Phronema

What is love and why is so essential for growth, development and happiness? This is tied in with love’s polar opposite – hatred, rejection and abuse, which are so destructive and damaging. There is something here that cannot be explained in physical or biological terms. What? It can be discussed at an empirical level as sociologists like Bowlby and Goffman, and psychologists like Fromm and Maslow have done, but this only provides a description, not an explanation. I suspect the importance of love has to do with the fact that it transcends the limits of individuality. The process of individuation helps us to become relatively free and autonomous individuals – seen by some as the goal of human development. But there is more. There is a yawning emptiness within the individual. Many try to fill it by seeking the physical intimacy of sex, but sex without love is empty, or by seeking power, or wealth. These too are empty. Like sex without love they touch only the exterior of the individual. Love is a reciprocal relationship involving openness and commitment. There is a tension between the desire to be an individual, in control and able to manipulate people, situations and events to one’s personal advantage (but always conscious of something lacking, of being empty), and being open and loving, surrendering control for negotiation, power for fulfilment. We are social beings but, unlike ants and termites whose society is determined by purely biological and environmental factors, we are not determined wholly by our biology. Our sociality depends on openness and voluntary co-operation – on love.

Another characteristic is openness to religious experience and the transcendent. The work of Alister Hardy and Will Hay are relevant here, as is the study of comparative mysticism. Our sociality extends beyond human interaction to include – what? Nature? The cosmos? God? Each of these has been put forward as the key to what it means to be human.

Yesterday I was very forcibly struck by the urgency of the crisis stressed by Jesus in the Synoptics. His whole emphasis was on the importance of making the decision now. Later is too late. After his resurrection the focus of this urgency changes and eventually the urgency itself disappears. Why was the situation so critical and urgent for Jesus? What exactly did he mean by the Kingdom of Heaven, or Reign of God? What did he believe was the effect on the individual as a result of a decisive commitment for the Kingdom of Heaven? Gradually in the post-Resurrection Church the focus changed to an expectancy of, and preparation for, the Parousia. This would be an event, initiated by God, which would transform the world. It was necessary for the individual to have made a decision for God before this time if he was to enter definitively into the Kingdom.

With Jesus the urgency is now. The culminating moment would be later but its outcome depended on the attitude now. In the parable of the Sheep and the Goats the decision as to who was saved and who was not had been made long before by the individuals themselves. The judgement was simply a confirmation of that decision. Jesus was the first existentialist. He called for a fundamental change in attitude and lifestyle. Each moment is an existential encounter with God who is present in every person and every event. This presence may not be recognised. In the parable it was not, but that did not matter. What mattered was the attitude towards others and towards events.

First – what attitude? This is never spelled out in a systematic way. It has to be gleaned from sayings, from parables and from Jesus’ own attitude to people and events.

Poverty in spirit – awareness of dependency, of lacking what it takes to be self-sufficient.
Gentleness – delicacy of touch when it comes to the feelings of others.
Mourning – more than just sorrow. It is the result of being open and vulnerable to others and the feelings of others. It is not having the hard shell of indifference. It is empathy.
Hunger and thirst for justice – the result of being situated not just within the narrow confines of one’s own situation but within the wider community. We are all members one of another and when one is wounded all bleed.
Mercifulness – we all make mistakes and need to be allowed to recover from them.
Pure in heart – being transparent, open and honest with no guile or deceit.
Peacemakers – healers.
Courage – to stand against persecution and injustice.
Love – even of enemies, i.e. the well-being of others is of primary importance.
Non-violence – recognition of the autonomy of others, even when they abuse it, by a refusal forcibly to impose one’s will on them.

What sort of person does this set of attitudes denote?

Someone who is aware of the presence of God within himself and each individual, a presence more intimate even than that of a loving father.
Someone with deep roots in the community, who does not see himself as an isolated individual, dependent on his personal attitude, skills and possessions for survival.
Someone who is aware that this present existence is only a stage in a process that does not end at death.
Someone with a set of values based on loving inter-personal relations, not on material possessions.
In sum – a person who sees himself as a nexus of relationships, all of which have their origin in God.

