PNTV: Falling Upward by Richard Rohr (#420)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less Time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Falling Upward by Richard Rohr. Subtitle A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Richard Rohr is one of my new favorite teachers. He's a Franciscan monk, a Catholic Franciscan monk for the last five decades. Now, as we've discussed in different contexts, I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school for 12 years in a Franciscan tradition. But this is the first time I found a Franciscan monk who integrates everything from Joseph Campbell and his hero's journey to Ken Wilber and his integral theory via his lens on spirituality. And needless to say, I just fell in love with him. He's amazing. As I was reading the book, I keep a note card, right, with ideas I want to make sure I put into the philosopher's notes so we can discuss here. But I wrote down, if Joseph Campbell was a Franciscan monk, if Joseph Campbell, the great hero mythologist, was a Franciscan monk, he would have shown up as Richard Rohr. He's fantastic. Highly recommend the book. I actually got this. Alexandra got it for me after I read the Second Mountain by David Brooks, which we'll cover in our next pntv. As it turns out, David leans heavily on Richard Rohr's wisdom, and the two books are kind of recommended together on Amazon. Thank you, Alexander, for getting me both books. So we have five big ideas. We're going to start at the top. I've been talking about light bulbs quite a bit lately. We have Desmond Tutu and Richard Rohr in a conversation, two Catholic luminaries. And Desmond tells Richard, you know what? Our jobs, we're like light bulbs. Our job is to simply stay screwed in and let the divine light come through us. Isn't that a beautiful metaphor? And I just love drawing light bulbs. I often do in my own little way.

Here, right? Boom.

We're a light bulb. That's our job, to stay plugged into God. It begs the question, how do we do that? And I would offer, we do that by looking at another symbol. I like to draw a lot. I imagine that light bulb here at the top. This is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But the thing we need to understand is if we want to plug in to the divine, you got to go to the very mundane. You got to go deep into your fundamentals. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, celebrating, prospering. The Core 7 Fundamentals of Our optimized coach program may not sound spiritual. In nature. But there's no deeper, more fundamental spiritual practice than what you eat, how you move your body, how you sleep. Are you taking care of the temple of God that is your body, or are you spray painting it with toxic sugar laden ultra processed food, Sitting all day long, not getting proper amounts of sleep as you blow up your consciousness with blue light at the end of the day? Those are spiritual practices. And the ultimate game is to stay screwed into the divine. We need to quit unscrewing ourselves by doing the obvious silly things that get in the way. Again, the most fundamental practices are in fact from the proper light, the most fundamental spiritual practices. We spent three months in our mastery series for our optimized coaches going through this a session on each one. And we emphasize the fact that, look, if you want to show up virtue wise, peak performance wise and or spirituality wise, it all starts with a strong screwed in light bulb foundation. Now, two tasks of life. We're arriving closer to the theme of this book, which is a necessary falling down in order to come up, which we'll talk about in the next idea here. But the two tasks of life is how Richard Rohr frames it. And then you have David Brooks, who basically extends Richard Rohr's idea and says the two mountains of life. So the two tasks of life roughly are, according to Father Rohr, building yourself up, building a strong and healthy ego container. And he talks about the paradox of the ego. It's very important that we have a strong ego. Then we need to empty that and fill it up with God, but in that order. The two tasks of life, one, create a strong identity, a strong ego container. Two, fill it up with God, with what you're meant to do. Use that power, not for yourself. Even Abraham Maslow, his hierarchy of needs, of which this is a kind of my own representation of self actualizing wasn't the highest stage of development. For Maslow. Self transcendence was when you move beyond the sense of self into something beyond yourself. Which is why in our little optimize coach graduation lanyard, which I keep in my pocket as a reminder of my commitment, optimize equals optimist equals best equals you, daimon, you're the best version of you. Congratulations. You have a strong ego, a strong sense of self. Now move beyond that, become a hero. Give yourself in full service to the world, which again, this book is really unpacking Joseph Campbell's heroes, myth, wisdom, which we'll get to in a moment. But the two tasks, the first mountain, the second mountain, and again to briefly talk about the paradox of the ego. Check out the note for more. I talk about this important theme. A lot of people think that they need to get rid of the ego. Yes. And you can't get rid of something you never actually had. You can't let go of something you never had. A firm grasp on is how Nathaniel Brandon puts it. You need to have a very strong sense of identity. And Rohr calls this the paradox of the ego. Again, check out the note where I talk about Joseph Campbell's parallel wisdom, Ken Wilber's parallel wisdom, and then Nathaniel Brandon's as well. But he says far too many people have lived very warped and defective lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet. You have to learn to control your ID impulses, your superego, shoulds and conditioning, and really get a strong sense of egoic self. And then, and only then, can you move past that into something beyond it, something bigger than yourself. Filling yourself up with God. But if you aren't harnessed, if you haven't screwed yourself in as the light bulb, you haven't tamed yourself. As Eric Butterworth says, the true meaning of the meek shall inherit. The earth is not meek, unless you're thinking of those who have submitted themselves to God in a disciplined practice. Tamed, harnessed. You have to harness yourself and your wild impulses and direct it in a meaningful way in order to focus God's energy. Otherwise, you're just gonna fly around like a balloon that's been blown up, and then you let the air out of it and just kind of flies around the room. Just came up with that. It kind of worked. So falling Upward, the name of the book, the whole theme here is that sometimes life is a little weird. And as I drew here, sometimes you need to go. This is actually interesting. I kind of did this here. I didn't even mean to. You need to go down in order to go up. All great heroes, myths follow that arc. We'll talk about that in a bit. And I'm going to share another passage here in our Philosopher's Notes tv, the last one on the story of Adam Brown called Fearless by Eric Blum. I read to you a passage from Richard Rohr that was from this book.

