Listening. And another prayer hangup of mine

An article by Richard Rohr and a Facebook exchange with a wise and bright person from my past (links at end) got me to thinking…

Because being a good listener is a praiseworthy ideal, many of us think we are good listeners. Almost none of us is. Our culture is too hungry for answers, and too eager to give them. I’d hazard that less than 1/10 of 1% of people in our culture listen without thought of responding. That’s not a very good rate of good listening.

Most of us are driven crazy by religious fundamentalists because they have an answer for everything. Political fundamentalists aren’t far behind or much different. It’s the same with fundamentalist science and rationalism. Every ideologue is a fundamentalist, believing that they have heard the counter-arguments, but they are all incorrect.

I think, I’m afraid, that is not relating. That is relating to ideals, not relating to people.

We stopped listening. We are unable to hear a human being, instead reducing them to their incorrectness/correctness. We objectify people by treating them, their thoughts, and their feelings objectively, for the sake of answers that they seek, and that we pride ourselves on offering.

More than anything in this realm, a human being wants to be heard. A human being wants to be listened to. Much much more than they want answers. Even if they don’t know it. Especially about hard questions. Hard questions are hard because they are hard. When you reduce hard questions to an answer, you are rejecting the human being who finds them hard.

Answering is the opposite of listening, not the resolution to listening.

We should listen genuinely because it allows the mysterious to remain mysterious. When we don’t let the mysterious remain mysterious, we simplify and objectify the human being speaking. We also shrink ourselves to something much less enormous than we are.

I think our national religious conditioning has made us this way. Even if you are an atheist, you are living in a nation cultured by evangelical fundamentalism – from the founding fathers to the present day.

Our religious cultures have brainwashed us into simplicity. We are to believe that our relationship to the divine is not mysterious and has answers. Even the atheists, who think there can’t be a god that would allow the kinds of evil plain to see. But I believe much of atheism is driven by fundamentalists haughtily pronouncing answers to questions that have no answers. This is in stark opposition to the example of Yeshua, who listened without answers VERY often. And most of the time, when an answer was given, it was deeply mysterious.

The most explicit way our religious cultures have conditioned us to be very poor listeners is by the prescribed practices of prayer. Ask things of God. Discern the answers. Pursue God’s will. We think this involves listening. But it involves listening for objective, fundamentalist, simplified, reduced answers, not contentment with mystery and difficulty.

Some people say God did not promise to take our suffering away, but only to be present with us amidst it. And that non-answer is why philosophers call evil and suffering the great problems. Those big problem questions don’t have answers. They are mysterious.

But fundamentalists don’t want a mysterious God.

I do. Woody Allen says he would never want to belong to a country club that would accept him. I would never want a god who wasn’t sympathetic to my wrestling with the difficult questions. I think the real God is. And the people in whom the real Spirit dwell are good listeners when they let their divinity embrace mystery and console their fearful ego.

The people we identify as authentically good listeners are simply people who are present in fullness. When they don’t offer ridiculously simplified answers, we are nevertheless consoled. Why? The soul seeks to be heard, and the soul needs nothing more than full presence. Not answers.

Ask God for whatever you wish. Listen for answers if you wish. But be present. Fully present. For God is.
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Neil D. 2021-09-04
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Related:

A psycho-spiritual role for logic

I’m not an overly enthusiastic fan of reason, logic, rationalism, scientism, physicalism, thinking, etc. But I am absolutely an enthusiastic fan. What does “overly” mean to me?

When you put all of your eggs — all of your big questions — in the basket of rationalism, you cheat your humanity. The height of reason is not the height of humanity {see endnote for more}.

Logic — no matter how pure — is simply not a person’s only way of “knowing.” Let’s take up the question of, “Who am I?”

Mire your self in as much logic as you wish about the question, “Who am I?” You stumble quickly into irrational grandiosity which inflates your self-importance, like Mushu presents himself as The Great Stone Dragon to Mulan (voice, Eddie Murphy): https://youtu.be/zn_nM7x7Lcw.

At the opposite end of the Logic Pendulum‘s swing is that you are but a speck on a tiny planet in the universe, bound to be wormbait and dust.

We each sense that we are something special in the universe, but that sense does not, and cannot, come from our faculty of reason isolated from the rest of our life experience.

“Who am I?” leads us to ponder both the universal and the specific. Neither seems to make sense alone. I am part of something big, and I am an individual. Let’s play further with another question logically…

“What is my potential?”

