Attention

November 23rd, 2007

Meditation is not easy. As Yves Raguin puts it, ‘The way of immanence is always a dark way.’ After a few minutes of saying the Jesus Prayer I simply count breaths. I count up to nine and then start again. This helps keep me alert because the natural impulse is to go on counting and it requires a little mindfulness to remember to start again after nine. It is difficult to remain focused for more than a minute to a minute and a half. This is slowly improving. Simple, bare attention is not a natural state unless the will is totally focused. The mental chatter, ideas, images, feelings etc. goes on ceaselessly. Habituation quickly sets in and attention to counting, breathing and awareness of the body is soon distracted.

The trouble is that bare attention is not dramatic. There is no excitement, no colour, beauty, or wonder. Attention craves novelty. Once it has exhausted everything within its field it relaxes and becomes prey to the next idea, image, or feeling that emerges. And yet bare attention is the key. The one thing which separates us from reality is the mind. We live in this mental world of our constructing. Physically we are present to our environment and to the others who may be in it with us. Mentally though, as often as not, we are present only to our mental world, caught up in ideas, imaginary conversations, fantasies, day dreams. Every teacher and public speaker is aware of the difficulty of commanding the attention of others. They may be physically present but, as often as not, they are not always present to the speaker. How often we walk without noticing our surroundings. lost in thought. It follows that if it is our mental world which separates us from our environment and from others it also separates us from God, from awareness of the transcendent and even from awareness of ourselves. We fail to become aware, as Tillich puts it, that ‘the finite world points beyond itself.’

 Bare attention may be boring after a little while but it is here where we are immediately in touch with reality and with God. We have become so habituated to the mode of our mental world that we are unable to appreciate the richness of reality. It is because of this attention to now, to the context of this moment, that the practitioners of Zen are so intensely conscious of nature and of the existential significance of the tiniest details – as Basho noted all those years ago. 

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Depths and depths

November 22nd, 2007

 The thing about meditation, one of the reasons why it is not so boring sometimes, is that it is all about disconnecting all relationships. Even though one is alone, the mind still dwells on personal relationships – those that matter. It worries at them, speculates, invents scenarios. When this is stopped by focusing, it feels bored. Nothing important is going on – importance is conveyed by the emotive content of the relationship foremost in the mind. Once attention is relaxed, because nothing important is going on, the unconscious takes over and either generates a new series of internal dialogues, or hypnogogic episodes. Some of these are really strange. They seem to come from nowhere – certainly not invented by the imagination. They have a quality of otherness, strangeness, about them.

It struck me that anatta is awareness with all relationships put aside. It is relationships which make the self. Each relationship evokes a different self. Once all relationships are put aside there remains only the observer, awareness of sensations, waiting for thoughts to emerge. It wonders where they come from. Relationship to thoughts. Stop thinking. Focus. Just awareness. There are depths and depths. Anticipation. To go into the still depths.

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Meditation

November 21st, 2007

It is not books I need now but experience, the experience of meditation and insight – leading, hopefully, to … I don’t know. Understanding , certainly. Fulfilment hopefully. Anyone can read and amass information. But this knowledge is conceptual and second hand. At best concepts are deductions based on interpretations of direct experience. At worst they are constructs based on anything from imagination to wishful thinking. It is easy to be tempted by these last. They can be warm and comfortable, pandering to the need for reassurance and security. The way of meditation is very lonely and very austere. The other evening I was listening to Gregorian chant while working at the computer. It always transports me back to my days as a monk. I was overcome with a nostalgia, more,  with a longing for the spirituality of the monastery. The Office of Compline is particularly soothing and comforting. In the dark old church the monks gather round the sanctuary lit by the warm light of candles. The beautiful old melodies of the plainchant invoke the protection of God, the Virgin and the saints. None of the terrors of darkness or of the night may penetrate here. Here there is the presence of Christ in a community and fellowship and love. As an individual I am supported and upheld by my membership of the community, by my baptism – making me a child of God – by the presence of Christ. All that is required of me is fidelity to my vows. 

In contrast the way of meditation is very lonely and austere. There are no warm flickering candles, only the all-enveloping darkness. There is no community, but the solitary counter of breaths. There is no reassurance, no God, no Christ only the agonising urge to know. There is also faith – belief that reality is not just this compendium of sensations – and a commitment to persevere. And that is all. Doubt surrounds on every side. Sensations of discomfort, or sleepiness intrude. Waking dreams and hypnagogic fantasies weave their mental tapestries. Hope flickers and gutters dimly in the all-enveloping darkness.