I'm going to reread it because it's that good.

So a lot of us think that life should just be all roses, right? Easy day, all day, every day. Well, you're in trouble if that's your attitude. You're going after a hedonic sense of joy where life should Be easy. The eudaimonic sense of purpose recognizes the fact that it is going to be challenging. In fact, that's how we grow, by being willing to go down and then come up. That's when we learn the hard lessons. This is how Richard puts it. And this is so important to get, because when we get this, we can quit shaming ourselves and quit having what he calls unnecessary suffering. Referencing Carl Jung. Unnecessary suffering comes when you don't embrace necessary suffering. Life is supposed to be challenging. You are going to suffer at times it's necessary for your growth. You thinking you shouldn't suffer is in fact the greatest source of your unnecessary suffering. So let's stop doing that. He says this normally a job, fortune or reputation has to be lost. A death has to be suffered. A house has to be flooded or disease has to be endured. The pattern, in fact, is so clear that one has to work rather hard or be intellectually lazy to miss the continual lesson. Even me with building Optimize. Now we're excited about where we're at. We're heading to great places. And guess What? I raised $2 million, built the business to a million plus of revenue, then blew it up. It wasn't going to work. And that happened the way I wanted it to. Had to start over, down to up. The exact same thing happened in all of my prior successes I'm proud of. I failed until I figured it out and then I turned it around and came back. My hunch is the same holds for you. Which leads us to another thought from Father Rohr. It is not that suffering or failure might happen or that it will only happen if you are bad, which is what religious people often think, says the religious guy. Or that it will happen to the unfortunate or to a few in other places where that you can somehow, by cleverness or righteousness, avoid it. No, it will happen. And to you, losing, failing, falling sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences, all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey. Boom. Necessary suffering. There we go. Heroes again. I wrote down if Joseph Campbell was a Franciscan monk, we'd have Richard Brewer integrating some other great ideas and channeling his own idiosyncratic take on spiritual practical wisdom. He talks about Joseph Campbell's hero with a Thousand Faces. We'll do that one very soon. Great book. Haven't covered yet. Right. And he talks about the pattern that exists according to Joseph Campbell, across all myths. So the hero has a thousand faces because the hero shows up in all cultures. But Campbell says there's A monomyth. The same themes run through all these different stories. He boils it down into five.

Richard Rohr.

We can boil it down into three. And again, I happen to be in a documentary on Joseph Campbell. One of our philosopher's notes, actually the philosopher's notes we wrote on Joseph Campbell's books inspired a guy to create a documentary on Joseph Campbell called Finding Joe. And I was the first person he interviewed for his documentary. Flew out to Bali, where I was living at the time. We connected. I introduced him to some of my friends, like Robin Sharma and Gay Hendricks, who were in the show or in.