Second – why does the attitude have such existential importance? When I first started following this I was struck by the urgency of Jesus’ call for metanoia. It was not concerned with the future but with now. Well, he did speak about the future judgement but it was so imminent that a decision could not be postponed. Later this urgency dropped away. The coming of the Kingdom was either death, or some future event. Previously I had assumed, as have others, that Jesus believed the end time was imminent and, when it did not arrive shortly after his death, it was projected further and further into the future. However, having just read so much on Buddhism and its insistence on mindfulness, I began to wonder. The Buddhist insistence stems from an awareness that this present reality is not as it seems. Everything is characterised by impermanence. There are no enduring substantial essences, neither of things, nor of persons. Suffering and unhappiness lie in clinging to what is not ultimately real. Only by penetrating the illusory surface could one see it for what it was – a mirage. But the mirage seems so real, one moment breathtakingly beautiful, another frightful. Dream or nightmare, waking up requires the realisation that one is asleep. Hence mindfulness. By means of the focused concentration of meditation one can become aware. Of what? That the Buddha could not say. It could only be experienced. It was not a concept that could be expressed in words.

Mindfulness by itself was not enough. It required right action (sila), a very high standard of morality. At first this intrigued me. One’s first impression of Buddhism is that it is all about meditation and therefore enlightenment must be an intellectual event, a coming to know. Practically everything one reads about meditation deals with mental states and with what goes on during meditation. Hardly ever is anything said about everyday life – about how meditation affects and is affected by it. Meditation would seem to involve a private and inner journey apart from the bustle of day to day living.

But one soon realises that there is no apart from everyday living, even in a monastery. Wherever we go we carry with us the baggage of a body, thoughts, feeling, emotions, fantasies, desires, dreams and regrets. Whether we live with others or alone it makes no difference. The mind is filled with a constant chatter, seething with memories, desires, feelings and emotions and there is no difference between those stemming from the imagination and those from real experience. What we are mentally – that is what we are. If your fantasies are about committing the perfect crime you are a criminal even though you may never have stolen a penny in your life. If your fantasies are full of lust you are a philanderer even though you may have never touched another woman. In ordinary life fantasies are not taken into account because people can only judge by outward behaviour. But to you it matters because what is in your mind shapes the way you see the world. Hermit or city dweller, it makes no difference as St. Anthony found out. You carry yourself with you wherever you are, wherever you go.

This is why sila is so important. The ‘enduring and substantial self’ as it seems, the source of all our desires and dreams, is neither enduring nor substantial. But we will never come to see this as long as we cling to it. When we are selfish or greedy, lazy or vindictive we are clinging, tight-gripped to this self, putting it before all others. Again, it makes no difference whether this is a purely mental thing, or whether it is actual. The effect is the same. We are reinforcing our way of seeing things.

The interesting thing about Jesus, particularly in Matthew chapters 5 to 7, is that he seems to have a very similar approach. Right actions are not enough; in fact they are useless if in our imaginations we have lust and hate. Likewise he advises people to pray alone in their room with the door closed. It has been said that this attitude was a reaction to the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who loved outward show and elaborate liturgies. Jesus wanted sincerity, a transparent honesty. Fine, but I wonder whether there is more to it than this. Had Jesus discovered something? His stress on a complete metanoia goes deeper than simple justification. After all, God is merciful. He will forgive the repentant sinner, as Jesus pointed out again and again. A perfect life is not required in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Repentance and desire are enough. But in the Sermon of the Mount Jesus is asking far, far more. Why? The Good News is the message that the Messiah has come to offer forgiveness and to inaugurate the Reign of God. But what exactly did he mean by ‘the Reign of God’?

Here we encounter, not only the inadequacy of words in describing experience, but also the problems of translation. Although it has the weight of tradition ‘Kingdom of God’ is misleading rather than enlightening as a translation of ‘basileia tou theou‘. It fails to convey the dynamic, interpersonal and reciprocal quality of the relationship with God suggested by ‘reign’. It is here we must look for the reason for the urgency in Jesus’ preaching.

