Phronema

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.

The more I think about it the more I come to realise the importance of LeDoux’s theory of the emotions being hardwired into the amygdala.* We are led by our feelings. Normally we respond to the tasks that have to be done – job, looking after children etc. In my case, with the whole day in front of me, I have to set myself tasks. I write in the morning and, in theory, walk, or garden and do reading and research in the afternoon and evenings. Whether I do any or all of these depends on my mood. And so I often arrive, as this morning, with a feeling of having wasted the last few days and accomplished nothing. This tends to lead to a feeling of depression – that my life is non-eventful and nothing is being achieved, that my life now has no meaning, that I am wasting my time etc., etc.; a general feeling of uselessness and purposelessness.

All this went through my mind this morning during meditation. I had just been reading Kadowaki on karma and sunyata (emptiness). One reads ideas but one is very slow to see how these ideas might exist in the reality of one’s own life. I think I am still too much of an idealist, in the Platonic, or Hegelian sense – that power does reside in the conscious mind, if only one can learn how to access it. I now realise that a) the conscious mind has no control over the emotions and b) that emotions and feelings shape the what, the how and the meaning we attach to living. All the conscious mind can do is to choose to ignore or to go along with the push and pull of the emotions. I see I am being very Platonic here in assuming a tripartite structure in the mind. I am not sure how independent the will is of he emotions.

Previously I had gone along with Freud and Jung and accepted that the unconscious is the repository of unwanted, or too-uncomfortable-to-bear emotions and memories. I thought that all one had to do was allow these to be aired, look at them objectively in the light of day, and their power to hurt, or to control would be dissipated. I think this may be true for memories. I know that in meditation allowing forgotten memories to come to the surface and dissipate robs them of their power to hurt. I had thought that this then gave control over that particular feeling, be it anger, or hate, or lust, or whatever. I now see that is not the case. Memories can be healed but the feelings are still there, autonomous and powerful. Given the appropriate stimulus they will be triggered with all their power. If one doesn’t want the feelings then one has to avoid the stimuli – what in traditional spirituality used to be called the occasions of sin. This has all sorts of drawbacks. I remember an old monk telling me that whenever he went out he had either to wear his habit or a dog-collar. He didn’t trust himself not to do something sinful otherwise. So avoiding the occasions of sin may help avoid sin but it does not help one to grow, to become integrated and whole.

I am beginning to understand what Zen calls the Great Death. In meditation one is face to face with naked feelings. Because there is no escape into day-dreaming, or ratiocination, the impact of feelings can be very powerful and often make the continuing of meditation impossible, or seem to be impossible. Not to go along with their impulse, simply to sit, focused on awareness of the body and all that it is feeling, is like dying. One is detached from the body in the sense that one is not responding to instinctive impulses, and yet totally attached in the sense that the body is the focus of awareness. Then, in this attached detachment, aware of bodily and mental limits as limits, the possibility of a beyond all limits arises.

*http://www.cns.nyu.edu/ledoux/

Reading Kadowaki: Zen and the Bible* on the similarity between Zen and Christianity. He compares the Buddhist ‘elusive passion’ (klesa) with the effects of original sin. As an aside he says that original sin cannot be known from experience. It is a datum of revelation. He goes on to say that man went against what he was originally meant to be. All this I find surprising and hard to accept now, though once I took it all uncritically. Many questions come to mind. How can one know what was ‘originally meant to be’? Even if one accepts the original paradisical situation of man as a revelation of what God intended can one go on to say that its passive, non-self-conscious existence was God’s final intention for man? Surely the state of ‘original sin’ is no more than the alienation which must inevitably result from individual self-consciousness. Again we come back to the question of what it means to be a human person.

*Kadowaki, J. K., Zen and the Bible: A Priest’s Experience, Routledge, London 1980

Reading William Johnston on the Dark Nights* – it is interesting how much John of the Cross has to say about sexuality. I would like to read more on the psychology and the philosophy of sex, not Freudian stuff, but something more balanced. There is no doubt that it is something that goes right to the very depths of the psyche. It is more, far more, than a mere biological function. It has to do with identity but it also has to do with how we relate. Identity, in that we are all sexual persons and our sexuality determines the mode in which we relate to others and to life itself. Pornography and rape are symptoms of a sense of isolation such that only through fantasy or violence can the person concerned try to achieve a feeling of union or completeness but, because of the nature of violence and fantasy, this is forever frustrated. Philanderers, I suppose, are people who find mere sexuality unsatisfactory and are either trying to make up for lack of content through sheer volume, or are seeking the ultimate union.

Whatever, our sexuality both opens up our yawning incompleteness and points a way towards fulfilment. We are, however, such complex beings that achieving the balance of body, mind and spirit is very difficult. Any overemphasis in a single dimension can lead to disastrous consequences. It is interesting that William Johnston, following John of the Cross holds that sexuality has a spiritual dimension and in mystical experience this is transformed. This is quite counter to the traditional Western and Eastern Orthodox traditions which rigorously exclude any form of sexual expression, going so far on Mt. Athos, for example, as to forbid even female animals. Is it the case that so powerful are sexual feelings that it is felt the only way they can be controlled is to exclude them totally? Not healthy. In the East there has always been a tradition which focused on the spiritual dimension in sexuality – Kundalini in Hinduism and Tantric Yoga in Buddhism. I think the West has always looked slightly askance at these as though people were trying to have their cake and eat it too. On the other hand celibacy and contemplation do go together remarkably well and in all traditions a celibate religious life has an honoured place. Perhaps the Indian tradition has the right balance with its four ages. In the first two sexuality finds its full physical and emotional expression in love, marriage and bringing up a family. In later life, when the children have become independent, the person turns towards contemplation, withdrawing more and more from involvement with others. In any case it is a topic that needs exploring and certainly forms a major part of what it means to be human.

*William Johnston, Mystical Theology: The Science of Love, Harper Collins, London 1995