Phronema

Ideas come during meditation, even though it is not a time for thinking. I keep see-sawing back and forth between the desire to understand in a rational way that can be explained to others, and the desire to experience. I know that the received wisdom is not to get involved in rational thought during meditation, that concepts are a hindrance rather than a help, but I do not think this is quite correct. Thought, language and experience are so interwoven that I do not think they can be so arbitrarily separated. Nor is the separator between subliminal and conscious experience impermeable. There is a constant seepage into consciousness, of which one is aware, but the moment the searchlight of direct awareness is turned on it it vanishes. In this way the Jesus Prayer keeps saying itself throughout the day, and it is not just a mere repetition of words.

What I want to get on and talk about is the fact that I am the centre of the universe. Each person is the centre, not just of his/her universe but, of THE UNIVERSE. Everything is seen from the perspective of the centre and the centre is I. This is a fact of experience even though I know it is not true, even though I know that I am a temporary, infinitesimal speck in a cosmos vast beyond all imagining. Only what touches me has meaning for me. The birth and death of stars, the collisions of galaxies, the extermination of species, the awesome power of a supernova and the cold silence of space – none of these have any meaning for me unless I am touched by them. Nor do the billions of lives, the trillions of human dramas, joys and tragedies about which I know nothing. Yet each life is the centre of the universe, warmed by the same sun.

If only what touches my life has meaning for me and if there are billions of others who could say the same thing; if there are billions of lives, each in its private bubble of meaning, how can one find ultimate meaning? Is there ultimate meaning? The problem is the bubble, the bubble of our individuality. We can only see from inside our individual bubbles. There is no other perspective. From inside the bubble we cannot reach out and make contact. Only if the bubble pops can I be merged with the whole. But the skin of the bubble is my individuality. It is my universe and I am at its centre. It is my only protection against dissolution. Once it is pierced I will be emptied out. Will I then cease to be? Is this what Jesus meant when he said, ‘Whoever would save his life must lose it.’ Is this what is meant by anatman? The individual self, protected inside the bubble of his conscious awareness, is unaware of true reality, is unaware of what/who he really is. This morning, just for a fleeting moment, I had a vision of what it would be like for the bubble to burst. The emptying out and merging would not be to lose but to gain.

There seem to be two contradictory tendencies today. One sees Religion as an archaic hangover from a pre-scientific age, interesting in a historical way as a cultural artefact but not to be taken seriously by those with any knowledge of the laws of cause and effect. The other, more reactionary approach, sees the rejection of Religion as the cause of most of the world’s ills. It opposes all forms of permissive liberalism and would like to impose the rules and values of Scripture – whichever scripture, this applies equally to many Christians and Muslims. As I have said previously, this imposition of rules and values tends to be selective with a very hard line towards sexual permissiveness and property rights and a very soft line towards justice and individual rights.

Religion for the reactionary tendency tends to be something external. It is heteronomous in that rules are imposed from without. St. Augustine’s dictum, ‘Love, and do what you will,’ would be alien to them and dangerously permissive. Their gaze is turned outward. God is up in Heaven. So are the Saints. They look for miracles, apparitions and revelations. They will cross continents to see a grotto, or a wall, or to see someone with the stigmata. Religion is ritual and right conduct. Graces and benefits come from above. Prayer is contrition, petition and adoration – usually in that order. When I was young the Nine First Fridays was a very popular devotion. This involved going to Mass and communion on the first Friday of nine consecutive months. Doing this guaranteed that you would not die without a priest to administer the Last Rites. These ensured that you would not go to Hell, although you might have to spend some considerable time in Purgatory. There were also various novenas, prayers said for nine days, or weeks, or months – hence the name – which infallibly (so it was believed) caused God, or the saint, to answer the petitioner’s request. Such a religion is myopic, unable to see beyond the individual, or the immediate family, or community. You are the chosen person, or people. God is your God. He rules your world, which you see from your perspective.

There is, however, another religious worldview and why it is not more widespread is unclear. It lacks the dogmatism and the certitude of both the scientific and the reactionary worldviews. This view proceeds from doubt. Not the doubt of Descartes, which was only a device with which to construct another set of dogmas; nor the Great Doubt of Zen which is the threshold of the Transcendent; but the doubt of ‘What?’, and ‘Why?’, and ‘Who am I?’, which initiates the search for understanding. It is said that theology is fides quearens intellectum, but religion is doubt seeking understanding. It is the search for meaning.