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Death

November 20th, 2007

To extend the roller-coaster analogy, I was thinking about death this morning in the shower and it struck me that life is like being on a train with no windows and an unknown destination. No one can remember getting on the train. Nor does anyone know where it is going, or why. All we know are the carriages we live in, so we occupy our time as best we can. Every now and then the train stops and someone is made to get off. This is a very unhappy time for that person and his friends. The friends feel abandoned and the person steps into the unknown. The friends will never see him, again, nor, as far as he knows, he them. Each person dreads the time when it will be his turn to get off. Life on the train may not be perfect, sometimes it is hellish, but it is all we know. So why are we made to get off? Why can we not stay on the train and enjoy life with our fiends forever? The analogy cannot be pushed too far, but it does help us to realise that life is not just our present experience. There is far more to life, depths, heights and broad expanses that we cannot even begin to imagine. Why insist on remaining within the narrow confines of the train when there is a beautiful world out there? How different everything would be if we all knew why we were on the train, if the train had windows and we could see the passing countryside and if we knew our destination.

But we don’t know our destination. We can no more imagine what that destination might be like than the child in the womb can imagine what it will be like to walk with his lover through beautiful countryside on a glorious summer day. Perhaps we should regard death as a metamorphosis, a second birth into a new stage of life, but we don’t. Among Christians there is a belief that death was not originally an inherent part of the human process and only became so as a result of the Fall.

 Consequently death has always been regarded as a shocking, often tragic, closure. There are a number of points that need to be cleared up. 

Is there any evidence that the ‘train’ is not all there is? There is no hard evidence, I suspect this is because it would be impossible to make such evidence available, just as it would be impossible to convey to a child in the womb information about life after birth. Even though there is some information available to the child in the form of external sounds it does not have the ability to evaluate these and distinguish them from internal sounds. Likewise with adults it is not at all uncommon for people to have glimpses of the transcendent. Statistical evidence suggests that perhaps more than 50% of people have such experiences. Those who have these experiences have no doubts that they are genuine. They have seen beyond the horizon of our physical limitations. However, these experiences are subjective and not available to objective scrutiny. Nevertheless, if mystical experience were seen as offering a real possibility of finding answers to the mysteries of our existence more people would be encouraged to pursue it. Unfortunately the Church has always been wary of mystical experience. Kolokowski* gives two main reasons for this.

THEOLOGICAL – In all monotheistic creeds the gap between God and his creatures has always been crucial.  The path to God is through humility, repentance, and recognition of sinfulness and impotence.  The distance can be bridged by love but never cancelled.  Therefore to speak, as Eckhart did, of being transformed totally in God without any distinction being left smacks of blasphemy and hubris. This is a good example of ideology imposing its criteria on experience and denying the validity of those experiences which do not fit.

INSTITUTIONAL – The charismatic concept of the Church implies that it is the irreplaceable mediator between God and his people.  This is expressed particularly through the sacraments.  Yet the mystic does not need human intermediaries.  His communication with God is direct and, therefore, he may imagine that he is free to dispense with ministers. The mystic sees and feels God in any stone, or any drop of water, and thus does not need a special piece of consecrated bread to gain access to Him.  Ecclesiastical suspicion of mysticism is quite understandable; anybody could claim to be anointed by God.  This is why the Church defines criteria by which the genuine can be distinguished from the false.

 The need of the institution to protect its power inhibits the exploration of our own nature and our connections with the Transcendent, hence the need to be protected from the misguided, or malicious, ‘anybodys’ and their false claims. Because mysticism is such an unknown area it is open to exploitation by charlatans. If there were a system within the Church similar to that which exists in Zen whereby the master validates the pupils experience we might make genuine progress.

 There has been too much emphasis on transcendence and not enough on immanence. We each need to discover for ourselves the  Spirit Paul talks about in Romans Chapter 8

Why death? If we are destined for an existence which transcends the physical limitations of the body then, why death? Why not a metamorphosis? I suspect there is much more to death than we are prepared to admit. We have a deeply ingrained longing for eternal life and for eternal youth. You only have to read the multitude of myths ranging from the Garden of Eden story to Tir na nOg. These advance the idea that an earthly paradise is possible. A paradise in terms of an idyllic life in beautiful surroundings is all that we can grasp. We cannot imagine any other kind of afterlife, except, perhaps, sitting on a cloud in a long white nightgown playing a harp.  We are living bodies. Our feelings and emotions determine what is meaningful and significant, not our abstract thoughts. Ideas and concepts may be beautiful. They may construct sublime mathematical or philosophical structures but nothing as meaningful as the feeling of loving and being loved. Death spells the end to all this. The decomposition of the body means the destruction of the amygdala and those parts of the brain where emotions and feelings are generated, it means the destruction of the senses which give pleasure. If a mind survives it will be a mind without sensations and feelings, truly an insubstantial wraith. This is why so much emphasis is placed on the resurr
ection of the body. Human life is bodily life.

