Phronema

For many in the Protestant tradition there is a great fear of anything to do with New Age, Eastern religions, meditation, mysticism etc. All this is seen somehow as demonic. In the silence and stillness of meditation, they say, the devil can get at you. One person rang several Episcopalian churches and asked whether they had anyone who could give spiritual direction. The response was, ‘What do you want anything like that for? Just follow the Bible.’ Someone else summed up this whole question of other religions and cults versus Christianity by saying that Christianity is focused on Christ whereas the others are directed on self. In other words Christianity is about love of God and others and not self.

All this is much too simplistic. It reminds me of the arguments I used to have with Pierre Oriol, a remarkable self-taught philosopher and market gardner. ‘L’amour n’existe pas,’ he would insist. In other words all love was fundamentally selfish and, however obscurely, involved self-seeking. I, in my idealistic, youthful ignorance and determined to defend the ideas for which I was making such sacrifices, argued against him. There was such a thing as altruistic love with no hint of self in it. One only had to look at the example of Christ and the lives of the saints. But Pierre would have none of it. Ultimately all love is selfish, even when it seems to be self-sacrificial. What is done is done for self-satisfaction, for self-aggrandisement, to be a hero, or to gain merit, or grace, or salvation. I couldn’t argue against him then. There was no way one could know the inner dispositions of people and there was no guarantee that what they said – ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do now…’ etc. – bore any relationship to the truth. We were both locked into a definition of self as a unique and independent entity. And although Christianity has always preached an agapaic love, love for the other, whether God, enemy, or friend, for his own sake, it has also always had difficulty with this because it goes against the grain. Altruism does not come easily. Paul was not a bit shy about enumerating his many acts of self-sacrifice in exhorting people to be like him and ultimately like Christ who emptied himself. Was this a bit of self-glorification on Paul’s part? It could easily seem so. We tend to be suspicious of people who parade their virtues and self-sacrifices in public. As for Christ, how could one even begin to imagine the consciousness of the God-man? The total reversal of values of the Sermon on the Mount is a beautiful ideal, inspiring even, but not for the average person. So, to say that Christianity is better because it involves unselfish love of God is not as simple and straightforward as it might seem.

On the other hand to describe meditation as preoccupation with self and, worse, Buddhism as a sort of religious auto-eroticism, is a complete distortion of facts. As with Christianity Buddhism is about love. However the approach is different. Buddhism asks the questions, ‘Who is it that loves?’ and, ‘Who is loved?’ Christianity sees no need for these questions. The commandment is for the individual to love God and neighbour. But Buddhism asks, ‘Who is this ‘I’?’ and, ‘Who is this neighbour?’ The question of God, since he is not an object of experience, is left on one side. The surprising, and shocking, answer of Buddhism is that there is no ‘I’, and consequently, therefore, neighbour is not just an ‘other’. The private world of the self is a mental construction, an exclusive, non-public world with a distorted and myopic view of reality. Through meditation we can learn to penetrate the barriers which isolate us in our private subjective worlds. We come to see that the barriers are mental constructs and every bit as insubstantial as the self. We also begin to see that each of us is part of the Whole and, this is the strange and incomprehensible bit, at the same time we retain our identity as individuals.

Buddhists and Christians have a similar goal but each expresses it differently. Christians want to be able to say with Paul, ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me.’ They want to be subsumed into the cosmic Christ, to become one with Him. What this means we do not know and those who have experienced it, like Paul, cannot describe it. This Christ, the Word of God, who already was in the beginning, is both the origin and the goal of the cosmic process. Christians take part in this process as individuals. The traditional Christian way of putting it is that we enter life maimed by Original Sin, which creates an existential gulf between the individual and God, and handicapped by its affects we have, first of all, to be made whole by Sanctifying Grace and then, by denying our natural human tendencies, through asceticism, mortification and self-denial, eventually achieve union with Christ.

The Buddhist view has nothing to say about the transcendent. It is concerned only with the fact that life is impermanent and is full of suffering and that there is a way to end the suffering, not negatively by denying life, but by transcending it. About the moment of transcendence, Nirvana, and what lies beyond, or whether there is, or is not, a beyond, it can say little or nothing. On the way to transcendence two facts become apparent. One is that there is no permanent, individual substratum called self. The other is that all creatures share the same nature. Out of the second arises a compassion akin to the Christian ideal of agapaic love. At a rational level the two religions seem poles apart. At the practical level of lived experience each has much to learn from the other.

What is it that makes me me? Interestingly enough I came across a piece by Michael Barnes in the Month yesterday where he says that identity is not discovered by rational introspection but in relationship.

“Very quickly one moves beyond the futility of the ‘ego’ searching for its own ‘ego’; rather one finds that identity is not discovered through a process of rational reflection but in the fact of that reflection itself. What confers human identity is the experience of looking for it – in and through the relationship formed with another person.”