The old dogmatism provided all the answers, which were to be accepted on faith. Understanding was not required. Only theologians were encouraged to question and then only within the strict parameters of Scripture and tradition. Religion was a rigid construct of dogma and practice that had to be accepted on faith. Such a religion cannot grow from within. It cannot, like a snake, slough off its old and outworn skin because now it is only a skin, the living flesh beneath having suffocated.

In the search for meaning readymade answers are inappropriate. They are always another person’s answers, or they are made-up answers to stifle questioning. In the search for meaning it is not the answer which is the most important thing but the search. The answers may not come until the end of a long life, if even then. What is important is the search, because a search implies a journey and a journey implies leaving where you are now.

This is why it is so important to doubt because doubt provides that itch of discomfort, that dissatisfaction with the present situation, that uncertainty which deprives us of peace. But what has all this got to do with religion? At first – nothing. Only if the search is unsuccessful is it successful. If the search is unsuccessful; if answers are not easily available; if science cannot provide them; if other people, religious and non-religious, cannot provide them; if, having searched and questioned and still not found we are still in a state of doubt and uncertainty and have not given up the quest, then we begin to have an idea of what we are not looking for. And to know what it is we are not looking for is already to have some idea of what we seek.

To have searched and not found means that we know that money, power and pleasure do not have the answer. Nor do the gentler pursuits of art, music and literature, nor the contentment of family life, nor sport, nor the cultivation of gardens. None of these have the answer. But still we know there is an answer because doubt exists, the questions exist. Who am I? Does my life have meaning? The answers ‘Nothing’ and ‘No’ are not valid answers. To accept them is to despair. It is to go against our deepest instincts. Therefore, since the answers are not to be found where we have looked they must lie beyond where we have looked. And the search for the beyond, for the far side, for the Transcendent, is religion.

Doubt can be debilitating. It can also feed the thirst for knowledge and understanding. This is why it is so wrong to discourage children from asking ‘Why?’

Religion based on doubt is religion based on the search to understand the ‘why?’ of life, what it means to be ‘me’, to be a person. The answers are not to be found in books. I have wasted many years reading, researching, making notes and all I have done is to make it quite clear to myself that there are no written answers. The answer does not exist out there somewhere. It is not something that can be communicated in words. Nor is it something that can be reached by reasoning or logical deduction. I do not know what the answer is but, since I know what it is not, I am confident that when I find it I will recognise it. I have the strangest feeling that I have always known the answer without knowing it.

How can we know by not knowing? There is within us, deep within the depths, the essential part of our being and it is closed and locked. This is the root cause of our doubt and uncertainty, of the dissatisfaction that constantly plagues us. The search is for a key. We do not know what the key is because we have not found it – yet, but we do know what are not the right keys.

Thinking while shaving – what, if any, metaphysical significance is there in pouring water, wetting the shaving brush and lathering my face. Are these simply inconsequential events as meaningful, or meaningless, as the falling of a leaf, or the meanderings of an ant? Or do they have a resonance? And what about human actions? Is there any difference between a tree falling on a house and killing three children, a pilot mechanically pressing a button which drops a bomb from 30,000 feet on a house killing three children of whom he is not aware, and a man with a gun and malevolence in his heart who kills three children? How do the lives and deaths of these children resonate throughout the cosmos? Does the manner of their deaths have a significance and if so what and why? Are their deaths meaningful only for those directly affected by them or are there other factors of which we are not aware?

The big questions keep intruding. The news, the situation in Iraq, floods, kidnappings, murders, abuse, poverty, decrepit old age, my own impending mortality – either human life is an absurd and very sick, very unfair joke, or there is some meaning. But I cannot see any meaning, or imagine what such meaning might be. I cannot see what could justify some of the appalling and meaningless suffering we see and hear about. Nor looking back on my own life, or looking at the lives of others can I see what lasting value they have.

And perhaps that is the clue. In the visible and material sense there is no lasting value. Only the exceptional few have left their mark on history and continue to influence the minds of people today. Are these the only lives to have value? What about the billions of others, with their hopes, fears and aspirations, their strivings and loving – do they count for nothing? On the evidence available the answer must be yes. They are gone, gone, utterly gone, as though they had never existed. If the life of ordinary people has worth it is not measured by monuments or books, it is not something tangible, not something that can be demonstrated.