Here, I think logic has a deep and profound psycho-spiritual role to play for a person. You are NOT the ideals and values you espouse. That’s illogical grandiosity. Yet most of us live our lives thinking and acting this way. We wish to be something we can never be. Consider it logically. An ideal is an ideal and cannot be entirely embodied by… well… a body. Neither ANY-body nor EVERY-body.

Objective truths are unreal. They objectify us. And something within us tells us that we are not mere objects, in reality. So poo-poo on your idolization of objectivity. We are each subjects—agents of action.

“Who am I? What is my potential?” Logically, I am Neil. Logically, my potential cannot exceed Neil’s theoretical potential. Logically.

Why do we get so easily tempted by lures of achievement? By promises of becoming something we wish for? Because we live in a materialistic culture with expert marketing! And those forces are not founded on logic! They appeal to “something” in us far beyond our faculty of reason. At their extreme, they are imaginary realms, outside the realm of logic.

Our imagination lures us, logic be damned!

This propensity, proclivity, impulse, and compulsion for imagination is evoked when we hear platitudes like…
Be all/the best you can be.
Be your best/full self.
Self-actualize.
Know thy-self.

So, set aside your imagination as best you can, and apply here some brutal logic. And remember that psychology informs us by unequivocal consensus that Comparison is a lethal practice for The Self.

You cannot be “that” in its imaginary entirety. You cannot be “this” at every moment. You cannot be this or that by choice, by will, voluntarily in every circumstance.

This is the fullness of logical honesty.

In the sense that you deny each of these truisms, you are logically ill. You become *mentally* ill when you rely exclusively on logic. Because “you” are so much more than an engine for reason.

A human being is much more than a thinker.

A human being is also a feeler.

We try to sort out those two, but that is an exercise of logic! Can you peel an orange with an orange peel?

Anytime we consciously exercise logic, we sense that it is incomplete. And so have the greatest minds in philosophy throughout our history.

Today’s brilliant thinkers have an imaginary hope that we haven’t YET figured out how to subsume our faculties of emotion into our faculty of reason, but will in the future—like scientific discoveries remain incomplete and point to paths we should follow for further discovery. Of course we should do that, but if the aim of those pursuits is a fantasy that we will detangle our thinking faculties from our feeling faculties, and reduce the mystery of the human being, well, then, what are we left with?

Anyhow, that may seem to have strayed from my purpose here. I have drifted into talking about universals, and not the specific You, or Me.

Stop being so hard on yourself because you do not perfectly embody ideals, which were never meant to be perfectly embodied. Be content with valuing them. You are unique in the universe, even outside of time: Never has there been, nor will there ever be, another you.

To “do You well,” practice some logic about who you are, and, especially, who you aren’t.

Then practice some more logic: The full You that you just conceived NEVER remains static.

You are this and that… sometimes.

That’s *honest* logic.

“‘Neil’ is a name which should never be spoken.” Or only spoken as a whisper. Or whatever. Why? Mystery.

This morning’s Neil is not the same as this evening’s…

Logically…

Related: Beware of therapy goals! (2) Envy and the Pitfalls of Validation

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Neil D. 2021-09-01

{ ENDNOTE

The Enlightenment is a wonderful collective achievement, but it is not the end game. It was just a corrective swing of the pendulum away from the oppression of both the superstitious middle ages and the religiosity of The Renaissance. (https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/whats-the-difference-between-the-renaissance-and-the-enlightenment.html)

The Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution have put us in the age of technology, biotechnology, information, etc. accompanied by political revolutions which have put the freedom of individuals on par with service by the power of the state.

If you are more interested in his characterization of European/western historical ages, I recommend reading about the aforementioned topics as well as “Deism.”

}

Fear of loneliness

Fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment, fear of being alone… To me, there is nothing “bad” about these. For millions of years we have evolved from ancestral animals to be hardwired as herd animals, as a matter of *survival*.

I’d like to relate that inescapable biological reality to the concept of “soul.” Many of us often think that we could, or should, “rise above” our neurochemistry and hardwired biology. That is a very grave misunderstanding of Christian theology, yet often perpetrated by “Christian” religions (there are other movements which would have us believe this, too).

You are not, as a human being with consciousness, limited strictly to/by your biology. But, you CANNOT escape it, either. So don’t hold yourself to some fantasy ideal or belief that you CAN escape it. To “transcend” your mortal biology is NOT to escape (or replace) it. Nor even to rise above it, without carrying it with you.

