In the between

February 13th, 2008

It occurred to me today, thinking about relationality, that the reason it is necessary to get the attention away from thoughts is so that the mind becomes empty and focused on nothing (this is not the same as not being focused). I relate to my thoughts. My emotions are exercised. I become involved. Therefore there is a need to disengage from all that is relative so that I may focus on the Absolute. The Absolute, though, is not there to be focused upon.

Relating to a person is easy. We do it instinctively. In a meaningful relationship more is communicated than that which is seen or heard. Although the communication is in the seeing, the look, it is not itself what is seen. It is, rather, in the feeling, the emotion and the meaning of the emotion – love, anger, guilt, fear, anguish – which is communicated. It is mutuality, each participating in the being of the other – what the Japanese call aidagara, betweenness. Another word they use is basho, place, locus. This relationship is the ‘place’ where I am located. It is not in me, nor outside me, but in the between of the other and me. Hence the difficulty with God. There is no seen or felt God. There may have been experiences in the past, numinous and otherwise, but they were nearly always fleeting irruptions, momentary glimmers in the all-pervading darkness. There may too have been, at times, a sense of presence, more an intuition than a feeling and, at other times, a sense of belonging, kinship, of being part of a no longer alien world. These were times when cracks appeared in the enclosing walls of the self. But most of the time there is simply this dull lump of a self, bereft of the finer emotions and heavy with inertia. The only option is to leave the self on one side, to focus the mind on nothing – not self, not thoughts, not emotions or feelings, simply on the breath and the mantra until they disappear and there is nothing. Sometimes this absence of anything becomes a vast and empty nothingness which is like going home. This is the aidagara, the locus of the relationship with Absolute Nothingness.

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Reciprocity

February 12th, 2008

I came across a telling quote from Edith Stein in McIntosh* p. 232. She is talking about the contemplative vocation and the desire to be wherever there is suffering in order to help, to assist, to love – simply to be there. This, however, is not possible. She goes on to say, ‘You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart.’ This is an idea that needs to be explored. There is certainly a powerful impetus to love, and especially the poor, the suffering and the victimised.

  Not only an impetus to love – there is also the sense of responsibility for the other which Levinas delineates. L’s discussion is, as far as I can see, one-sided, from the point of view of the self. But what goes for the self goes also for the other. There is, in fact, a mutual responsibility arising from a mutual calling into selfhood. The mother addressing her baby by name for the first time initiates his emergence as a self/person. But the baby is responsible for his mother as mother. By responding to her call he evokes her motherhood. 

L does not hold that the face-to-face relationship is a reciprocal one – ‘because it implies that humans are interchangeable, that one may substitute one person for another, trade off rights for goods, justifying exploitation or worse.’

 However, I do not see how the idea of reciprocity can be avoided and I suspect that L defines the word differently. I suspect that he means by it something like tit for tat, a mutual exchange of goods but not something which goes to the essence of those involved. By reciprocal relationship I mean one in which a change in one of the poles of the relationship produces a change in the other. Each of the entities in the relationship has a defining effect on the other.

*Mcintosh, Mark. Mystical Theology: Integrity of Spirituality and Theology , Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.


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Self

February 11th, 2008

July 30, 2002

Reading The Monk and the Philosopher* – so far an excellent introduction to Buddhism  – disappointing, though, on anatta. Much is made of the illogicality of the self. On analysis its existence is seen to be impossible, but the argument makes the assumption that the self is a thing, just as the body, or the brain, are things. When one looks for the location of the self it is nowhere to be found. He fails to make a clear distinction between a phenomenal and a substantial self. Buddhism readily admits to a phenomenal self. How could it not? It is the idea of a substantial self that is the problem. This problem is made more difficult because the terminology implies that the argument concerns a ‘thing’. If, however, the self is considered as a dynamic relational process a whole new perspective is opened up. Of course the self is not a thing; nor does it reside in the body, or the mind – although these are part of the dynamic process which generates, if that is the right word, the self. The self implies an other and without this other self cannot come into existence. If the self can be said to reside anywhere it is in the aidagara, the between, the relationship of self and other. It is the other who calls out the self in the newborn baby. It is the baby’s response to the other that discovers its latent self. Ultimately it is God, the Absolute Other on whom all relationships depend. 

*The Monk and the Philosopher: East Meets West in a Father-son Dialogue, Jean-Francois Revel, Matthieu Ricard, HarperCollins, London 1998

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Experience and negativity

February 7th, 2008

Thinking about a phrase by Mary Frohlich where she, quoting Denys Turner, talks about the –

faultiness of present-day assumptions which reduce the mystical to an“experience of negativity“ rather than recognizing (as did these great patristic and medieval theologians) that Christian life is founded on a “negativity of experience.”