We all have moments of supreme significance when life is filled with meaning; when we touch and are touched by the lives of others – sometimes just a few others, sometimes thousands – but in the long perspective these moments are as ephemeral as wisps of mist, concealing rather than revealing reality. And it is in these misty shadows that we are comfortable and would, if we could, remain. But that is not possible. Eventually we all face the reality of mortality, an irrevocable closure that calls into question all that we have lived for. What is the point of anything if it is only temporary?

Love rejects this cold logic. Although the prospect of looming death and suffering sadden and depress, our love for others (and ourselves), our love for the astoundingly beautiful world we live in, our love for God, whose translucent presence we have felt from time to time, this love cannot accept that life itself, any life, all life, is meaningless and has no value. Or that the closure of any one life is the end of life, or meaning. To love is a blind acceptance, a stubborn in-the-face-of-contrary-evidence acceptance. It is an acceptance based on hope and faith, and on the imperative to love itself, that our lives, all lives, life itself, transcends the here and now.

The question of meaning does not arise much in ordinary daily life. The helter-skelter of daily existence, plus the pressure of relationships, do not leave much time for existential speculation. At the time these provide meaning enough. This is what life is about – relationships, job etc. What is difficult to understand are those people whose lives are not full of meaningful activity. It is as though they were being carried by a tide and then were washed up on a sandbank where there is nothing to do. There they wander aimlessly, occupying themselves with little tasks and excursions, or else they sit passively in front of the television. Boredom stalks them like an uneasy ghost. How can anyone be bored? How can anyone meander aimlessly, mind unused, dull, passive? Yet they do. On either side of the sandbank the tide of life surges and eddies – going where? That is the question. Is it going anywhere? Is there a stream of life, flowing, broadening, deepening, pouring itself into… what? A pleroma, a nirvana, the Kingdom of Heaven? And then what? Or, is there merely the tide, ebbing, flooding, surging, its waves whipped up by fractious winds, but going nowhere? That is what I want to know.

What we are doing when we are swimming in the tide, setting goals, striving for them, reaching them, going onward? Are these activities of as little, or as much, or more importance than the activities of animals in their pursuit of food, mating and reproduction? Are human activities, by virtue of being human, of a more profound existential significance and, if they are, what is it that makes them so? Are all human actions of equal worth? How do the total concentration of meditation, or making love, or abusing a child, or changing a nappy, or placing a part in a factory assembly line, or staring boredom in the face, how do all these compare in the eternal scheme of things? Are there actions which carry existential significance, good or bad, and what is it about these actions that makes them so. And are there actions which are of no significance? If so it is as though the people cast up on the sandbank were living in a vacuum.

Viktor Frankl describes the existential vacuum in this way – at the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behaviour is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behaviour are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). There are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by the will to power, including the will to money. In other cases it is taken by the will to pleasure and a search for hedonistic compensation.

What matters is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. It is like asking a chess master, ‘What is the best move in chess?’ There is no such thing as the best move outside the context of a particular game with a particular opponent. Similarly in life. Each person’s existential situation is unique. As each situation presents a challenge, a problem to be solved, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. One should ask not what is the meaning of life but rather recognise that that it is s/he who is being asked. Each person is questioned by life itself and can only answer in the context of his/her own life.

Great scandals in the Church – children, young people, people exploited – emotionally, financially and sexually. Some cynics might say – so what’s new? Someone has just published a book about the meaning of life. Apparently he wrote to dozens of well-known people and asked them their opinion. Most of the answers apparently are trite. The more philosophically inclined questioned the validity of the question. One religious person said we are created with a God shaped hole and the meaning, or purpose of life is to fill it. It is interesting that there is no consensus – not just on what meaning life might have, but as to whether there needs to be meaning. I came across a quotation from Gabriel Garcia Marquez today –

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers gave birth to them… Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.*

I think we have to find, or to make our own meaning. I do not think there is a ready-made meaning, a template into which all can fit. We are so diverse, so wonderfully and bewilderingly different that there cannot be any simple answer to the question. God is part of the meaning, I am sure, but how we perceive God is different for everyone. One of the problems with the established churches is that they are too keen to supply a simplistic template into which we must all fit. I know it is difficult for an organisation, especially a hierarchical and bureaucratic one, to cope with diversity but such is the nature of the human beast.

*Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. Edith Grossman (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 165.

On the differences between the humanist and the religious conceptions of what it means to be a human person. For humanists the fact that we are rational beings, able to think and stand back from our actions is what marks us out from our animal brothers. For some, like Sartre, it follows that we are free; free to reflect on future possibilities and choose rationally. Others like Freud and Skinner would question the freedom but they would allow a certain amount, at least when the inner springs of behaviour were in the domain of the conscious.

The main problem with humanism, as I see it, is the question of meaning. Life has no meaning other than that which we choose to give it. I can choose whatever I like as my purpose in life, research, medicine, sport, pleasure and, at a practical day to day level, consider whatever I have chosen as my raison d’être. And this is fine until I am faced with the three brute facts of existence – powerlessness, contingency and scarcity.* Suffering robs us all of our pride and tramples on rationalisations. It shrinks our world to the orbit of the body and the only thought which has any meaning is, ‘End it.’

The religious view of what it means to be human provides both an answer to suffering and a meaning for life which transcends the three brute facts. The trouble with the humanist view is that it is in the end reductionist. It reduces the deepest and most complex of all mysteries, me, simply to an intelligent organism, unique among the flora and fauna of earth, yes, but another specimen nonetheless.

We know, how I know not, but the knowledge is there in the depths of our being, that each life is infinitely precious. Why else do we spend so much on ambulances and fire brigades etc. Why otherwise would complete strangers risk, and sometimes give, their lives for another. Why are we fascinated by, and go silly over, babies, over the miracle of another life.

We are never satisfied. Satiety lasts a few moments and is replaced by a new hunger. In the endless search for novelty we are haunted by boredom. The pleasures of living are rewarding but in the end we yearn for something more than mere living can give. Something in us transcends the senses and our limited minds. Our being, in the depths of our being, is plunged into depths unimaginable. The senses cannot pierce them though, sometimes, in moments of silence when we are not particularly paying attention, we catch a glimpse of unutterable beauty.

*cf Thomas F. O Dea, Sociology of Religion (Foundations of Modern Sociology), Prentice-Hall, 1966

Is that it? Is that what ultimate reality is – a quantum vacuum? But then I began to think – this is the danger of rationalising, of using verbal symbols in order to try to understand and articulate reality. In the end we produce a formula, a collection of symbols which is a description – just that and nothing more. ‘Ultimate reality is a quantum vacuum’ is just as inadequate as ‘God is Trinity’. In a sense both are negative statements. Each expression says more about what ultimate reality, or God is not than what it is. What is needed is a language of experience.

Words are signs, signs invested with meaning. The signs are arbitrary. Dog, chien, perro all mean the same thing. We understand the signs because we have learnt what they mean through experience. We can use signs and symbolic reasoning to extend our knowledge. We may have experience of A+B and B+C but we may never have experienced A+C. However by the use of logical reasoning we can extrapolate from our knowledge of A,B and C to make a good guess at the results of A+C. All this is spelled out in Charles Tart’s essay ‘Hidden Shackles’ (Tart Charles T., Hidden Shackles: Implicit Assumptions that Limit Freedom of Action and Enquiry in Zollschan, Schumaker and Walsh eds., Exploring the Paranormal, Prism Press, Dorset,1989)

The problem lies a) in discussing reality beyond our experience, reality which we have not experienced and to which we give signs which are rooted in our experience but which may or may not be useful in describing this extra-experiential reality, and b) in discussing one’s subjective experience.

a) We can do the first 1) by the use of analogy and metaphor and 2) by the use of logic to manipulate these analogies and metaphors to make deductions. The problems with this approach are

• The appropriateness of the analogies and metaphors. ‘Father’ is not much use as a description of God to someone who has been abused as a child by his father. We must be very careful not to confuse the analogy with the analogue, the metaphor with the metaphrand.
• Hidden assumptions. Unless we are aware of these, and of the fact that to a great extent our perception is constructed, we are not going to get very far. We must be open to surprise.

• When all is said and done the deductions and conclusions are still only signs and symbols which may extend our thinking but do not extend our experience.

b) This is why it is so important if we are to communicate our subjective experience that our analogies and metaphors should be rooted in common experience and not in the intellect or intellectual conceits.