This is true. Relationship is the key. It is also the essence. Which is why my sitting gazing inward does not get me very far. The only point of solitude is reculer pour mieux sauter into the midst of people and relationships. An interesting paradox. One of the reasons why relationships are so difficult is because no single relationship encompasses the whole me, is exhaustive of all that I am. (One of the reasons why being in love is so exhilarating is because at the time it seems to do just that.) Each relationship draws out particular aspects, plays particular chords, makes demands – some satisfying, some creative, some irritating, but is not exhaustive. And so one longs to escape into solitude to find the elusive me, the me underlying all these relationships but who is never wholly fulfilled in any of them, only to discover that this me is not there to be found. There is only emptiness and the realisation that who I am is the multiplicity of relationships that make me me.

And yet… And yet… In the silence of solitude, in the emptiness, there are intimations that all this is a very shallow way of putting things.

Relationship is the key to understanding. It seems to me that the mind, or the self, cannot be just a program running on the hardware of the brain.

I keep coming back to the idea that it is not the case that the brain creates consciousness, but rather that the brain tunes in to consciousness. Consciousness is a state of being into which we evolve. It is a state of being in relationship and being aware of relationships. What is self-awareness? It is being able to stand aside from oneself and observe ones thoughts, feelings and emotions. Most of the time we are aware of ourselves – I am doing this – I feel sad – I really like this – but we are caught up in our feelings and not critical, objective, or detached. This is a minimal sort of self-awareness. At other times we make an effort to stand back from ourselves and try to look at ourselves as another might see us. We try not to be caught up in, carried along with our feelings. This is not always easy to do. When feelings are very strong or deep it can be almost impossible. Meditation helps, in fact, this is what much of meditation is about.

But who is this who stands back and looks? This looking is relationship. It is the awareness of the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘me’. ‘Me’ is the bundle of thoughts, feelings and emotions. Who is ‘I’? ‘I’ is an observer, a watcher. ‘I’ doesn’t think. ‘I’ is the mirror which reflects thought back to ‘me’ so that I can see myself, examine my thoughts. This is reflecting. But, again, what, or who, is this mirror? I think it is the boundary of my being. Underwater light is reflected back from the mirror surface; inside a prism light is reflected from the faces. A one year old child in front of a mirror sees her reflection but has no idea that she is looking at herself. A two year old child recognises her reflection. What has happened to bring about this change? Certainly she has become much more aware of the limits of her body, of her perception, of time. ‘The self comes into being the moment it has power to reflect itself.’ says Douglas Hofstadter*

To be aware of limits is to be aware of what is beyond those limits. The horizon is a horizon because we see the sky beyond. The field of our vision is limited but we are not aware of the limits , unless we stop to think about them, because we do not see them. To be self-aware is to be aware, physically, mentally, emotionally, of the extent of our being, it is to be aware of not-me, and therefore of me, and of the other as other. Self-awareness leads to transcendence, to the desire to transcend these limits through relationship. In a relationship my being extends into that of another and the other’s into me. It is reciprocal. Each broadens and deepens, or diminishes, the other. This is why relationships are so important. Once one becomes aware of the limits of one’s existence one is constantly trying to extend these limits, reaching out to, and through, others.

The danger is always solipsistic egoism; the belief that I am the only one that matters; that the little insecure ego must be protected at all costs. But there is no ego. It is a mental construct. There is only being in relationship. The self, this bundle of constantly changing thoughts, feelings and emotions, is not a single entity but a series of relationships.

*quoted by Bryan Appleyard in Understanding the Present, Picador 1992 p. 207

I am trying to sort out this question of self. The more I read the more it seems that there is no substantive self. The experiential self is elusive, constantly changing, impossible to pin down. There is a sense of identity, allied with memory, of an enduring self but the more one examines memories the more one realises that the only pervading factor is a sense of identity. The various selfs of memory differ from situation to situation. There is a continuity in the sense that the self I now am has, to a great extent, been shaped and moulded by my previous selves and the events they lived through – though I am not now who I was then, nor will I be tomorrow who I am now.

In this sense one can see the accuracy of the Buddhist idea of dependent arising (pratityasamutpada) – each existing state arising from and being dependent on the previous state. Not only is there no need for a substantial, enduring and unchanging self, a ground, or substrate, which pervades all changes; such a self would not make sense. As Varela points out (p. 70) How could such a self be the condition or ground of all my experiences and yet remain untouched by those experiences? If there is an enduring substantial self then there is determinism and all hope for the future vanishes. But if each moment gives rise to the next and each self to the next then there is hope. We can make our future. We can make ourselves.

Here is the importance of meditation because in it we can become aware of the stillness in the emptiness and of the moments of arising. In it too we become aware of the fundamental state of all being – relatedness.