I have been doing very little of this writing. My mind does not seem to be as sharp, or as able to hold a range of ideas and develop them. Whereas before I used to be able to devour books now I find them heavy going. Holding concentration is more and more difficult and I battle with drowsiness. So I may have missed the moment and age is threatening to put a stop to my efforts. It also occurs to me that all this may be part of a gradual process of stripping away the egoistic self. Meditation too has almost become a thing of the past. Gone are the days when forty minutes passed effortlessly. Now I struggle to manage fifteen. Yesterday I was digging round a tree. It was blowing half a gale and the air was filled with the sound of the wind. At one time this would have filled me with a sort of ecstasy. To be immersed in the sound and feel of rushing wind, or the waves of the sea, was to feel at one with Nature, with the Spirit. Yesterday it was just a pleasant noise. It is as though my senses – those that filled me with awe and a sense of presence – have been dulled. No longer do I feel. I came across a passage this morning in Raymond Bailey’s, Thomas Merton on Mysticism –
God does not intend that he should have a place reserved for him to work in since true poverty of spirit requires that man shall be emptied of god and all his works so that if God wants to act in the soul he himself must be the place in which he acts…[God takes then] responsibility for his own action and is himself the scene of the action, for God is the one who acts within himself. (Meister Eckhart, Sermon, ‘Blessed are the Poor’.)
One has read all this sort of thing before, especially in St. John of the Cross. You can see the logic of it. In another quotation from the same book Aelred Graham says –
The earnest seeker after truth has usually decided in advance what kind of truth he is looking for… His views are dictated in advance by the needs of the illusory image he has constructed of himself.
And so all the false concepts and illusions have to be stripped away if one is to arrive at the truth. It is tempting to think that there are no false conceptions, that one’s ideas about God (partial and inadequate though they may be) reflect the reality. This is especially the case when one has had mystical experiences. God is love. God is Subject, not an object.
But the moments of high emotion engendered by such experiences do not last. In time they become a fading memory. Meanwhile life continues to be lived at full thrust, fuelled by various feelings and emotions – love, longing, loneliness, anger, frustration, alienation, suffering and, sometimes, joy. Each of these induces a pragmatic response with physiological as well as psychological affects. All this is entirely natural and easy to understand, but the point is the responses also build up a pragmatic self. It is this self which is the problem. The pragmatic self is self-centred – however much it may think itself other-centred and want to be so, nevertheless when its comfort and well-being are threatened it can think only of its own predicament. The pragmatic self is grasping. It may pride itself on being warm-hearted and generous but its underlying concern is always about its own advantage – if only that IT may go on being loving and generous. The pragmatic self is an isolated individual. It may be surrounded by loved ones and friends and have a rich social life but in the dark hours its sense of being different, of isolation and alienation, rises and haunts its waking dreams. The pragmatic self knows that death will bring about its end and so it fears death. There may be a resurrection and an after life, but it will not rise. It will die, perhaps even before the death of the body should it get Alzheimer’s disease or something similar.
This was the Buddha’s insight. As long as we are the prisoners of this individual, grasping self we are condemned to suffer. As long as the narrow, egotistical self is the centre about which our life revolves we shall not be able to discover the true centre, the still point, from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.
Egoism consists in this: absolute opposition, an impassable gulf is fixed between one’s own self and other beings. I am everything to myself and must be everything to others, but others are nothing in themselves and become something only as a means for me. My life and welfare is an end in itself, the life and welfare of others are only a means for my ends, the necessary environment for my self assertion. I am the centre and the world only a circumference. (Soloviev, V., The Justification of the Good, Constable, London 1918)
That self is the towering, windowless keep within which cowers the fragile worm that is the ego. The keep must be destroyed so that the worm might shrivel and die in the consuming fire of unconditional love. Then the self will die so that the soul may live. It will die anyway at death, but better that it should die before death. Better it should discover the consuming fire so that it can tell others and draw them out from the cold walls of their prisons.
This is why monasteries are so structured. The common life which forbids the ownership, even of one’s clothes, gnaws at the root of avarice and possessiveness. The prohibition of particular friendships disallows the consolation of an exclusive love. The abdication of individual personal advancement, the poverty, austerity, the lack of sleep, the lack of privacy, the plain food, all deprive the self of the relationships,
the emotions and situations which originally formed it. The pragmatic self is aware of its insubstantiality. This is why it needs to clothe itself with possessions and surround itself with relationships which support it. These must be stripped away. Only then, as Eckhart says, when the ego and all its supporting trappings have been emptied out, can God find a place to work.