It took a while for this to sink in and I think it is profoundly true and the consequences enormous. I think the current interest in consciousness, and its altered states, on the effect of drugs on conscious experience, and on Eastern mysticism, has focused attention on experience, and experiences. Likewise the influence of people like Otto. If one were to go merely by the phenomenology of experience it would be difficult, sometimes impossible, to distinguish ‘genuine’ mystical experiences from those induced by drugs. By ‘genuine’ I mean the experiences of genuinely holy people as compared to people like Huxley and Robert Forman, who would claim neither to be holy or that their experiences were supernatural.

I have given much thought to the experience of negativity, shunyata, the Void, emptiness etc. It is easy to rationalise it as that which is experienced when one sees over the horizon of the empirical world. The ‘beyond beyond’ is empty, not in the sense that it is contingent – the sense in which self and person are seen as empty in Buddhist thought – but in the sense that there is nothing that can be grasped, conceived, or thought. It is easy to go on from this position (for theists anyway) to assert that this emptiness is the plenum of God’s presence, the ‘ground’ of all that is, and that to have experienced it is, however negatively, to have experienced God. Certainly to experience the Void is deeply meaningful. It provides a perspective, perhaps for the first time, from which to see this empirical world no longer as an absolute given, but as ephemeral and contingent. 

The ‘negativity of experience’ is another matter. In prayer I would guess that, for most of the time, it is the normal experience – darkness. One simply holds oneself there in the darkness, experiencing neither the vertiginous emptiness of the Void, nor the loving presence of the Other. 

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Transcendence and experience

February 6th, 2008

I am groping with a vague idea, trying to make it explicit. It has been germinating for some time at the back of my mind. It has to do with the negativity of experience when it comes to prayer. There is tacit knowledge – an intuition of the Transcendent, which does not, and cannot, become explicit. This is because explicit knowledge is categorical and conceptual. Lonergan spelled out the difference between explicit knowledge and experience:

“To say that dynamic state [of mystic awareness] is conscious is not to say it is known. What is conscious is indeed experiences. But human knowing is not just experiencing. Human knowledge includes experiencing but adds to it scrutiny, insight, conception, naming, reflection, checking judging… the gift of God’s love ordinarily is not objectified in knowledge, but remains within subjectivity as a dynamic vector, a mysterious undertow, a fateful call to dreaded holiness. Because that dynamic state is conscious without being known, it is an experience of mystery.” (Lonergan, Bernard, Method in Theology, Herder & Herder, New York 1972  p. 106

Tacit knowledge is a conscious experience but there is nothing explicitly known. What is actually going on in religious experience?

 

Natural mystical experience – oneness leading to the disappearance of the subject/object dichotomy. The experience of the senses does not change, though there is a change in the meaning attributed to what is perceived. What changes is the sense of relationship. What is seen is external to the ‘I’, but not alien to it. On the contrary ‘I’ extends out into ‘all’. Nothing is alien, all is subjective. This is not solipsism. There is a paradox here – a subjectivity shared with the other.

Numinous mystical experience – the relational awareness of the OTHER – mysterium tremendum – who exists over and against the ‘I’. Sometimes this experience appears to be rooted in a specific empirical context, sometimes not. In any case what is important is not what is perceived but what is felt and the meaning attached to these feelings.

Presence – the experience of a transcendent presence, the OTHER. There may be numinous characteristics but here is no self/other dichotomy. The experience of being loved is from within the subjective perspective of the OTHER. There is self and there is the other but instead of being opposed they have merged, each retaining its identity. Each knows the other from within the other’s perspective. ‘I know as I am known.’

The two key elements in these three types of experience are meaning and relationality. Whatever the type of experience, it is perceived as profoundly significant and out of the ordinary.  This perception is not the result of empirical information, nor the result of a conceptual process. It is simply there. Similarly with relationality.

 

  We tend to think of experience as mediated by the senses but this is not always the case. For example, walking into a meeting, or approaching a group engaged in discussion, we pick up the emotional tenor immediately. We can be instantly aware of a charged atmosphere, of distress, of anger, etc. This is partly by means of a visual perception of the body language of the participants, but only partly. What is grasped is far too complex to be conveyed visually. If this were not the case we would be moved far more by the attitudes and actions we see on film or TV than in fact we are. It is through our relationship with others that emotions and feelings are communicated. There is no relationship with actors on a screen. (I suspect that one of the reasons why the theatre is more ‘dramatic’ is due to the physical proximity of the actors.) The baffling thing about religious experience is that it is possible to be aware of relationship without there being any visual or sensible referent.

