[Buddha-l] Rohr and Finley on stages of spiritual development

Erik Hoogcarspel jehms at xs4all.nl
Sun Jan 24 03:50:44 MST 2010


Op 24-1-2010 7:36, Richard Hayes schreef:
> This weekend Rohr has been talking about levels of spiritual development (a theme that many teachers of many traditions have written about). His claim is that the Roman Catholic church and American evangelicals (the so-called religious right) been stuck at stages 1 and 2 of his 9-stage schema. (A fairly good summary of his schema is in the following Christian blog:
>
> http://tracesword.blogspot.com/2009/05/levels-of-spiritual-development-richard.html
>
>    
Here's a quote form the blog:
/Level 7,8 and 9 folks understand faith as "living with mystery in 
darkness, joyfully". These people have a high tolerance for ambiguity. 
Ultimately, movement from one level to another requires failure at each, 
and a passage through darkness to the next level.
/I'm not very thrilled by this kind of rankings, because they are all 
strongly biassed. Human all too human. And they are all very familiar. 
Having seen one you know them all.
I've no desire to live in mystery or darkness, how can one be 
enlightened in that case. Oh I see, that's the mystery :-\ .
Hegel called this the night where all cows are grey. The same mystics 
however would not hesitate to put the Pope on a high level (he's a 
theologian) and Einstein (how could he be absent?), allthough both are 
not very keen on vagueness. I would say to me most republicans live in 
darkness and their minds are a mystery to me. So I would give them a 
level 6, no questions asked.


erik


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