Phronema

For some people existence is not blind, not meaningless. For some awareness is not that of an isolated individual standing at the brink of an abyss. I can remember as a young boy when I became aware of being. I was walking along the cliffs where I lived when I picked up a pebble. Something about it must have attracted me. Holding it in my hand I became aware of it as something which had being in itself. It was no longer just an object. It was other than me. It is impossible to express in words what I felt. Later I used to love to sit for hours on a ledge on a cliff listening to the sea surge, feeling the cool spray on my face. Sitting, half way between the sea and the sky, I did not feel alone. I was one with the seabirds, with the tiny creatures that lived on the rocks, with the foaming waves. I was aware of the world breathing. The moment someone else appeared on the scene everything changed and I would feel alone, an isolated individual. Later, when I read the following in Ursula King’s book on Teilhard de Chardin I knew exactly what he meant. 

For Teilhard de Chardin the presence of another person seems to interrupt the unity of the world, to pluralise it for the seeker of ultimate unity. ‘But ‘the other man’, my God – by which I do not mean ‘the poor, the halt, the lame and the sick’ but ‘the other’ quite simply as ‘other’, the one who seems to exist independently of me because his universe is closed to mine, and who seems to shatter the unity and the silence of the world for me – would I be sincere if I did not confess that my instinctive reaction is to rebuff him.’

What I am trying to get at is that many people become aware of transcendence, that existence is not determined by a network of transitory relationships set within a finite physical domain. Those hours sitting on the rocks above the sea confirmed two things in my mind. The first was that I was indeed an isolated individual living within my enclosing universe. Others had their universes, perhaps there was even a communal one, from which I was excluded.  The second was that I was surrounded by a thin, sometimes translucent, shell. At times the shell would dissolve and I would be at one with nature for a while. Later I became aware of a Presence pervading everything. I began to understand that everything is connected, unified by the pervading Presence of God. The only isolates are we individuals. We have become isolated because of the circumstances of our upbringing and because of the prevailing worldview we cannot help but share. 

In order to write some sort of guide for the perplexed one needs to have made the journey and achieved understanding. Knowledge is not a simple seeing, not just perception. It is far more complex than that. So often we see without seeing. Seeing involves registering that x is x, and putting it into context. But knowledge involves more than the simple awareness of what is there. It involves ‘how’ and above all ‘why’. It involves understanding the process – that there is a process in the first place and that the process is going somewhere.

There is also intuition. Long before understanding there is intuition – an unrealised, unarticulated awareness of, feeling for, the truth. Against all the evidence to the contrary the belief that conscious life does not end in death persists; in spite of the utter banality of so many lives, that life has meaning. You could say that we’re like tadpoles, busy navigating the weeds and the algae in the depths of the pond and oblivious that there is anything more – that there is an above-the-pond, a supra-pond world that tadpoles can never inhabit but frogs can – a world of depths and soaring heights and vast space where the sun warms and gives life. Or, like caterpillars gorging on the leaves of our daily preoccupations, blind to the terminating cocoon of the grave we are oblivious of the prospect of metamorphosis.  

We rarely stop to think and question. We have been conditioned to believe that because there are 100,000 answers there is no answer because they cannot all be right. Many do select the ‘right’ answer out of the 100,000 and put their faith and trust in it. And many are disappointed. They find that the answers were not really the answer after all. They discover inconsistencies and contradictions. They may shut their eyes to these for a while – for a long while sometimes. But the doubt remains and gnaws away at their sense of peace and security. Some stop asking questions at this stage. It is easier to get off the knife-edge of doubt and step down into the warm reassurances of the well-intentioned. Just believe and everything will be all right.

The problem is that there are no answers – at least no answers that can be put into words. There is an answer but because it cannot be put into words the most that can be done is to point the way. Each person has to find this answer for himself. And the strangest thing of all is that when we do finally realise the truth it turns out not to be something utterly strange, new and unheard of. When we find the answer we discover that in some curious way we have always known it. It has been part of us all along – or rather, we have been part of it. 

