{"id":27074,"date":"2026-05-31T22:58:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T02:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27074"},"modified":"2026-06-01T08:58:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T12:58:02","slug":"27074","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27074","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Moving Beyond Our Binary Minds<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Tenth Avenue North - Worn (with lyrics)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UUEy8nZvpdM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Sunday, May 31, 2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr highlights the importance of developing an open, \u201cbeginner\u2019s mind\u201d:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The dualistic mind is the one we\u2019re all educated into. It\u2019s the one that gets us through the day, helping us make important distinctions and necessary judgments, pointing us to the left or right. It\u2019s essential for the advent of the scientific, industrial, and now technological revolutions, so we\u2019re all grateful for it. It\u2019s good and necessary as far as it goes, but let me be clear, it doesn\u2019t go far enough! The dualistic mind cannot deal with the biggies: love, death, suffering, God, infinity, and the very notion of grace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To balance what I see as our overreliance on dualistic thinking, we have to find ways to practice thinking in a different way, where we can receive the moment as an open field. I call it the nondual or contemplative mind. In that space,<strong> we don\u2019t have to divide the field or reject anything we don\u2019t yet understand as wrong.<\/strong> We <strong>don\u2019t have to eliminate everything that\u2019s mysterious, negative, painful, or problematic<\/strong>. With the contemplative mind, we can leave the field open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a <strong>major exercise in letting go<\/strong> because we have to let go of our fear, defensiveness, and expectations. I think that\u2019s why so many people don\u2019t persevere in meditation practice, daily contemplation, or periods of silence.<strong> I do a twenty-minute sit in the morning and again later in the day, and to be honest, <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">it usually f<em>eels like twenty minutes of dying<\/em><\/span><em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">, twenty minutes of boredom,<\/span> <\/em>twenty minutes of not getting my own way. All these compulsive, obsessive, and negative thoughts come into my mind and try to grab my attention. &nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the beginning contemplation is simply a practice of living with and looking out from our stable foundation in God, what we might call the Inner Witness. <strong>We have to be willing to see how attracted we are to negative, paranoid, oppositional, and even violent thinking. <\/strong>We start to wonder, Where did this come from? Why am I doing this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We must be willing to question, \u201cHow could this little flimsy mind ever know God? How could it understand or even hold space for the great love or great suffering that enter every human life?\u201d It will simply<strong> jump to the next thing because the dualistic mind is always moving toward resolution. It loves closure and rushes toward judgment. That\u2019s why all great spiritual teachers said, \u201cDo not judge<\/strong>.\u201d &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To well-educated, dualistic thinkers, that just feels irresponsible. We have to make judgments, don\u2019t we? Of course we do, especially when it comes to issues of justice and solidarity. But the <strong>first lens through which we receive a moment, a person, or a situation has to be nondual.<\/strong> I have to accept all parts of reality\u2014that which I think I understand (and call good), and that which I don\u2019t understand (and assume is bad). Sadly, most never go beyond that.<strong> Anything that they don\u2019t yet understand is presumed to be wrong, dangerous, sinful, heretical, or even to be destroyed.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>==========================<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Loving Beyond the Boxes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Monday, June 1, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard affirms God\u2019s desire for us to know and welcome all of ourselves and others:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>God is clearly more comfortable with diversity than we are, and God\u2019s final goal and objective are much simpler. <strong>God and the entire cosmos are about two things:&nbsp;<em>differentiation<\/em>&nbsp;(people and things becoming themselves) and&nbsp;<em>communion&nbsp;<\/em>(living in supportive coexistence).<\/strong> Physicists and biologists seem to know this better than theologians and clergy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Religious people who use the scriptures to condemn or exclude others seem to have different goals and objectives from those of God or Jesus. Their arguments generally have to do with very secular concerns: <strong>power and control, fear of the other and the unknown, and idealization of a family unit that Jesus himself neither lived nor idealized.<\/strong> Check the Gospels if you don\u2019t believe me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Institutional religion <strong>tends to think of people as very simple; therefore, the law must be very complex to protect them in every situation. Jesus does the opposite: He treats people as very complex\u2014different in religion, lifestyle, virtue, temperament, and success\u2014and keeps the law very simple in order to bring them to God:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>A legal expert put him to the test: \u201cTeacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?\u201d He replied to him, \u201c\u2018You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.\u2019 This is the first and foremost, and the second is like it: \u2018You are to love your neighbor as yourself.\u2019 On these two commandments hangs everything in the Law and in the Prophets\u201d (Matthew 22:35\u201340).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jesus takes the risk of allowing people the freedom to be themselves and to love God according to the shape of their own heart, soul, body, and mind!<\/strong> Religion developed for the sake of social control, but Jesus doesn\u2019t give us much grist for the social control mill. Jesus is asking a <strong>different set of questions, ones that take away our private agendas and remind us of the ways we have not yet begun to lov<\/strong>e. For Jesus, it is all about union\u2014union with God, others, and&nbsp;<em>what is,&nbsp;<\/em>however it presents itself. We cannot let labels trip us up. We all belong, but how cleverly our moral pretenses prevent us from struggling with what is right in front of us! <strong>How ingeniously our ego protects itself from compassion and understanding. [1]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Author Jen Austin considers how God invites us to move beyond neat categories:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is part of the human tendency to put everything into a neat little category\u2026. However, categories also allow us to include and exclude people based on characteristics that are unfamiliar to us or that we don\u2019t understand. Black or white, gay or straight, we spend a lot of time and waste a lot of energy creating and adhering to labels in our culture, quite often at the expense of basic human dignity and common sense\u2026. God is bigger than all our little boxes. God\u2019s love transcends the lines we draw on earth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>=============<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Individual Reflection<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Where in your life is your dualistic mind currently rushing toward a verdict \u2014 and what might it mean to simply leave that field open?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Group Discussion \u2014 choose one:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol>\n<li>What is one category or label you&#8217;ve used recently \u2014 about yourself or someone else \u2014 that may have protected you from having to actually love?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Rohr describes contemplation as &#8220;twenty minutes of dying.&#8221; What in you resists that kind of not-knowing, and what might it be protecting?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Where have you experienced the simplicity of &#8220;love God, love neighbor&#8221; getting complicated by something that felt like faithfulness but may have been control?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Moving Beyond Our Binary Minds Sunday, May 31, 2026 Father Richard Rohr highlights the importance of developing an open, \u201cbeginner\u2019s mind\u201d:&nbsp; The dualistic mind is the one we\u2019re all educated into. It\u2019s the one that gets us through the day, helping us make important distinctions and necessary judgments, pointing us to the left or right. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27074"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27074"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27084,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27074\/revisions\/27084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}