I can understand why some of the mediaeval religious got involved in all sorts of penitential excesses. It is very frustrating spending days, weeks, months in prayer and trying to lead a religious life only to seem to be getting nowhere. The trouble is that one’s mindset is constantly changing, influenced, if not determined, by events, the body, feelings and all sorts of things over which one has no control. So there will be a few ‘good’ days followed by many mediocre ones. The feeling that one is getting nowhere may not be true in an absolute sense but it certainly feels true and when it comes to feelings no amount of pep-talking to oneself is going to change them. What is to be done. There is need for some sort of strategy that takes account of the fact that one is a process and not a fixed entity. The strategy has to be one that goes with the flow, dealing with the highs and the lows, the times of ennui and accidie, as well as those of fervour and enthusiasm. The traditional monastic strategy is an enclosed cadre vowed to a regime of poverty, chastity and obedience which carries the individual along. For most enclosure is not appropriate – though there may be a longing for solitude. And I am suspicious about taking vows for reasons that I have not fully worked out. They are a bit like a straightjacket restricting any contrary movement. My feeling is that there is no merit in not doing something one is constrained from doing anyway. I remember talking to a monk once, a long time ago now. He said that he always wore clerical clothes and a collar when he went out of the monastery because they acted as a constraint against actions he might not otherwise be able to resist. So vows can be a help, but as long as they are necessary one has not achieved that conversio morum which is one of the preliminary goals of the religious life. It is a bit like learning to ride a bike. You will never learn as long as someone is holding it so that you don’t fall. There are going to be falls. That is inevitable. One just has to keep getting up afterwards, dusting oneself off, swallowing wounded pride and shame and get on with it.
So, a strategy. My initial feeling is that meditation is the key, and I mean meditation seriously done for an hour morning and evening, not half an hour of vacuity and drifting thoughts. I believe there is a document from the Vatican this week condemning New Age practices, including meditation. Such blanket condemnations do no good and do not reflect well on the Church’s ability to make religious judgements. There are some forms of meditation which are questionable leading either to a form of self aggrandisement or to a pandering to the emotions. I don’t see, though, how any form of meditation based on Buddhist practice can be anything but helpful. After all, they have been doing it for two and a half thousand years and have learnt a thing or two about the mind and how it works. And it is the mind, especially the will, which is the key factor here. No religious progress can be made if bodily feeling and emotions determine action and lifestyle. So let’s try to work out the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
WHAT?
God is the WHAT, if that’s not blasphemy. One of the questions that really bugs me, considering that God is Ultimate Reality, the All in All, and that we are destined to be oned with Him, is why we need to go through this whole samsaric process. Bernadette Roberts uses the analogy of a bubble to explain the relationship of the individual to God. Like the air, God is both inside and outside the bubble. When the bubble is popped there exists only God. Our usual awareness is of the iridescent surface of the bubble – the individual self – and we fail to recognise either the inner or the outer reality. The analogy cannot be taken too far. Suffice to say that God is both the ground of our being and also the wholly transcendent Other towards whom we are drawn – an irreconcilable paradox. So, given that God is the All in All, why is the individual process of birth-life-death necessary? In other words, why me, why you, why anybody? There has, in the past, been a tendency to play down the significance of this life, that is, its importance is seen to lie only in the fact that it is a precursor to the next. In the East it has been seen as samsara, an insubstantial and illusory reality compared to Brahman, or to Sunyata; in the West as a ‘vale of tears’, an unpleasant interlude between birth and death, the definitive birth into eternity. This cannot be a valid approach to the meaning of this life. The fact that God is Creator means that creation has an absolute significance, the fact that God is incarnate means that humanity has an absolute significance, the fact that God is immanent means that what is indwelt has absolute significance, the fact that God is transcendent means that what is transcended has absolute significance. In trying to see the light we fail to see what the light illuminates, or rather, we only see the shadow that it casts. If we could only turn our gaze away from the shadows to see what it is that the light is illuminating. That, after all, is what God sees. But we cannot. We can only see from our own human perspective. Though there are glimpses; from time to time an intuition, a feeling, an intimation of depths beyond depths.
HOW?
There tend to be two approaches one in which the mind, the other in which the will (love) predominates. In practice I don’t think the two can be separated and, ideally, they ought to work in tandem but usually one or the other is dominant. The mind is the intellectual approach which sets out a path, a programme of action to be followed. It is based on knowledge and on the premise that the ultimate goal is to know the truth. The will is the way of love and faith (= trust).
Meditation is a path from which to see more clearly. It is a path which leads to the awareness of emptiness. Emptiness is a standpoint from which things and the self show themselves for what they are:
True emptiness is nothing less than what reaches awareness in all of us as our own absolute self-nature. In addition, this emptiness is the point at which each and every entity that is said to exist becomes manifest as what it is in itself, in the form of its true suchness.
[James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2001, p. 222]
What does all this mean to one not familiar with Buddhist concepts? Emptiness is the contingent nature of reality as we know it, including ourselves and our own self awareness. The bottom line is that there is no security, solidity, or permanency. All is flux, panta rei, as the ancient Greeks perceived. The only certainty is constant change. The hard problem is how to make sense of this constant change. How can anything have meaning if it is just a momentary phenomenon in a sea of momentary phenomena. And this goes for people too. What meaning had the lives of all the countless millions of people who lived in the past. What meaning will our lives have a hundred years from now. Looked at in this way depression looms. There are no satisfactory answers. This is why it is so important to come to perceive reality as it actually is – empty/contingent.
There are no spiritual ‘rocks’ to which one can tether oneself. This is not to say that spirituality and spiritual practices are not necessary. They are vital, but they are propaedeutic and one needs to be prepared to have all support knocked away and to be set adrift. I can understand what Buddha means when he says that we must be our own resource. This is not Pelagianism. In the end all one has is this contingent self which is no-self. Only when one realises this, makes it real, does the true nature of Reality become apparent. This is not Pelagianism because God is immanent in all that is and especially in us. All life, all energy is drawn from Him but this is not a datum of experience – though sometimes there are hints and intimations. It is because we cannot be aware of the transcendent dimension of reality that we cannot see contingency/emptiness in context. And so we appear to be alone, drifting on a boundless and featureless ocean. All that is left is faith/trust, more or less blind, and love. This is the only way, the only strategy.