Phronema

Hick on prayer (p. 18f) asserts that ‘we are all linked at deep unconscious levels in a universal network in which our thoughts, and even our emotions, are all the time affecting others as others are in turn affecting us.’ This is simply an assertion, an article of faith, and he admits that there is no evidence to support it. He gives the impression that the good wrought by prayer is simply the result of this human solidarity, unconscious and unfelt. No mention is made of God. Perhaps this last is an oversight and he does not intend to exclude divine influence.

Prayer is very mysterious and I think it does work in something like the way Hick describes. Although there is no empirical evidence for it, there does appear to be a network linking, not only we sentient humans, but also everything in the cosmos. Rupert Sheldrake, with his morphic fields, is quite convincing. There is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence of a bond between people, usually where there is an intimate relationship, such that when something significant or tragic happens to one the other is immediately aware that something has happened to the other even though they may be widely separated. This is the sort of thing to which Hick is referring. But prayer goes much deeper than what may simply be a natural bonding.

There is, first of all, the urge to pray. This is universal and has always been a factor in our religious behaviour. This is so deep rooted that even those who have never previously shown any religious commitment or belief often turn to prayer in life threatening situations. The cynic might say that here is an example of someone making Pascal’s wager. But I do not think so. This is no calculated gesture based on a rational assessment of the odds but a deep-seated emotional response to a limit situation. Prayer springs from the deepest roots of the self, from that zone in the affective system which straddles the conscious and the unconscious mind. Here situations, events and actions initiate emotions, feelings and moods, which are evaluated as meaningful and significant. Here we touch the foundations of our being. None of this is in the rational mind. It is not something we can conceptualise or argue with. It is a given, with the numinous quality of an ancient memory.

Here we sense not just the interlinking network which binds us all, although that is sensed. Here, obscurely and tentatively, we sense the Presence within. This is what prayer does. It brings this Presence to the surface of our minds. It opens the channels which link us and which have been narrowed and constricted by egotism and self-interest. God is active, not as a puppet master manipulating the strings of cause and effect. God acts in and through us. This I believe to be true, though I am not aware of it in any concrete sense, nor is there any empirical evidence of it. I will never forget one day when I was in the Little Brothers. Dominic Voillaume had come to make his annual retreat and had spent a week in a hermitage on San Capracio, the mountain above the village. I walked into the room where he was bent over a table reading the paper. He turned to greet me and his face was – transfigured, is the only word for it. There was joy, peace, beauty – impossible to describe. It was almost embarrassing to look him in the eye his face was so naked. The story of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai and having to hide his face behind a veil came to mind. Dominic had just come down from the mountain and his face reflected what he had experienced.

I think when people talk about prayer they concentrate too much on the knowing and rational activity and not enough on the emotive and feeling side. It is relatively easy to come quite quickly to the existential limit of the senses and to sit simply aware that one is sitting. If there are thoughts and images they run in the background like an unattended television screen. Emotionally one feels calm and at peace. There may have been emotional turbulence but that, like the thoughts, has been put to one side. One still has not reached the limits of being; knowing – yes, perhaps, being – no. One is still ensconced in the affective self. We are like the child who, when the events of the day become too much, sucks his thumb and hugs his comforter. These, insignificant in themselves, are the psychological substitute for the warmth and security of his mother’s breast. As long as we can snuggle into the comfort of withdrawing into ourselves we have not reached the limits of being. We have reached, perhaps, the foot of the mountain and before us is a long, hard climb into the obscurity and darkness of the clouds at the top. 

Reading John Hick – Religious awareness –

Hick’s thesis is that awareness of the transcendent is not easily apparent but has to be cultivated. This stems from the fact that we are free to make choices. I agree that personal freedom is a factor but it is not the whole story. Being human means that we are not determined from birth by instincts and environment in the way that a mouse or a lobster is. Our genetic endowment and social environment, though vitally important, are not wholly determinative, not even, once a certain level of development has been achieved, in extreme situations such as famine or war, cf. the countless stories of altruism, self-sacrifice, heroism and the ability of many individuals to transcend a destructive environment. Self-consciousness gives us the ability to step back from the physical, moral and social inputs and cancel instinctive reactions. This allows us to be creative in our responses, to be proactive, taking into consideration other factors than those immediately apparent.

Some, relatively few, are born with a profound sense of religious awareness, cf. Bernadette Roberts and examples in the findings of The Religious Experience Research Unit at Lampeter. Some seem to have little or none. For the majority it is something that needs to be cultivated. Sooner or later we all encounter limit situations where existential questions are thrust on us.

The meaning one attaches to life, to being human, has to take into account our present situation. The meaning/purpose of life is not clear because we do not possess the whole picture. Hick is not rigorous enough (p. 50). True, our dispositional structure affects the way we live, but equally, the way we live, the worldview in which we are immersed, affects our dispositional structure. It may be almost impossible for an individual in an antipathetic social milieu to ‘experience as’ in a religious sense even though all the clues may be there. Marx’s insight that the social being of man determines his consciousness is apposite here. That said, finding oneself in a limit situation which brings into question the belief structures and hidden assumptions, hitherto unexamined, and shows them up as relative can be the stimulus which brings about a new way of seeing/experiencing.

The question of meaning cannot be answered in spatio-temporal terms. This is why the question is often seen to be meaningless, or unanswerable. Any possible answer must be relative and conditional. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ without any qualifying words such as ‘now’, or ‘for me’ demands a definitive answer. Since the human situation is always provisional and in process such an answer cannot be given. One has to get beyond the conditional and the relative to the essence of humanity. And this is the problem – what is the essence of humanity? Some would say we are simply intelligent animals. If this is all we are the question of meaning can be answered in material terms. Others, perhaps the majority, would say that there is something in us which transcends our psychosomatic limitations. What is this ‘something’ and in what way does it transcend the spatio-temporal dimensions of experience? It could be said that this transcendence consists in the fact that as self-conscious and self-determining beings we have the power to transcend many of the physical and social constraints of our environment. This is why we have been able to progress from a primitive existence to our form of life today, able, at least in prospect, to manipulate the genes that determine our bodily existence – a fact that fills many with horror because we are tinkering with our humanity, a humanity we do not fully understand. 

Others would say that the transcendent element in us is the fact that our being opens out into the being of God. What does that mean? We are not self-sufficient. Physically we need food, clothing and shelter to survive. Socially we need others in order to become persons and, having become persons, to achieve a certain level of happiness and fulfilment in loving and being loved. Intellectually we need others to learn language, not only to communicate with them, but also to think, process ideas, arrive at conclusions and make decisions planning for the future. When all our physical, social, emotional and intellectual needs are met we still find that life is not satisfactory. Something in us remains unsatisfied. On the one hand the three brute facts of existence, powerlessness, contingency and scarcity gnaw at the mind’s complacency. On the other hand there comes from time to time the feeling that the walls of our existence are translucent and behind them we catch glimpses of a Presence.

[John Hick; The Fifth Dimension, One world, Oxford, 1999]

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.