A Teacher
Richard Rohr
Transformation through the death of the False Self into the True Self
The transmission
Richard Rohr was born in 1943 in Kansas and was ordained a priest in the Franciscan order (Order of Friars Minor) in 1970. A popular preacher and writer, he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1987, an institution dedicated to integrating contemplative practice with engagement in social justice, a pairing captured in its name.
Through hundreds of talks, conferences, and books he became one of the most widely read Christian spiritual teachers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rohr’s teaching draws on the Franciscan tradition, the broader Christian mystical heritage, and depth psychology, and is often associated with what he calls the perennial or contemplative tradition that runs beneath institutional religion.
His book Falling Upward (2011) articulated his influential account of the “two halves of life,” in which the ego-building tasks of the first half must give way, often through failure and loss, to a deeper spiritual maturity.
He continues to write and teach, and his work has carried contemplative vocabulary, especially the True Self and False Self, into wide popular use.
What they gave
True Self and False Self: Rohr popularized the distinction between the constructed, ego-defended False Self and the True Self, the deeper identity grounded in God and present from the beginning, framing the spiritual life as the uncovering of who one already is.
- Falling upward through loss: His “two halves of life” teaching holds that genuine transformation typically comes through a necessary dying, failure, suffering, or letting-go, rather than through further achievement, casting dissolution as the doorway to deeper life.
- Action and contemplation united: Through the Center for Action and Contemplation he insists that inner stillness and outer engagement are not opposites but a single integrated path, contemplation grounding and purifying action.
- Contemplation as nondual seeing: Rohr teaches a contemplative, “nondual” mode of awareness that perceives union beneath apparent separation, recovering the mystics’ direct knowing as available to ordinary seekers.
In their words
Prayer must lead us beyond mind, words, and ideas to a more spacious place where God has a chance to get in.
Secular freedom is having to do what you want to do. Religious freedom is wanting to do what you have to do.
The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying.
How you see is what you see.
This ability to stand back and calmly observe my inner dramas, without rushing to judgment, is foundational for spiritual seeing.
True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now.
Your True Self is that part of you that is going to live forever and sees truthfully.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan tradition, Thomas Merton, the depth psychology of Carl Jung, and the wider company of Christian mystics and the perennial contemplative tradition.
- Influenced: the Center for Action and Contemplation and its global audience, the contemplative-activist strand of modern Christianity, and the now-common popular language of the True Self and False Self.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Everything Belongs1999
- Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life2011
- The Universal Christ2019