I think I am as far away from understanding what it means to be human as I have ever been even though I have read and thought so much lately. My primary instinct – that I would come to understand, not through reading but through experience, is being borne out. I am reading the chapter in Nishitani on ‘the personal and the impersonal’. In true Zen fashion much of it just does not make sense, apparent paradoxical nonsense, like so much of Buddhist thought. Most of what he had written previously I understood because of what I experience in meditation. But anatman is another matter. I understand the concept and the logic, but it is not my experience of what it means to be a person. When it becomes my experience, if it ever does, only then will I really understand.

So, what does it mean to be a person? I have asked this often enough but all my attempts at an answer have been conceptual and speculative. Being a person is primarily being me. There is a sense of identity which extends back as far as memory. In my very early memories there is a sense of gift and a sense of recognition. ‘Gift’ in the sense that I did not make myself me, no more than I made my body. ‘Recognition’ in the sense that this gift of this ‘body/me’ was entirely mine. My uniqueness, quirks, talents, efforts and achievements were sometimes praised and appreciated; sometimes criticised and not appreciated; but always as coming from me, always mine and not derived from, or owned by another. There were no limitations on me being me, though the limitations on my behaviour were another matter. I was not allowed to be me with other people in a way that hurt or upset them. I became, gradually as I grew up, two persons. One, the private, inner, incommunicable me. Incommunicable because this ‘me’ was not one that I could communicate, or that I felt others were always willing to accept. This ‘me’ was constantly exploring experience, experimenting, testing the limits of what was acceptable and desirable, both on a personal and on a social level. They wanted a polite and dutiful boy and this boy became the other, public persona.

This split between public and private personae has never really healed. In every situation I felt a gap, sometimes a chasm, between the ‘me’ I was inwardly and the ‘me’ that was publicly acceptable. Hence a feeling of alienation that goes very deep. This experience is not unique. It is probably universal. It gave rise to much of the speculation in existentialist philosophy. Certainly it gives rise to serious doubt. Who is the real me? This is not a question of choosing between the social and the private me, between the I and the me, as Mead would put it. The doubt arises from the fact that such a gap should ever exist. It exists because the depths, Buddhists would say ‘nothingness’, from which the ‘I’ emerges are unplumbed. I do not know the roots of my being. Therefore I do not know what being me is. I am not aware even that there are roots. I emerged from nothing into self-consciousness. I will eventually dissolve into nothing. I hope that somehow my self-consciousness will survive this dissolution, but I do not know that this will happen and I cannot imagine, given the unity of body, mind, feelings and emotions, how it might. Hence the feeling of alienation, this sense of being separated from the roots of my being. It seems inconceivable that I should not have roots; that I sprang fully fledged from nothingness into being. This nothingness is very mysterious.

One is thrown into a situation where one is alienated, split, separated. There is a drive to heal that split, to be unified, to fill the emptiness within and bridge the chasm without. One is a separate consciousness drifting in a vast ocean – no idea of from when; no idea of to where. One has emerged and will submerge again. What is this vast ocean? Am I part of it, or simply on it?

The more I meditate the more I am becoming aware that there is something going on at an unconscious level. What? I do not know, but there is a subtle mood which percolates through into consciousness, a sense of peace, a calmness. The problem of ‘Who am I?’ and how ‘I’ can survive the dissolution of the body, which so used to exercise me because it seemed insoluble, worries me no longer. I know – strange that, I just know – that the self-conscious me is not me. That the real me has yet to be discovered. Perhaps ‘discovered’ is not the right word. It implies that there is an already existing entity hidden round the corner, out of sight, so to speak. It does not do justice to the dynamic process that is the person. ‘Achieved’ might be better.

I am becoming more and more aware that mindfulness throughout the whole day is all important. It is so easy to get trapped in a mindset focused on self and feelings, and that is fatal. Everything that aggrandises the empirical self, that focuses attention on the physical here and now for me, on my feelings, my mood, my desires takes the attention away from mindfulness, from the view sub specie aeternitate, as the old scholastics would say. Mindfulness is focused on ‘betweenness’ (aidagara); on the interrelationship of you and me, of others and me, of the natural world and me, of me with myself. It is not focused me as an individual, substantial, independently existing entity. It is focused rather on the dynamic relationships between the chameleon-like me and others; relationships in response to which I am constantly being changed, moulded, shaped and formed. The empirical me is like a dancing flame, never still, bending and shaping in response to every whisper of wind.

