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Friday, January 8, 2010

"The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See"


Richard Rohr's latest book, "The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See" is a book to read slowly. It is also a difficult book to tell you about. Rohr is stressing nondual thinking which is really contemplative living in the present moment. He stresses how difficult this is for us but it is what we are called to do. Jesus was a nondual thinker - actually, I need to reread this book and mark it up, but I did want to share one thing with you today and that is what Richard says about "A Joyful Mind".
"Joy and mind. Those are not words that you would normally put together, but they inspired the eleventh-century Richard of St. Victor, a Scottish canon teaching in Paris, and became the themes of his two books on the contemplative mind, Benjamin Major and Benjamin Minor. The titles were taken from one obscure passage from Psalm 68:27, where "Benjamin" is described as leading a procession into the temple on mentis excessu, which was translated as "with a joyful mind or with an ecstatic minds. This made me ask:
What might a joyful mind be?
When your mind does not need to be right.
When you no longer need to compare yourself with others...."


He has two pages on the Joyful Mind but I will let you think of other things a joyful mind is for yourself; it is good for us to think this out for ourselves.

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