Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self QUOTES

61 " Fullness in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no handles, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

62 " You must get the “self” right. Otherwise even seemingly good and moral actions will have a tight, stingy, and corrosive character to them. Conversely, the right “self” can even do the wrong thing, and somehow it can always be worked out. You know this from your own experience. We must know who is doing the action and who is doing the reflecting. Is it “your” self? The God self? Or a mere chameleon? That question is foundational to mature spirituality of any stripe. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

63 " The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

64 " Knowledge of your True Self gradually places your life in a big and ever bigger frame. Then the small stuff can no longer hurt you or define you for the long term. Therapy is not equipped to call the small stuff into question—things like ever higher pay, more vacation days, not being noticed, taking offense. That is the job of religion, the ultimate clearinghouse, and why spiritual direction is a different discipline than therapeutic counseling is. You can do both, as I do. Good spiritual direction will highly simplify and clarify your therapy, and good therapy will ground any spiritual direction in honesty and necessary shadow boxing. Good therapy will allow you to cope with greater serenity and efficiency because you will learn how to do your human job well and with personal satisfaction. True spiritual direction can link that human job with your divine job without dismissing the human job in the least. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

65 " Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

66 " Christianity is much more about living and doing than thinking. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

67 " Perhaps the True Self—and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)—will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. Some will think I am arrogantly talking about being “personally divine” and eagerly dismiss this way of talking about resurrection as heresy, arrogance, or pantheism. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

68 " Because far too many religious folks do not seriously pursue this “reverence humming within them,” they do not recognize "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

69 " Perfect spirituality is just to imitate God. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

70 " In this high place it is as simple as this, Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of rough love and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there, in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape of your own face. David Whyte, “Tilicho Lake” Conservatives "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

71 " wisely put it years ago, “ Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.”1 "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

72 " As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, “ Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.”1 "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

73 " The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult. We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

74 " Perhaps Moses said it poetically and best and very early on: “This law is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach. It is not in heaven, so that you need to wonder, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down to us so that we may hear it and keep it?’ Nor is it beyond the seas, so that you need to wonder, ‘Who will cross the seas for us so that we might hear it and keep it?’ No, the Word is very near to you. It is in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:11–14). "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

75 " As Simone Weil said in various ways, it is much easier to make non-Christians into Christians than it is to make Christians into Christians. Cradle Christians are almost totally preconditioned to the carrot-on-the-stick model. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

76 " Many of the fathers of the church believed in an actual ontological, metaphysical, objective union between humanity and God, which alone would allow Jesus to take us “back with him” into the life of the Trinity (John 17:23–24, 14:3, 12:26). This was how real “participation” was for many in the early church. It changed people and offered them their deepest identity and form (“trans-formation”). We had thought our form was merely human, but Jesus came to tell us that our actual form is human-divine, just as he is. He was not much interested in proclaiming himself the exclusive or exclusionary son of God, but he went out of his way to communicate an inclusive sonship and daughterhood to the crowds. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

77 " Whenever you are fearing death, physical death or death of some ego fixation, or using diversionary tactics of any kind, you are in your False Self at that moment. Again, it is not usually bad or evil, but just inadequate to the big questions of love, death, suffering, God, or any notion of infinity. God allows and uses all our diversionary tactics to get us to the full destination. That is how perfect and patient divine love is. God probably knows we are procrastinators much more than perpetrators. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

78 " Even the human mind of Jesus did not know some things until he came out the other side of death. In fact, I do not believe the human mind of Jesus fully knew his own True Self as the “Son of God” until after the Resurrection. Before his own transformation, Jesus lived in faith and “was like us in all ways except sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus never appeared to believe the “lie of separation,” which is the core meaning of sin. He said without hesitation, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). That made him indeed unique—and the ultimate model and leader for all of humanity. "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

79 " The Risen Presence always appears once your False Self stops attaching, defending, denying, and blaming. As in Matthew's account (28:9), he just walks up and says, “Hi!” Paul actually says in several places that “our former selves have been crucified” already (Romans 6:6). The False Self is fragile and temporary and is thus already “over and out.” Its death knell has already rung. It is just a matter of time until you touch the true, and the false falls away like clumsy scaffolding. This is probably why some saints were pictured holding or looking at a human skull. It was not meant to be morbid but a way of picturing this shock of realization and the utter change of consciousness that follows. Once you experience the Real, the unreal is increasingly a mere diversion or entertainment, not substantial reality. Once you encounter the Risen Presence, you can rather easily let go of the past and the petty. The Risen Christ could be called the “future shock” of God. The Gospel accounts make note that the Resurrection occurs “very early on the first day of the week” (John 20:1), clearly evoking a new creation, a fresh start, a new first (Genesis 1:3–5), but now an eternal day of Easter light. And, of course, scientists now tell us that all light in the universe is electromagnetically connected and that all natural light is in fact one. The Risen Christ is the personification of this one Light that includes all light, which is why he is always described as “dazzling white” or “like lightning” (Matthew 28:3). "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

80 " If we are really convinced that we have the Great Big Truth then we should also be able to trust that others will see it from their different angles - or it is not a great big truth...Big Truth is written in reality itself before it was ever written in books. If you say yes to Reality, 'what is,' you will recognize the same truth when it shows itself in any Bible . . .If it is the truth, it is true all the time and everywhere, and sincere lovers of truth will take it wherever it comes from . . . The important question is not, 'Who said it?', but 'Is it true?' I do not believe the will of God is a theory, an argued moral theology, or an abstraction in any form; it is seeking the truth of each situation in that situation as best as we can figure it out. What else could God ask of humanity, most of whom had no access to synagogue, temple, church, Koran, moral theology class, or Bible? Were they all utterly lost and rejected? Somehow the True Self in all humans has a natural access to that 'hidden' will of God - if the mind and heart and soul are open and undefended (which is always the spiritual task and not easily achieved). "

― Richard Rohr , Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self