To me, the best Christian theology about the body and soul was inherited from Greek philosophers 4 centuries before Christianity, and articulated 1600 years later as the Medieval period gave way to the Renaissance (in European history terms). More than 300 years BC, Greeks (and some others) were already thinking deeply about the soul (psyche, and consciousness). They thought of it as neither separate nor separable from the mortal body. There were philosophies which competed with this, and in the Christian era, there have been theologies that contradict this framework, and they were rejected as heresies which fall woefully short of the pre-Christian and Christian mystery of body and soul.

My point here is that your mortal body and mortal nature are not something to be escaped; in fact, very much the contrary — according to the dogma of “resurrection of the body.” Your fear of being alone is not a signal to be overcome. Your instinct “to belong” is inseparable from your perfect nature.

Let’s be careful about the word “transcend”; it comes from the Latin, meaning “to climb ACROSS.” As we use it today, be careful not to think of it as “rising above” something so much that we conquer it or leave it behind.

A careful understanding of the Christian theology (and even pre-Christian, Aristotelian metaphysics) about the soul in no way includes the notion of leaving behind [our evolutionarily hardwired] body and its nature. Your soul is co-created to be fully attached to your body and to give that body life (see Thomas Aquinas and/or Christian theology about resurrection of the body).

I think of a complete human being as a mysterious blend of ego and soul which cannot be detangled. The ego is the faculty by which we sense that we are a separate, individual, autonomous agent in existence. The soul is a faculty by which we sense our common connectedness. Your fear of loneliness is nothing more than a very perfect and natural signal from your soul. We can “hear the voice of our soul” when we do many things, but, surely, we hear it most clearly in solitude.
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Neil D. 2021-08-19

Brené Brown & Richard Rohr on Power

So many hymns and prayers in institutional Christianity misrepresent the revelation by Christ. Each of us has been deeply wounded by power domination in relationship(s). Our religious brainwashing bears some culpability for that. Authentic power has no relationship to domination and surrender. But because we have been normatively blinded to that by religious conditioning, we suffer under that illusory form of power. Here are words from Brené Brown and a Christian mystic on Friday the 13th…

https://cac.org/no-domination-in-god-2021-08-13/

[Excerpts]

We will continually misinterpret and misuse Jesus if we don’t first participate in the circle dance of mutuality and communion within which he participated [in the Trinity]. We, instead, make Jesus into “Christ the King,” a title he rejected in his lifetime (see John 18:37). He never sought that kind of power.
…This isn’t a vulnerable, relational one who knows how to be a brother to all creation… [W]e no longer kn[o]w Jesus in any meaningful sense that the soul [can] naturally relate to (which was the main point of the Incarnation!).
…Our notion of society, politics, and authority—which is still top-down and outside-in—would utterly change…
[T]here’s no domination in God. All divine power is shared power and the letting go of autonomous and self-serving power.
Brené Brown writes wisely about vulnerability and power… “The phrase power over is typically enough to send chills down spines: When someone holds power over us, the human spirit’s instinct is to rise, resist, and rebel. As a construct it feels wrong; in the wider geopolitical context it can mean death and despotism.”
There’s no seeking of power over in the Trinity, but only power with—a giving away, a sharing, a letting go, and thus an infinite flow of trust and mutuality. This should have changed all Christian relationships: in marriage, in culture, and even in international relations. Instead, we continue to prefer kings, wars, and empires, instead of an always leveling love…

These are tricky and loaded ideas, perhaps impossible for most of us to grasp as a single point. So instead, share with us a comment below about what these words raised up inside of you, please.

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Neil D. 2021-08-14

Save thousands on psychotherapy:)

“The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again…
Knowing our true identity as sons and daughters of God can save us thousands of dollars in psychotherapy. Knowing that everyone else is a child of God— and treating them as such—can save the world!” [https://cac.org/preaching-to-the-disinherited-2021-07-23/]

Some lexicons express it as “hitting rock-bottom” and being flattened there for a prolonged depression to sort of learn that we do not need God. I know, that sounds like an uncommon and unfamiliar way to put it, “not need God.” I would not express “surrendering to God” as an acknowledgment that I need God. I already had/have God. God had/has me. I was there to reawaken to my true identity, that I am a child of God. https://feelwithneil.com/2020/09/19/the-young-messiah/

With this stabilized ego, new courage, fearlessness, and power, I gotta go… Gotta get busy saving the world. Come with me sister, brother…
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Neil D. 2021-07-27