The movie as well.

But check that out. Finding Joe, the movie. Search for it on Google. He put it up heroically for free when Covid came into town. Now, again, in the Mastery series, we spend a month operationalizing the wisdom from that hero's journey perspective. We call it hero ology, we unpack IT, operationalize it, etc. But there are basically theoretically three different aspects of a hero's journey. I like to think in threes. Right? There's the call. Your daimon is whispering to you. You're not satisfied. In your current life, in your current.

World, you're called the more.

Now, you either answer that call or you don't. The wisest among us answer it. Those that don't, suffer, you got to answer the call. You got to be willing to go on that heroic quest. You on the quest. You face dragons, you have mentors. You experience the ups, the downs. You realize your true mission and calling in life. And then what do you do? You return. And you return, transform. And your ultimate gift is who you have become and what you can give to the world. That's the hero's journey. That's what he unpacks. In this book, in a beautiful, brilliant way, you are called to be a hero. That's why we end everything with hero. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals you, daimon. Good soul equals hero. A hero is a protector. A hero has strength for two. If there's anything that I want to do with my life, it's rebrand the idea of hero. You are called to be a hero for your family, for your community, for our world. Show up, play your role well, fall upward, alchemize all of your challenges into what he calls serene discipleship. Where you suddenly, when you're living in your second part of your life and you've filled yourself up, you've done the hard work to master yourself, to harness God's power, then you say God, you tell Me, what's the plan for today? And he says, it's almost as if your. Your soul, or God becomes the driver. We would say you're daimon in our language. You become the passenger. You get to offer some suggestions, but really you're just doing what they tell you to do. The co pilot. The pilot's your daimon. I jokingly say that I. My boss, the CEO of the company, that is me. The Public Benefit Corporation, that is me. My Daimon CEO. I'm his assistant. I just do what he tells me to do. And I try to do it as well as I can. I try to hustle and follow his directions well, however imperfectly, I do it. But at that point, Father Rohr says, and by the way, the chairman of our business is God, the universal source. The Daimonis is the proxy for that wisdom. My board of directors has my heroes on it. Joseph Campbell would be on there. Richard Rohr would be on that. Right? Ralph Otto, Emerson, Epictetus. Some of my favorite luminaries who I aspire to go to for my insights and channel some of their wisdom and energy, etc. But at the end of the day, when you truly live from the second mountain, the second task of life. You filled yourself up. Your container is strong. You've emptied yourself. Let God come in. It's choiceless. Choiceless choice. You're just following the inner inspiration of your daimon. We talked about this in a peak performance sense with it takes what it takes. He's talking about greatness. Super bowl champion greatness, right? Trevor Moen, he says there's an illusion of choice. There's actually no choice. If you are committed to being truly your best self, plugging into the divine, letting it shine. There is no choice. It becomes very easy. You know what time you need to go to sleep, what time you need to get up, when you need to use your electronics, how you turn it off. The question is, are you going to pay attention to your daimon, or are you going to keep on letting the demon run the show? But again, if you've made the ultimate choice to plug in and flip the switch and let God come through, there aren't that many other choices left. Options, sure, but no real choices. Choiceless choice. The serene disciple. You as the co pilot or driver. Just enjoy the ride. Just do your best. Let your daimon run the show. Become a hero. 1, 2, 3. Are you receiving a call? Remember the good life is one hero's journey after another. It's not like you're one and done. You're constantly iterating up. And remember that involves ups and downs and ups and downs. That's never going to go away. You got two tasks. Where are you in your journey? And I should say the first task is also driven by external success. Congratulations.

You've got a beautiful resume.

You've got all the letters after your name. You've got all the money in the bank or the cars or the kids or whatever. Check the box or not. Because a lot of people don't even do that as well as they could. But ultimately there's something way more than that that we want to move toward. That's our second mountain, our second task. And that is being a radiant light, giving the world all you've got. Today, remembering the path up often goes down. Then it goes up. Haha. Let's do this. Have another awesome day. See you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Bry.

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