I think I’ve found out what happened to The Third Eye book, which appeared on the Internet for a while and then disappeared again. I’ve been reading Fr. Rohr’s 2009 book The Naked Now, and the “third eye” terminology appears frequently in it. So perhaps the material that was to have been a book titled The Third Eye morphed into The Naked Now.In the three-eyes metaphor, the first eye is our senses, the second eye is our capacity for rational thought, and the third eye is our ability to “taste” the wholeness of something. This occurs when “our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant” (p. 28).
“As you will see, contemplation, my word for this larger seeing, keeps the whole field open; it remains vulnerable before the moment, the event, or the person — before it divides and tries to conquer or control it. Contemplatives refuse to create false dichotomies, dividing the field for the sake of the quick comfort of their ego. They do not rush to polarity thinking to take away their mental anxiety” (p. 34).
He uses the word “nondual“ a lot in the book, but he seems to mean by it something like “not being seduced into hasty propositional conclusions.“ “Nondual thinking,” “contemplation,” and “non-polarity thinking” are all synonyms in Fr. Rohr’s vocabulary. He devotes chapter 17 to defining what nondual thinking is not. So, for example, he says it’s not “relativism,” “esoteric Eastern philosophy,” or “avoidance of appropriate judgments” (pp. 129-130).
Third-eye seeing can only occur in the present moment, and this immersion in the present, without rushing into conceptual thinking, is the “naked now” of the title. Fr. Rohr may have started thinking about the present moment after reading The Power of Now, but he seems to be coming from a different place. He points to Luke 17:23, where Jesus says: “There will be those who will say to you, ‘Look, there he is,’ or ‘Look, here he is.’ Do not go off, do not run in pursuit.” This, he says, is Jesus’ way of stopping people from limiting God’s action and presence to a particular location. Then Fr. Rohr comments: “In relativizing both time and space, Jesus is doing something similar to what Eckhart Tolle is doing for many today with his ‘power of now’” (p. 76).
Eight appendices give practical exercises for cultivating this third-eye, “naked now” seeing.
Richard Rohr. The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See. New York: Crossroad, 2009. Paperback. 192 pages. ISBN 9780824525439. $19.95.