The idea of the resurrection of the body has all sorts of problems associated with it. Not least of these is that of location. Where will all these billions and billions of bodies be? Will they require social and physical structures to cater to their physical needs? If the answer to these questions, as Paul seems to imply in I Corinthians, is that they will be spiritual bodies (a contradiction in terms?) and as such will have no physical needs, then what is the purpose of bodies. I suspect that the resurrection of the body is a metaphor for an utterly new kind of existence.

We cling to the idea of a bodily resurrection because we cannot imagine a form of existence that does not require a body. How shall we see, hear, feel and interact with others if we do not have a body? Therefore, we shall have to have a new body; different, yes; spiritual, yes, but a body nonetheless. From within the train we cannot resolve these paradoxes. All we have is faith – blind and dark, but that is all we have. That, and the glimpses of transcendence.

*[L. Kolokowski; Religion, Fontana, London 1993 p. 103-4]

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On the roller-coaster

November 19th, 2007

It is easy to understand how material things and material well-being can become so important, and easy to forget that they are nevertheless ephemeral. We know this – though it is not usually admitted – especially when we encounter the limit situations and reality checks which insist on intruding into even the most protected of lives. What we do not know is how to reach beyond the ephemeral and touch Reality.

Why are silence, solitude and stillness so important if one wants to pierce through the ephemeral? It struck me the other day that life is like a roller-coaster. There is a long steep climb to begin, then a rushing series of highs and lows, soaring loops and plunging dives, swerving changes of direction until one enters the gradual descent to the end. Such is the speed of the ride and the pressure of events that there is no time to become aware of the wider fairground. But it is possible to stop the roller-coaster, or at least freeze-frame the action and become aware of the wider scene – the framework on which it is built, the adjoining stalls and rides, the car park, the roads and even the peaceful countryside beyond. We may even discover that, while we cannot get off the roller coaster until it finishes its journey, its speed and direction are not entirely beyond our control. 

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Mysticism

November 17th, 2007

 

Back to Deikman. He seems to see mystical union in only in monistic terms. The individual is subsumed into the whole, losing its individuality, like a drop of water falling into the ocean. But unity need not imply singularity. In the mystical context it is dynamic, not static. When a pianist plays all the disparate elements of his body, his heart, mind and emotions become a unity. Likewise with an orchestra. The idea of God as the Lord of the Dance is not coincidental. We are all elements in the cosmic dance, only we are not aware of it for the most part. Union is one-mindedness, more than just co-operation and co-ordination. ‘Have the same mind in you as was in Christ Jesus,’ said Paul to the Philippians. Mystical union is not the realisation of an ontological primordial state. It is the realisation of one mind, one will. Hence the importance of conversion. 

What I am trying to express here is not easy and needs a lot of working out. Although Deikman is often very clear, at other times he confuses things. In his chapter on Intuition he begins by treating mysticism as a science. Whatever it is, mysticism is not a science. An art? – better, but this does not include the moral element. Moran is quite right in asserting that a concept of what it means to be human, and what is involved in human development, must include the idea of conversion. We are, above all, moral creatures. There are plenty of descriptions of drug induced mystical experiences which agree, more or less word for word, with natural mystical experiences. The assumption by many, including I think Deikman, is that they are the same. My feeling is that this is too simplistic. There are other factors involved.

There are different types of mystical experience, a feeling of expansion, nature mysticism, soul mysticism, pan-en-henism, the numinous encounter with the mysterium tremendum, transforming union – to give a rough list. Some are natural states which do not involve a personal or moral commitment. 

We are, above all, moral beings. Love is a fundamental driving force. The idea that the experience of union with the Absolute, with God, is amoral, i.e. does not require any moral commitment, does not seem correct. In other words, the experiences of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Alduous Huxley, Timothy Leary, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Augustine are not equivalent although their descriptions of these experiences may be similar.

The scientific approach to mysticism is that of the detached observer. The mystical approach is one of engagement. The scientific approach is limited because it can only evaluate in a detached way from outside the context of the mystic’s experience. It cannot experience what it is to be the dynamic confluence of relationships that a person really is.

