Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life

Product Information

I was sobered by his litmus test for unfinished shadow work (work which by the way is never done, but well along the way with second=half-of-life people): "Invariably, whenever something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed . For one thing, he articulates a new age account of the fall of Adam and Eve as a "necessary fall" for their development of consciousness. What you thought you knew about living the spiritual life no longer suffices for the life you are living. If you never deal with this shadow self, then you'll endure a miserable old age, always blaming others for not treating you well. The Two Halves' refers to Jung's program of life, where in the first half, we build the Ego and secure a 'living'.

Rohr also pretends that Jesus never mentioned hell, although he did so more than any other person in the New Testament. And if we go back to our hero, Odysseus, we can see that he too was a loyal soldier, rowing his boat right up to his second journey. That may be cold comfort during the crisis—when your house has flooded, who wants to think about spiritual growth? The value of this book lies in the way Richard Rohr shares his own aging process with us in ways that help us be less afraid.

I have nothing against that crowd crediting Victor Turner with some of their basic tenets, but he wasn't some big Male Spirituality Guru. We are the beneficiaries of spiritual informational globalization, like no one has ever been before. Rohr stresses being influenced by archetypal journey stories such as the Exodus of Moses, Odysseus' long voyage to reach home, Mohammed's several key flights, Jesus' four kinds of soil, the "way of the cross" images on church walls the insights of St. It’s fine to have a favorite few authors, but he doesn’t just quote them on different topics, he uses the same quote from the same author multiple times.

Although he does some things in humility, his hubris is frustrating and laughable at times: “The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well. Salvation” “heaven” and “hell” are all just made up terms that are actually connected to modern psychology. It’s not age that leads us to maturity, but how we handle suffering and what we learn from those experiences. Free fall is when an object is falling, only being affected by the force of gravity, while weightlessness is when an object has no weight due to there being no effect from gravity (it still has mass).

This important companion to Falling Upward is an excellent tool for exploring the counterintuitive messages of how we grow spiritually. He comments on the fact that many other religions do a better job of understanding God and man, yet remains a “Catholic” because of the “tools” the church gave him.