As long as I am locked into the empirical me I am a prisoner. I am soft clay shaped by whatever memories, feelings, emotions emerge into consciousness. Although they are ephemeral and transient, memories and their attendant feelings, often come with an immediacy of impact that is hard to resist. A snatch of music, a scent, a photograph, and a long dead moment in the past becomes vividly alive in the mind. I am overwhelmed with nostalgia, with regrets perhaps and thoughts of, ‘If only…’ The memory usurps the present and dominates the attention. The past, though dead and gone, has become alive again in the present. It is a false and spurious life but the memory which creates it has the power to mould my moods and feelings. I am a prisoner of a past that does not exist. Only by getting out of the empirical me and into the betweenness of me and myself can I see the memories for what they are and become free of their hold on me.

In ordinary day to day encounters one is often so caught up in ones own subjective feelings that the other is only important in so far as he or she has an impact on me and my feelings. They are not in themselves important. Or, the other is so important for me and my feelings that they become all-important and I take second place. Between these two extremes there is a broad middle ground where others are both important in themselves and for me but not so important that my feelings for myself take second place. In all these cases my feelings and my self-interest are the deciding factors. Even in the extreme case where the other is all-important.

The importance of mindfulness, of awareness of betweenness, is that it takes me out of me. It takes me into that empty space which is all important. It provides perspective. If it were not for that emptiness I would not be me. When a baby is born it does not distinguish between itself and its mother. The mother’s breast, her embrace, her voice, her smile are all extensions of the baby’s own body and not distinguished from it. Towards the end of the baby’s first year of life self consciousness has begun to develop. A space develops between the baby and the world it inhabits, between it and its mother. There is baby and not-baby. The baby begins to become aware of the limitations of it’s self. In order for self consciousness to appear there must be consciousness of the other as other. When this happens the subjective ‘I’ becomes aware of an objective ‘me’.

Awareness of betweenness is a realisation that the I-Thou, me-other dichotomy is more apparent than real. There are not two independently existing, self subsisting entities. It is the relationship, which is what betweenness is, which makes both I and Thou.

Reading Zaehner on nature mysticism. References to Sanctifying Grace leave me feeling uncomfortable. What is sanctifying grace? I believe it to be the relationship between God and the person. What is the difference between the relationship of God to the person in Sanctifying Grace and his relationship to the person who has no SG? We need a definition of person and soul. God is the ground of being and therefore relates to each being in an ontological sense. This relationship is not normally perceptible.

As Person and Subject, God relates to persons in a personal way. This, likewise, is not normally perceptible. Is this relationship what is meant by SG? Are the various kinds of mystical experience perceptions of this relationship?

What does it mean not to be in a state of Grace? Does being in a state of Grace mean openness to Being? This entails living authentically and relating to others with openness and love. If so, there are no, conscious at least, obstacles to the development of the relationship between being and Being.

Does not being in the sate of grace mean being egotistical and selfish, closed to Being, seeing others either as threats to one’s ego, or as opportunities to be used, manipulated, exploited or possessed? In which case there is no understanding of the unity and interdependence of being, nor of the dependence of being on Being. Individuals are seen as unitary and fragile, competing for existence in an, if not hostile, at least an indifferent universe. Such people cannot develop as persons because their basic orientation is closed and inward looking. They are not able to take the risk of opening themselves in love to achieve transcendence and, ultimately, what Christians call salvation. Not unless something jolts them out of their blindness.

My unhappiness with the term sanctifying grace is that it reifies and makes almost a commodity of what is, essentially, a relationship. Not to be in SG is to refuse to recognise and respond to Being. Traditional Catholic theology would limit this relationship (SG) to the sacraments. Individuals come into existence (are born) and have, of necessity an ontological relationship with God. The personal relationship, if that is what SG is, only comes into existence at Baptism. This relationship is then deepened and developed only through repeated reception of the sacraments.