Today the effort to concentrate went better. There were still the trains of imagery and mental conversations, but about twenty minutes in to the meditation these seemed to die down and I found I could just concentrate on the breathing. The images continued but they were less distracting, running beside the awareness of the body and breathing. The strange thing is that they seemed to have nothing to do with me – talking heads I did not recognise. Some ancient memories when I was a young boy surfaced too. All these, however, were much less vivid than usual and easy to ignore. I am still faced with the problem of the barrier, as I call it. It is when there is nothing going on in the mind apart from simple awareness of breathing and of the body. This is the moment when I want to pierce through the darkness and the limitations of mere bodily existence – and nothing happens. Boredom quickly sets in and the mind becomes easy prey to distractions. I know there is a beyond because I have experienced it, but it is not accessible at will. All this raises the questions, ‘Who is the I?’ and ‘What is the beyond?’

Afternoon – meditated again for about 30 minutes. It was easier and took less time on this occasion to arrive at simple concentration. There were less hypnagogic phenomena but habituation leading to a sort of numbed drowsiness. Simply holding the attention there without any diminution of concentration or awareness is very difficult. Telling oneself that this limit of awareness is the threshold of the transcendent is not enough. The thought lasts for a few moments until it too merges into dull and unremarkable familiarity. Is there a barrier that can be penetrated? I don’t know whether those terms can apply. I am inclined to think that the Church’s attitude to Pelagianism, full-blown or semi, is right. The encounter with the Transcendent is a gift. All one can do is prepare for it by removing barriers and obstacles.

And yet – everyday reality is shot through with a divine luminance. When we look for it and try to grasp it it is not there. But in the quiet moments, moments when the hands are busy and the mind relaxed, it surprises us with a tranquil joy.

Mentioning Basho the other day sparked off some reflections in my mind. Basho is famous for his poetry – haiku – short 17 syllable poems which capture, as Seamus Heaney puts it,  ‘the still centre of the moment’. A rare art to be able to communicate in just a handful of words a moment, a scene and the emotion evoked. The small splash which breaks the silence of a pond, a crow on a branch, black on black in the deepening gloom, a temple bell in the still evening, shadows cast by the moon – fragments of time when something beyond time is caught and fixed forever in mind – the ‘still  point’.

I was reminded of one day when walking down to the town I heard someone hammering, the hard metallic ring of a chisel on stone. It is a very particular sound and it evoked memories, tactile memories of the heaviness of the hammer, the judder of the arm as it strikes, hot hands, the dust and distinctive smell of crushed stone. A whole series of moments in my past were suddenly recalled and linked together. A Proustian moment in which past and present co-existed. For that moment, the inevitability of the passage of time, the dying of the ‘now’ and its burial in the past ceased. And I wondered about the metaphysical significance  of memory and awareness. What does this linkage of things and events in awareness tell us about the nature of reality? And what about that subliminal sense of a transcendent presence?

T. S. Eliot wrestled with all this in ‘Burnt Norton’, and reading it again I become aware of how much in the poem describes the experience of meditation.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

There in the empty darkness, sometimes, the ceaseless cycle of thoughts, feelings and fantasies stills and one enters the still point. And the Presence…? Sometimes when I am out walking along the cliffs I feel afraid to go too near the edge. Not because I am afraid of heights. On the contrary. But because standing there on the edge looking down to the sea far below I feel drawn, a terrible attraction, to throw myself over, to feel the fall, the rush of air, the utter freedom of an irrevocable future. But timid fear keeps me back. And so it is with the Presence. 

To extend the roller-coaster analogy, I was thinking about death this morning in the shower and it struck me that life is like being on a train with no windows and an unknown destination. No one can remember getting on the train. Nor does anyone know where it is going, or why. All we know are the carriages we live in, so we occupy our time as best we can. Every now and then the train stops and someone is made to get off. This is a very unhappy time for that person and his friends. The friends feel abandoned and the person steps into the unknown. The friends will never see him, again, nor, as far as he knows, he them. Each person dreads the time when it will be his turn to get off. Life on the train may not be perfect, sometimes it is hellish, but it is all we know. So why are we made to get off? Why can we not stay on the train and enjoy life with our fiends forever? The analogy cannot be pushed too far, but it does help us to realise that life is not just our present experience. There is far more to life, depths, heights and broad expanses that we cannot even begin to imagine. Why insist on remaining within the narrow confines of the train when there is a beautiful world out there? How different everything would be if we all knew why we were on the train, if the train had windows and we could see the passing countryside and if we knew our destination.

But we don’t know our destination. We can no more imagine what that destination might be like than the child in the womb can imagine what it will be like to walk with his lover through beautiful countryside on a glorious summer day. Perhaps we should regard death as a metamorphosis, a second birth into a new stage of life, but we don’t. Among Christians there is a belief that death was not originally an inherent part of the human process and only became so as a result of the Fall.