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Soul

November 16th, 2007

Reading Deikman – The Observing Self – sparked off some inconclusive ideas. He makes a contrast between religion and mysticism. The former is concerned with ritual and with propitiating the deity; the latter with bringing about the realisation that ‘I’ = God. He is much too simplistic when it comes to mysticism, seemingly aware only of the monistic variety. He does not appear to have read any Christian writers on the subject. There are, broadly speaking, two mystical traditions. One sees fulfilment in union with God – a union that is not a merging of identities, the other sees it in the realisation of identity. Within these two schools there are variations based on subtle distinctions. Given the impossibility of articulating mystical experience and the varieties of understanding and interpretation, I don’t think these differences are irreconcilable. However, Deikman raises an interesting question – is there a progression from religious experience to mystical experience? It is tempting to say yes on the grounds that the mystical experience is a foretaste of what happens after death. But, as Moran** points out, that assumes that there is a clearly determined end point. Perhaps there is, and perhaps, given the endless variety of individuals, there isn’t.

I think we have lost utterly the ideal of death giving meaning to life. This is very clear from Sogyal Rinpoche’s: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The myth of the ‘fountain of youth’ is just that, a wish fulfilment for eternal youth, eternal childhood even. It sees the meaning of life as narcissistic carefree play in a garden of pleasures. Death does give meaning to life, not because it is an end but because it is the end of the beginning. Deikman suggests that the answer to the problem of meaning does not lie within our ordinary perception. Reality as experienced by caterpillars, butterflies, sea anemones and kittywakes are all different and all limited. With a little imagination we can visualise something of reality as they perceive it. If we can appreciate this, why do we assume that our perception of reality is complete?

Deikman goes on to make two crucial points. 1. Our core sense of personal existence – the ‘I’ – is located in awareness, not in its content. I am not my thoughts, feelings or emotions. 2. We cannot observe the observing self; we must experience it directly. It has no defining qualities, no boundaries, no dimensions. One of the reasons why the preoccupation of the senses, with pleasure, with material things leads to alienation is because it dislocates the ‘I’ from its centre. It attaches it to an object or a self-construct. It reifies the soul.

I find his description of the observing self very interesting, especially coming from a scientist. It goes a long way towards describing the soul. For a long time I have been bothered by the concept ‘soul’. What does it mean to have a soul? Can one ‘have’ a soul? Where are you when your soul is in Heaven, Purgatory, or wherever? Is the soul your ‘self’? How can that be if it is directly created by God and infused into the body? So many questions with no satisfactory answers. On the one hand soul seemed redundant, another term for ‘self’. And yet it denoted the spiritual element in us which ‘self’ could do only partially. What he describes is a spiritual entity. Everything to do with a person is physical, or material, or energy which is derived from physical processes, except the observing self. Somehow, the OS emerges from the mental activity of the brain. This idea begs so many questions. How does it emerge? I can see there is something in the Dalai Lama’s contention that previous lives are the condition for the emergence of this one. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. Is what emerges a particular aspect of Being which takes on my distinctive characteristics? I suspect that this is nearer the truth than that each of us is absolutely unique. If we were unique how could there be empathy?

*(Deikman, Arthur J., The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1982)
**(Moran G., Alternative Developmental Images in Fowler, Nipkow and Schweitzer eds., Stages of Faith and Religious Development, SCM Press, London 1991)

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Prayer

November 15th, 2007

Meditation and prayer are very different. I find myself wanting to pray during meditation but cannot. Not because I cannot pray, in fact the impulse to do so is often urgent with eloquence, but because the way I see God has changed radically in the last few years. When I prayed it was, not just to a person, but to Person. It was to the Almighty who could, if he wished, grant any desire. Very often prayer was like a bleeding wound pouring out the blood of anguish and desolation, asking to be healed and comforted, what Jean-Louis Chrétien calls ‘wounded speech’. Often it was a cry for intervention, a plea for the rearrangement of events so that I might feel better – though I never allowed myself to think in such a blatantly selfish fashion and always put an altruistic spin on things. Even though I realised there were so many problems with a worldview that saw God as a Transcendent manipulator, as Someone who intervened in history in order to arrange events so they fitted his plan, this realisation did not percolate through to my emotional life. God the Intervenor fitted my emotional needs. The God that made intellectual sense did not. I lived quite happily with this dichotomy for a long time, never questioning the prayer of petition.

However, since I have retired and since I have been meditating regularly and seriously it has been less and less easy to pray like that – for a number of reasons. The sight of the starving children in southern Sudan on the TV screens nearly every day, homeless people sleeping in doorways, young people rejected by their families, the victims of war – there are so many who deserve divine intervention more than I that it is no longer possible to pray just for my needs, I can only pray for others.