It seems to me improbable in the extreme, given the nature of God and the nature of the human person, that the personal relationship between them should be conditioned by and limited to the rituals of an institution which has only been in existence for a fraction of human history and has never touched more than a fraction of people. Theologians talk about SG as a unique gift which derives from God alone. It is not something naturally human. St. John, on the other hand is quite clear that to love (he makes no qualifications) is to know God, ‘for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.’ (1John 4:7)

I have been reading Nelson Pike’s Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism. As the title suggests it is a philosophical approach and he is very clear; asks very sensible questions and takes nothing for granted. His problem, and I think it is a problem generally, is that he does not give enough attention to emotions. This is understandable. Emotions, like mystical experience, are entirely subjective and are not available to others, unless mediated symbolically through art, music, language and metaphor. Ideas and concepts can take on an objective existence of their own. They become what Popper called World 3 objects. As such they can be studied and they can be evaluated according to the criteria available to World 1 and World 3. But this does not get us very far. Towards the end of the book, after pages of exhaustive analysis, Pike comes to the conclusion that ‘theistic experience is possible’.

Although emotions are not available for objective study we cannot leave them out of the equation. Somehow they have to be integrated into the various human ‘sophies’ and ‘ologies’. Because ultimately it is emotions, feelings, which bestow meaning and significance. We know this. We have always known this. If something does not feel right then no amount of thinking, rational logic, will make it right. Now, the question is – why should subjective, ephemeral feelings be the arbiters of meaning rather than ‘eternal’ truths? When feelings endorse what we believe to be true there is a harmony and a sense (feeling, again) of unshakeable certainty. The resulting sense may be of peace and security, or it may be of the pointlessness and futility of human existence. But there is a solidity, a certainty which is not easily shaken. When feelings and beliefs conflict then there is discordance, a disharmony which may result in worry and anxiety, and in the suppression of feelings, or in the suppression of beliefs. Either way, all is not well.

Whatever else it means, being human means being a psychosomatic entity, a unity. Platonic and Cartesian dualism, just from my own limited experience, are not valid options. My body has a far greater impact on my mind than the other way round. Dualism provides a solution to the problem of existence after death. The death and decomposition of the body simply means that the more important spiritual element can migrate to another body, or to another mode of existence. But if one is a psychosomatic unity then death presents a problem. There is no arguing with the finality of death and the decomposition of the body.

This is where dualism is so handy. It provides a neat, simple and readily understandable solution. It offers hope in the face of the terrible reality of death of the body. There are all sorts of supporting factors. People have out of the body experiences, near death experiences, mystical experiences in which the body is somehow transcended. It is even possible to visualise an existence apart from the body, as a mind aware of all that is going on. But, and this is where the problem of the emotions makes things complicated, emotions are physical. They are bodily feelings that emerge in the amygdala and proceed to the neo-cortex. They impose themselves on the rational mind. They are almost entirely independent of the rational mind and very little affected by it however much the mind might want to impose its will on the emotions. According to Joseph LeDoux

Neuroanatomists have shown that the pathways that connect the emotional processing system of fear, the amygdala, with the thinking brain, the neocortex, are not symmetrical -the connections from the cortex to the amygdala are considerably weaker than those from the amygdala to the cortex. This may explain why, once an emotion is aroused, it is so hard for us to turn it off at will.
(http://www.cns.nyu.edu/ledoux/overview.htm)

Two questions emerge – to what extent are emotions the result of physical factors? This is important because if it were possible for the mind to exist apart from the body would it be able to feel emotions? The idea of existing in a blissful state of apatheia is not satisfactory. (Anyway bliss is a feeling.) If it is emotions which convey meaning and significance what is the point of existing as a passionless centre of awareness? One might as well be a computer.

The other question is – what is a person? Do the two alternatives, an embodied spirit, or a conscious psychosomatic unity exhaust all the possibilities? My feeling (feeling again) is no. Both of these possibilities reify what is more a process than a thing. A person is never a fixed entity but a constant process of becoming. Secondly, neither take into account the extent to which a person is constituted by relationships. To be human is to relate. I, as a person, am not circumscribed by my skin. My being extends into the being of others as does theirs into me. And not just other persons.

But enough. The more I write the more I realise how little I understand. There is a gulf between between the rational arguments of people like Pyke and LeDoux and the experience of countless others. How kind of Pyke to acknowledge the possibility of theistic experience, something that for so many is an undoubted reality. And do we now fully understand the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of emotions and feelings? One of the Upanishads says somewhere, “He who speaks does not know, he who knows does not speak.”

