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 β even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.
Interpretation
The ego resists change and clings to familiar patterns, even if they are detrimental.
In this quote, Richard Rohr highlights the tendency of the human ego to resist change and embrace the status quo, regardless of its effectiveness. The ego, which is tied to our identity and past experiences, fears the unknown future and prefers the comfort of what it already knows, often leading to stagnation and dissatisfaction in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing change in the workplace.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
The gift of darkness draws you to know Godβs presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become βholding onβ instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.
Heaven does without doing through its purity, Earth does without doing through its calmness.
Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.
If we seek the Buddha outside the mind, the Buddha changes into a devil.
While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
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