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The mirror self

February 5th, 2008

Self is not self-sufficient. Self is like a mirror through which we look at everything. Everywhere we go we take the mirror and look at what is round about through it rather than looking directly. We find it very difficult to look directly, to put the mirror to one side. Sometimes it happens – when we are caught up in something so absorbing, so all-encompassing that the mirror becomes a restrictive hindrance and we let it go – listening to music, caught up in the collective emotion of a crowd, or group, etc. When we find ourselves in darkness the mirror becomes an obstacle. There is little or nothing to be seen so the tendency is to focus all the attention on the mirror itself. We become engrossed with our own feelings and preoccupations. It is a bit like being on the periphery of a wonderful spectacle and turning our back to it so that we can look through the mirror to see ourselves in the context of the spectacle. Of course we can see very little because our face is in the way. That’s as far as the analogy goes. There is, in fact, no spectacle to be seen but we do not know that because our face is taking up pretty well most of the mirror. But we feel there is something there to be seen. We are sure of it because we have had intimations of it, feelings of joy and sudden elation, feelings of a loving presence. So we intensify our gaze in the mirror but all we see is the reflection of self. Because, apart from the mirror and the reflection in it, there is nothing there to be seen. We must put the mirror of self aside – very, very difficult – and, to parody one of the desert fathers, learn to sit in the darkness and the darkness will teach us everything.

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Everyday mysticism

February 4th, 2008

I am much taken with Rahner’s idea of everyday mysticism and also with Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge. The two merge. There is a tacit awareness. Of what… it is not possible to say. Sometimes it is a sense of presence, sometimes a connectedness, sometimes a feeling of bliss, or unaccountable joy, i.e. the feeling emerges from nowhere and has no apparent referent. This awareness is most obvious when the body is engaged in routine activity and the mind is unoccupied – walking, working in the garden, doing the washing up, etc. Once I engage in mental activity it disappears. During meditation, not only is it not there, it seems unattainable.

I am beginning to think that the mystical journey is not just progress in knowledge, or awareness. It is a whole person thing. A phrase by Polanyi struck me vividly the other day. He gives as an example of tacit knowledge a blind person using a stick to find his way around. At first all his attention is focused on the sensations in his hand as he probes with the stick. Eventually, however, his attention switches, first to the tip of the stick and then to the reality that the stick touches. He decodes, as it were, tacitly the sensations in his hand into three-dimensional objects out there. In this way the stick becomes something from which the attention proceeds, and not something which attracts attention. Polanyi calls this a process of incorporation. He writes: “…we incorporate it in our body – or extend our body to include it – so that we come to dwell in it”.

 At first the sensations in the hand are explicit and say nothing more than, ‘This is what my hand is sensing.’ Eventually this explicitness fades and becomes tacit as the mind learns to interpret, or decodes, what is felt as the environment the tip is probing. 

… if we now regard the integration of particulars as an interiorization, … [it] now becomes a means of making certain things function as the proximal terms of tacit knowing, so that instead of observing them in themselves, we may be aware of them in their bearing on the comprehensive entity of which they constitute. It brings home to us that it is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their meaning.

This is analogous to religious experience. The feelings – joy, bliss, union, awe, love – are explicit at first, but they lack a context. Or rather, they do not fit the empirical context within which we live, our normal everyday reality. We have to learn to incorporate them so that we can extend from them into the reality to which they belong. This reality is transcendent, that is, it is not accessible to our senses, nor to any tools or instruments we might use to augment or senses. 

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Transcendent God

February 2nd, 2008

Thinking about God. I had an email from someone worried about eclecticism, about picking and choosing from the various religious offerings. It set me to thinking about God and how we persist in believing in simplistic concepts which, after a little thought, could not possibly be true. Miracles, for example. If God worked a miracle he would not be God. Miracles are divine interventions which alter the natural course of things, usually to some particular person’s advantage. For God to work a miracle he would have to choose to help one and not to help others. The idea of a god who has favourites, who chooses to help some, the few, and allows others, the majority, to suffer and die is not one I can subscribe to. But I can understand why many people do. It is a lottery syndrome. You pray, make novenas and sacrifices etc. and who knows, maybe it will be your turn for a bit of divine intervention. Worse still is the idea, perhaps your prayers have not been successful, that Our Lady, or a saint, will be more kindly disposed towards you and intervene on your behalf persuading God to change his mind. This may fit the picture of a fickle despot but it does not resemble what I recognise as God.