 Consequently death has always been regarded as a shocking, often tragic, closure. There are a number of points that need to be cleared up. 

Is there any evidence that the ‘train’ is not all there is? There is no hard evidence, I suspect this is because it would be impossible to make such evidence available, just as it would be impossible to convey to a child in the womb information about life after birth. Even though there is some information available to the child in the form of external sounds it does not have the ability to evaluate these and distinguish them from internal sounds. Likewise with adults it is not at all uncommon for people to have glimpses of the transcendent. Statistical evidence suggests that perhaps more than 50% of people have such experiences. Those who have these experiences have no doubts that they are genuine. They have seen beyond the horizon of our physical limitations. However, these experiences are subjective and not available to objective scrutiny. Nevertheless, if mystical experience were seen as offering a real possibility of finding answers to the mysteries of our existence more people would be encouraged to pursue it. Unfortunately the Church has always been wary of mystical experience. Kolokowski* gives two main reasons for this.

THEOLOGICAL – In all monotheistic creeds the gap between God and his creatures has always been crucial.  The path to God is through humility, repentance, and recognition of sinfulness and impotence.  The distance can be bridged by love but never cancelled.  Therefore to speak, as Eckhart did, of being transformed totally in God without any distinction being left smacks of blasphemy and hubris. This is a good example of ideology imposing its criteria on experience and denying the validity of those experiences which do not fit.

INSTITUTIONAL – The charismatic concept of the Church implies that it is the irreplaceable mediator between God and his people.  This is expressed particularly through the sacraments.  Yet the mystic does not need human intermediaries.  His communication with God is direct and, therefore, he may imagine that he is free to dispense with ministers. The mystic sees and feels God in any stone, or any drop of water, and thus does not need a special piece of consecrated bread to gain access to Him.  Ecclesiastical suspicion of mysticism is quite understandable; anybody could claim to be anointed by God.  This is why the Church defines criteria by which the genuine can be distinguished from the false.

 The need of the institution to protect its power inhibits the exploration of our own nature and our connections with the Transcendent, hence the need to be protected from the misguided, or malicious, ‘anybodys’ and their false claims. Because mysticism is such an unknown area it is open to exploitation by charlatans. If there were a system within the Church similar to that which exists in Zen whereby the master validates the pupils experience we might make genuine progress.

 There has been too much emphasis on transcendence and not enough on immanence. We each need to discover for ourselves the  Spirit Paul talks about in Romans Chapter 8

Why death? If we are destined for an existence which transcends the physical limitations of the body then, why death? Why not a metamorphosis? I suspect there is much more to death than we are prepared to admit. We have a deeply ingrained longing for eternal life and for eternal youth. You only have to read the multitude of myths ranging from the Garden of Eden story to Tir na nOg. These advance the idea that an earthly paradise is possible. A paradise in terms of an idyllic life in beautiful surroundings is all that we can grasp. We cannot imagine any other kind of afterlife, except, perhaps, sitting on a cloud in a long white nightgown playing a harp.  We are living bodies. Our feelings and emotions determine what is meaningful and significant, not our abstract thoughts. Ideas and concepts may be beautiful. They may construct sublime mathematical or philosophical structures but nothing as meaningful as the feeling of loving and being loved. Death spells the end to all this. The decomposition of the body means the destruction of the amygdala and those parts of the brain where emotions and feelings are generated, it means the destruction of the senses which give pleasure. If a mind survives it will be a mind without sensations and feelings, truly an insubstantial wraith. This is why so much emphasis is placed on the resurr
ection of the body. Human life is bodily life.

The idea of the resurrection of the body has all sorts of problems associated with it. Not least of these is that of location. Where will all these billions and billions of bodies be? Will they require social and physical structures to cater to their physical needs? If the answer to these questions, as Paul seems to imply in I Corinthians, is that they will be spiritual bodies (a contradiction in terms?) and as such will have no physical needs, then what is the purpose of bodies. I suspect that the resurrection of the body is a metaphor for an utterly new kind of existence.

We cling to the idea of a bodily resurrection because we cannot imagine a form of existence that does not require a body. How shall we see, hear, feel and interact with others if we do not have a body? Therefore, we shall have to have a new body; different, yes; spiritual, yes, but a body nonetheless. From within the train we cannot resolve these paradoxes. All we have is faith – blind and dark, but that is all we have. That, and the glimpses of transcendence.