In any case it is no longer possible to believe in a God who intervenes for some in response to prayer while he allows millions to continue suffering and dying. More and more prayer, and meditation, has become an exercise in searching for God in the depths of being. ‘Searching’ is the wrong word, as though God was some discrete being concealed from view. It is more an exercise in coming to see in a new way. The story of the little fish searching for the ocean sums up what I am trying to say. It is so difficult to say anything at all about God and yet he is the oxygen of life.

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Solitude

November 14th, 2007

Solitude is not a natural state. We are, in our deepest essence, social beings, constituted by the relationships which make us what we are. Take these relationships away, as happens when one finds oneself all alone, and it is as though various aspects of self have been torn away leaving bleeding wounds. There is an overwhelming temptation to alleviate the pain these cause by drifting into a fantasy world, living vicariously, a fantasy self engaged in fantasy relationships. This escape is all the more tempting if it distracts from the nagging worries which thrust the stark reality of the three brute facts of existence into the forefront of consciousness. The quicksands of insecurity surround on all sides, far more real than the possibilities of success and a good outcome. But the fantasy self is a chimera and its insubstantiality only adds to unhappiness.

The irony is that the notion of solitude is itself a fantasy and not real. Oh, it is possible to be solitary, even in the midst of a city, but one is never alone. Being alone is a state of mind. Even weather beaten tramps in their incessant walking impinge on the consciousness of others and are themselves dependent. At a superficial level we may look like ants scurrying to and fro but at a deeper lever we are all engaged in a dance to a song we cannot hear but whose rhythms shape our lives. At a deeper level still we are one with the singer of the song. But we are not aware of the deeper levels. They exist in our minds, if they exist at all, only as a possibility and possibilities do not assuage hunger or keep out the cold, nor are they a shoulder to cry on, nor a friend to laugh with. The possibility has to become a reality. This is where religion and meditation come in.

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Being human

November 13th, 2007

Reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. What Sogyal Rinpoche has to say about Dzogchen has set ideas sparking in my mind. Dzogchen is the primordial state, our true nature. This is what we naturally are. The problem, however, is ignorance. Dzogchen is not part of our experience and we imagine ourselves to be other than we really are. People take many paths pursuing different goals. Enlightened ones take the path which leads to fruition.

This fundamental nature is buddha nature – a term that describes the ineffable. In Christian terms we could say the divine. I am reminded of Athanasius: ‘God became man so that man might become God.’ Cats and rabbits grow naturally to the fullness of their nature. They are biologically determined. We humans are far more complex. As persons we are multi-faceted with biological, conscious, social and volitional dimensions. Each of these is determining to an extent. Sometimes one is dominant, sometimes another. It is in the volitional element that our freedom lies. It has the ability to override the other determinants, the biological, the social and the rational. And there is something else – a spiritual element. We use words like soul and spirit but we do not know what they mean, or have only a vague idea.

If we were only biological, social and rational animals then the behaviourists would be correct and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two could become a reality. But we are also free agents in that we have the power to stand back from ourselves, look at ourselves reflectively, and make a response not dictated by the stimuli we are exposed to. We do not always exercise this power. Very often it is not in our interest to do so. The biological impulses to eat and to reproduce are vital and are only denied at our peril. A perceived social demand to be slender rather than plump may lead to anorexia. An ideological imposition of celibacy may result various psychological problems. Yet at other times the witness of a hunger strike may change the mind of a whole nation, as Gandhi discovered, and celibacy provide the freedom to reach out to others.

There is also a very mysterious dimension to being a person – the fact that we can be aware of transcendence, of a spiritual dimension to reality. This, taken together with the ability to act freely, is the very essence of what it means to be human. We are animals, but not just animals. We are social beings, but not just social beings. We can also reason and act freely. And there is something else, something we cannot describe, explain or easily put into words – a feeling, but more than just a feeling, of infinite depth. People have described it in different ways at different times but the description I like best is from the Chhandogya Upanishad.

In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. One should know what is there.
What is there? Why is it so important?
There is as much in that little space within the heart as there is in the whole world outside. Heaven and earth, fire, wind, sun, moon, lightening, stars; whatever is and whatever is not, everything is there.
If everything is in man’s body, every being, every desire, what remains when old age comes, when decay begins, when the body falls?
What lies in that space does not decay when the body decays, nor does it fall when the body falls. That space is the home of Spirit. Every desire is there. Self is there, beyond decay and death, sin and sorrow; hunger and thirst; His aim truth; His will truth.

Our growing and becoming is not predetermined. We are songs woven by many voices. And yet, in a sense, we become what we have always been. The becoming is an awakening from a dark and claustrophobic dream.

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