We tend to see God as up there somewhere, in heaven –  a transcendent Being set over and against the world. I think for many people this transcendent dimension is like another universe. We can only get there after death, how is never made clear. From time to time God does cross this gap and intervene in our affairs. The most important occasion when this happened was the Incarnation. Catholics also believe that God intervenes through the Sacraments – though nothing is ever perceived. This is not what transcendence means. Louis Nordstrom puts it well.

‘To paraphrase from the Mahayana classic The Heart Sutra: to have gone thoroughly beyond is to have gone beyond beyond. The point is that true transcendence leaves no conceptual (or conceptualizable) trace – no trace of what has been transcended, what it has been transcended toward, nor any trace of the experience itself. True transcendence can neither be understood in terms of anything else nor in terms of itself: the former because it cannot contain any trace of the relative, the latter because it is, like all things, empty or devoid of self-nature.’*

God is not a being, i.e. a member of the category ‘beings’, or ‘entities’. He is not the most powerful being, not even an Absolute Being. Although he is referred to as Absolute Being this is not, strictly speaking, legitimate. God is not, cannot be an item of experience, not sensible, not emotive, not conceptual. God is ‘beyond, beyond’ any sort of experience it is possible to have. But it is possible to experience the effect of God’s ‘presence’. This is an experience which Stace calls ‘both something and nothing’.

 It is negative, nothing, in that nothing is experienced. It is something in that there is an awareness that this ‘nothingness’, this empty experience, is of profound significance. It is not the nothingness of dreamless sleep, or absent mindedness, or vacuity. It is a nothingness pregnant with meaning. This experience comes with no labels. It cannot be categorised. But it does come with the conviction that, somehow, one is in touch with Reality, with what is not ephemeral, not empirical, not contingent. Christians interpret this experience as an experience of the Divine, Buddhists as an experience of Sunyata. 

The intriguing question which emerges from this is, ‘What is the ‘relationship’ between this totally transcendent God and the human person?’ I put ‘relationship’ even though, as Nordstrom pointed out, God ‘cannot contain any trace of the relative’.

*[Mysticism without transcendence: Reflections on liberation and emptiness, Louis Nordstrom, Philosophy East and West, Vol 31 No. 1 January 1981 Pp.89 -95. Cf. Forman, RKC., Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian, Element Books, Shaftsbury, 1991 p. 111]

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Evil

February 1st, 2008

Reading Forman on Eckhart – evil is the absence of being, it does not exist. This is good scholastic theology but I have always felt that it is a ridiculous thing to say when one is confronted by the appalling reality of evil and suffering. It struck me today, however, that in a very real sense Augustine and Thomas are right – evil is really the absence of being – if you look at things sub specie aeternitate, or from a mystical perspective. The empirical world is an ephemeral world, continually coming into and passing out of existence, replicating itself and evolving as it does so. It is contingent, empty, sunya as the Buddhists put it. What being it has it has from God and, to a greater or lesser extent, reflects something of God. Evil does not emanate from God but from human beings. It spite of its terrible ability to destroy and cause suffering, its existence derives from human perversion. It is doubly contingent, contingent on persons who are themselves contingent on God. If one cannot see beneath the surface of reality then evil is most horribly real. If one can see that reality is translucent and that, however dimly, something of God shines through, then evil (without detracting anything from its power to destroy and pervert what is good) is seen as ultimately insubstantial and unreal.

Evil is parasitic, dependent on corrupted good. When the host dies, evil dies with it. As long as evil has a host it has the power to spread and corrupt others making them hosts. What is good is constantly replicating itself but evil cannot do that. It cannot produce offspring as good can. It can only infect others. Evil is sterile. It leads nowhere. It can produce nothing but suffering, death and destruction.

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Darkness

January 31st, 2008

The feeling of being lost, of being adrift without oars and out of sight of land, persists. Meditation is, when it is not a struggle with distracting thoughts, simply being there – which raises the question of what it means to be. To be with people – fine; to be doing something constructive – fine; to be engaged on a project – all fine; but just to be, poised before – what? God? He is not an object of experience and I am wary now of making assumptions – even assumptions disguised as acts of faith. Poised before nothing. Eckhart would approve I think. But this ‘nothing’ has a way of leaching determination out of the will, of deflating courage and of knocking the props out from under endurance. Hence I feel deflated, dégonflé, crevé, épuisé. (Why are the French words more expressive than the English. Perhaps it is something to do with the lingering, falling last syllable.) There remains only hope that sometime the darkness will give way.

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