consciousness precisely by shadow boxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

Chapter 12: New Problems and New Directions:

The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.

The question now becomes: How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second.? The holding of this tension is the very shape of wisdom.

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. Dualistic thinking works for awhile but then stops being helpful in most real-life situations.

Non dualistic wisdom, or what many of us call contemplative thinking, is necessary once you get into the right field. 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.

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, facts, and endlessly arguing the same. "My facts are better than your fact," we yell at ever higher volumes and with ever stronger ego attachment."

Chapter 13: Falling Upward:

What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, were the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lies inside the Big Picture.

You must find at least one true mirror that reveals your inner, deepest, and yes, divine image. In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you, but they also have much less power to control or hurt you. There is a strange and even wonderful communion in real human pain.

Like any true mirror, the gaze of God receives 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 of 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.

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.