What is it that makes something truly significant? This has been popping up in my thoughts one way or another these last couple of weeks. It struck me that only what we experience is real, real for us. I can understand what exercised Bishop Berkley now. Reality is continually expanding and contracting according to our state of awareness. One of the bad things about being ill is that the preoccupation with bodily pain and discomfort shrinks the circumference of perception to the limits of that body. The universe becomes a bed of pain. The glory of the night sky, the extravagance of sunsets, the light-hearted laughter of children, the lazy buzzing of flies on a summer day, all these cease to have existence and meaning. Only the constricted and contracted me exists, only what goes on within the tight circumference of the body is real.

This raises the scary question of which is the real me. Is the real me just a fluctuating bubble of awareness which has had its moments of expansion and will one day shrink until it disappears without even a discernible pop. You can see this in old people as they sit for most of the day in their armchairs, dozing and gazing vaguely and the television. Their world is confined to fading memories of ancient excitements. The mind recoils and refuses to be so extinguished, even though it knows that it has no control over what happens to it, even though it is aware that one by one its memories are slipping into the dark pool of forgetting. Let them out of sight for too long and they slide away unnoticed and are gone. Is this it? If it is, nothing is real. Meaning is the feeling of this moment. I cannot accept this but on the other hand this is what experience shows me. Is there another experience? Can one break out of the confines of this oh-so-limited and puny body/mind?

Thinking about that tag of Aquinas – whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver – or something similar. It is obvious at one level. A dog sees things as a dog, a cat as a cat, etc. It is less obvious when it comes to people. It is noticeable in matters of race, nationality or gender, it is less obvious and more difficult to explain when it comes to attitudes to life and questions of meaning. What is the difference between a saint and an ordinary person? It is not the case that both see life similarly and that one chooses the path of heroic virtue and the other does not. It is more subtle than that. The difficulty for the ordinary person (if there is such an animal) is that he cannot see things other than as an ordinary person. The challenge is first to become aware of this limitation; to come to see that there are other modes of being, some better, some worse, and that it is possible to change modes. Better in what way? Better in the sense of being more happy and fulfilled, in the sense of knowing, in the sense that one comes to be rather than to have, is proactive rather than reactive, in the sense that one draws nearer to the truth.

(Quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur.)

I keep thinking about the relationship of body and mind. It struck me the other day that it is no coincidence that the Noble Eightfold Path has six prescriptions which concern the body and only two, the last two concern the mind. Formerly, when I read it, or about it, I tended to take the first six for granted. Of course this is the right way to behave. How like the Sermon on the Mount, and so on. The interesting ones, though, are the last two, and especially the last one – right concentration. This is the one that gets you to enlightenment. But now I am beginning to realise that they are all important. There has to be a unity of body and mind and the first six are the foundation on which the final two depend. It struck me too that they go very deep.

Thinking further it occurred that Paul’s experience, described in Romans 7 when he found that his body and his will were not under his control and he did the things he did not want to do, is an example of this. It is no good trying to achieve right mindfulness if the body and the senses are dictating the agenda. But how to achieve control over them? With Paul it was a conversion experience, or perhaps more than one, and even then it was never complete and he complained about a thorn in the flesh he could not eradicate.

I think it has to be the first seven steps of the Path all working together. The thing about meditation, or mindfulness, is that it is not really effective unless it pervades the whole day and all its activities. Unless it does this it remains a struggle with the body, with distractions, feelings and moods. When it does begin to permeate the day, mindfulness is there catching these moods and feelings as they begin to arise and is able to put them into context before they become full-blown and powerful. Why struggle with an emotion or feeling in the full flood of its surge? You will either lose and later feel guilty and base, or you will have an exhausting emotional struggle and in the end feel empty and unsatisfied because you desperately wanted to do something but were not able to. It inevitably leaves behind an itch yearning for satisfaction and, sooner or later, it will be satisfied. There will come a moment of weakness and you will succumb. This is what Paul experienced and what we all experience. Even after Paul’s conversion experience, long after he could say, ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me’, he had to struggle with ‘the thorn in the flesh’. Mindfulness allows us to be aware of thoughts and feelings as they arise and before they grip the attention.