*[L. Kolokowski; Religion, Fontana, London 1993 p. 103-4]

It is easy to understand how material things and material well-being can become so important, and easy to forget that they are nevertheless ephemeral. We know this – though it is not usually admitted – especially when we encounter the limit situations and reality checks which insist on intruding into even the most protected of lives. What we do not know is how to reach beyond the ephemeral and touch Reality.

Why are silence, solitude and stillness so important if one wants to pierce through the ephemeral? It struck me the other day that life is like a roller-coaster. There is a long steep climb to begin, then a rushing series of highs and lows, soaring loops and plunging dives, swerving changes of direction until one enters the gradual descent to the end. Such is the speed of the ride and the pressure of events that there is no time to become aware of the wider fairground. But it is possible to stop the roller-coaster, or at least freeze-frame the action and become aware of the wider scene – the framework on which it is built, the adjoining stalls and rides, the car park, the roads and even the peaceful countryside beyond. We may even discover that, while we cannot get off the roller coaster until it finishes its journey, its speed and direction are not entirely beyond our control. 

Maybe efforts to pierce through the limitations of experience are futile. That is what I feel in the mornings after meditation, after half an hour, or forty minutes, spent battling with thoughts and distractions and trying simply to be aware. My mind is full of what I saw on TV the night before, of what I have been reading, of what is going on in the family, of wishful daydreams, of regrets and nostalgia. And it seems that this is all I am, ephemeral tosh, and that, perhaps, all my efforts – which seem so puny and ineffectual – are a waste of time.

It is all very well thinking about reality, about life/death, about the distinction between nihility and nothingness, but the reality of experience is nothing so grand. It is banal. How could it be otherwise? And so I am caught between the reality of everyday experience and memories of moments of transcendence when the fabric of the world became translucent.

Thinking further about two-dimensional beings – if the surface of their world was textured they could not know it. In passing over ridges and troughs they would not be aware of the changing spatial relationship of one part of their bodies to another, one part higher, another lower. A crack in the surface would be something analogous to a black hole in our cosmos – an event horizon beyond which two-dimensional reality could no longer exist as such. So too with us. In our dull and everyday ordinariness we search for glimpses of the transcendent, for the footprints of the ox.

Thinking too about Nishitani’s emphasis on the cold indifference of nature. Indifferent – yes, cold, I am not so sure. I feel neither cold nor indifferent towards nature. It is part of my being. I respond to it, resonate to its beauty. Is it the case that it is indifferent to me and cares not whether I live or die? This is an anthropomorphic way of putting things. Nature is neither different or indifferent. It is not personal and yet it is of me and I am of it. This was Richard Jefferies problem. In his intense experience of union with nature he desperately wanted it to be personal and was tortured by its seeming indifference. It is so difficult to see otherwise than from the perspective of self.

Another idea that emerges from Nishitani is that life and death are two sides of the same coin. Somehow, warm, living, feeling, human life emerged from cold, dead matter – matter which works according to laws which are indifferent to our human feelings. The laws give life and take it away, impersonally, indifferently. Scientists and technologists spend their efforts in learning to manipulate these laws to the advantage of life and human feelings.

Our human bodies are life/death. We are a life/death process. We can only live because our cells are constantly dying. We are as insubstantial as the vortex of a whirlpool, or the eye of a storm. We are not our bodies. Life is something that emerges when matter becomes sufficiently complex. Matter has emerged from nothing. We have emerged from matter. How? Why? We do not know.

Of course it may simply be a matter of perspective. Two-dimensional beings living on the surface of a sphere exist in three dimensions. They are not, and cannot be, aware of the third dimension. Only by ceasing to be two-dimensional and becoming three-dimensional can they be aware of the fullness of their reality. We exist in, at least, four dimensions, the three of space and the fourth of time. We cannot be aware of a fifth dimension even though it may be as much part of the fabric of our reality as the third dimension was for the 2D’s. Only by ceasing to be what we are now (dying?) and becoming what we are not yet (resurrection?) can we become aware of the fullness of reality.

Reading Nishitani. I cannot remember ever before reading someone who aroused in me a sense of awe at his insight and at the startling freshness of his way of seeing things. Perhaps I should not be surprised having been brought up on the Greco-Roman tradition and this is the first time I have tried to come to grips with an Eastern philosophy. What I have read on Hinduism and Buddhism did not prepare me although they make it easier for me to understand Nishitani’s background and where he is coming from.

He spends some time discussing the concept of creation out of nothing; an idea long familiar to us Westerners but always seen, at least by me, as referring, and applying, more to God’s power than to what he created. Nishitani emphasises that if the cosmos is created out of nothing then nothing is at the heart of being. It is just a simple shift of the gaze away from God and onto what he created, but the implications are enormous. Suddenly, reality, formerly so solid and substantial, is seen to be hollow, froth, a chimera without substance drifting in a void.

I have never before considered the meaning of nothing. When I began to realise that the volume of solid matter in us was minuscule compared to the volume of empty space, I thought that at least the matter was real and it was solid. Then when I discovered that protons and neutrons were composed of quarks and that quarks were bundles of energy rather than solid stuff, and that these bundles were constantly popping into and out of existence, that was only cause for wonder. At least the quantum vacuum, from which everything seems to emerge, was another dimension seething with energy, and that, at least, was something. The cosmos had a foundation, something substantial, even if it was in another dimension. However, the idea that at the root of our being there is nothing, that sends shivers down the spine. Pascal looked up into the vastness of the starry sky and said, ‘Ces espaces infinie m’effrai.’ I feel a similar emotion, a terrifying sense of vertigo. I feel that I am in a dream, that this is all that reality is, a dream, and that there is nothing to wake up to. Time, like a relentless gale, blows the ragged shreds of our existence away from us. We try to hang on to them but in seizing one we let go of another. The wind is too fast and too strong and our life is blown away in tatters.

Yesterday while driving I wrestled with the concept of sunyata, nothingness, or emptiness. It suddenly struck me that the mind is not very good at dealing with this. In fact it cannot grasp ‘nothingness’. We have two blind spots in our vision, one in each eye, yet we are not aware of them. The mind fills in what is missing. If we look through one eye we are not aware that there is a hole in our vision. Similarly we are not aware of the periphery of our vision. This is why the representation of looking through binoculars in the cinema, seeing through a template like a figure-of-eight on its side, strikes us as false. We just do not see like this. To see the periphery of vision we would have to see it as the dividing line between vision and no vision. But we cannot see ‘nothing’. ‘Nothing’, by definition, does not exist.

Normally what we understand as ‘nothing’ is relative nothingness. We say the room is empty, nothing in it. We do not mean this literally because, literally, it is not a true statement – there is air, magnetic fields etc. What we mean is ‘nothing of significance’. The boy says he is doing nothing. What he means is nothing of significance, or nothing he should not be doing, or he might be telling a lie. By ‘nothing’ we usually mean ‘empty’, a box, a room, space, or we mean non activity. Emptiness is not nothingness. It implies a container, walls, a boundary of some sort. By ‘nothing’ what we mean is ‘relative nothingness’, or nihility as Nishitani calls it.

‘Absolute nothingness’ cannot be grasped. There is nothing to be grasped. Absolute nothingness does not exist as we understand existence. Most people understand the cosmos to be the result of the explosion of the Big Bang expanding outwards into space. Before the big Bang there was no space. There was nothing. The Big Bang initiated both something – matter and energy, and nothing – the relative nothingness of the empty space between the stars. Whether the Big Bang emerged from absolute nothingness we have no way of knowing.

When we go to sleep there is a hazy awareness of time passing. When we wake in the morning we know – experientially, not just by deduction – that time has passed. There were times during the night when we were dimly aware. There were dreams. When I had my heart op, however, I experienced ‘nothing’ while I was unconscious. One moment I was lying in the operating theatre, the next I was waking up in the recovery room. There was no interval, no awareness of time having passed, although by deduction I knew that it had. The two moments were instantaneous, one merging seamlessly into the other. Try as I would I could not recall either the extinction of consciousness nor the moment of waking. One moment I was awake in the operating theatre, the next I was awake in the recovery room. This hiatus bothered me. It annoyed me that I did not have the faintest glimmering, not just of the interval, but that there had even been an interval. Only by deduction did I know that time had passed. ‘Nothing’ cannot be experienced but it can be deduced.

Neither the relative ‘nothingness’ of empty space, or non-activity, nor absolute nothingness as I have described it are what Buddhism means by ‘nothingness’, or ’emptiness’ (sunyata). More on this later.