Relationship

September 6th, 2007

Reading Odin on the social self. The Japanese concept of ‘betweenness’ (aidagara) is very interesting and needs thinking about. It means that which exists between two people when they are relating to each other. The focus would seem to be on the dynamics of the relationship which is seen as an end in itself. It is the relationship which makes me ‘you’ to the other and the other ‘you’ to me. In other words the relationship is creative, making ‘me’. ‘I’ exist as a result of this relationship. According to Hamaguchi,

‘While in the West the self is primarily an individual so that relationship to others is secondary, in Japan the self as kanjin (self in context) is primarily a member of a social context, including society and family, and only in a secondary sense to be regarded as an individual…The reason why self consciousness of the Japanese is formed this way is because self and others are in a symbiotic relationship, and they regard their own existence as largely dependent on the existence of others.’ (Odin S.; The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, SUNY Press, Albany 1996 p. 73)

We in the West would agree that our existence is dependent on our relationships with others, but only ab initio. The difference is that we believe that these relationships have brought into existence a permanent, self-sustaining entity which may, if it wishes, exist independently of others. And so relationships are seen as a means to an end, to be entered into and abandoned in so far as they serve the needs of the individual. In Japan, and Korea and China, the relationship (aidagara) is the dynamic no-thing (ku – emptiness) which exists between people.

‘Buddhism provides Christians with an opportunity to know and experience that the true reality of the person does not consist in being an indivduum, a given entity; rather, the true self is radically, essentially, constantly in relation to other selves and to all reality; its ‘being’ is constantly one of ongoing dependent ‘co-origination’; its being is relating. Therefore the true self is a selfless self, constantly losing-finding its self in its relations with others.’ (Crook J., Fontana D., Space in Mind: East-West Psychology and Contemporary Buddhism, Element Books, London 1990)

It is this emptiness, this space, nothingness, betweenness that is important. This is where the focus of attention should be. Not on the other as other, not on me as me, but on the dynamic space between us. This betweenness is what makes me me and you you.

The more I think about this ‘betweenness’ the more it seems a key concept. If, as I believe, we are all linked, then even casual and superficial relationships are important. They have a part in making me me. They have a part in setting the general tone, the climate in which we live. How we act towards the other depends on who that person is. The other is a lover, friend, family member, or an enemy, someone we dislike and distrust, or a non-person, a functionary fulfilling a role, a stranger passing in the street. In the first two categories the focus of attention alternates between me and the other. For example when falling in love, or when one has a sick child, it is the other who matters more than me. My happiness depends on, and is subordinate to, their attitude to me, or their well-being. When it is an enemy, or someone disliked the focus is on me and the threat they present to my well-being. Non-persons, functionaries and strangers do not really exist for me – though if such a person is in trouble, threatened, or in danger, their plight might awaken my awareness of our common humanity. In Western society individualism, and often possessive individualism, goes very deep. There is an unspoken assumption that the individual has the right to put himself/herself first, even though this may cause suffering to others. We allow fathers and mothers to abandon their families. We allow businesses to put profit for the few above the needs of the many – in other words we place a greater value on money than on people. Greater importance is attached to those with power, influence and money than to others. As a result society is polarised, riven by factions and special interest groups. Children are abused, or abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The unemployed are relegated to an underclass, surviving on handouts but not able to participate in society. There seems to be no way out. We deal with the symptoms but not with the disease. We try with palliatives and sticking plaster to deal with the most blatant wounds but the underlying illness is not even perceived.

The concept of ‘betweenness’ (aidagara) is, perhaps, a way out. It removes the focus of attention from the ‘me’ and the ‘other’ and focuses it on the relationship between the two. If the relationship is good, positive, life-giving, enhancing then both parties are enriched and affirmed. If the relationship is negative, destructive, cancerous then both parties are hurt and diminished by it. There can be no enhancement of the individual at the expense of the other.

Posted in Self | No Comments »

Love

September 5th, 2007

For many in the Protestant tradition there is a great fear of anything to do with New Age, Eastern religions, meditation, mysticism etc. All this is seen somehow as demonic. In the silence and stillness of meditation, they say, the devil can get at you. One person rang several Episcopalian churches and asked whether they had anyone who could give spiritual direction. The response was, ‘What do you want anything like that for? Just follow the Bible.’ Someone else summed up this whole question of other religions and cults versus Christianity by saying that Christianity is focused on Christ whereas the others are directed on self. In other words Christianity is about love of God and others and not self.

All this is much too simplistic. It reminds me of the arguments I used to have with Pierre Oriol, a remarkable self-taught philosopher and market gardner. ‘L’amour n’existe pas,’ he would insist. In other words all love was fundamentally selfish and, however obscurely, involved self-seeking. I, in my idealistic, youthful ignorance and determined to defend the ideas for which I was making such sacrifices, argued against him. There was such a thing as altruistic love with no hint of self in it. One only had to look at the example of Christ and the lives of the saints. But Pierre would have none of it. Ultimately all love is selfish, even when it seems to be self-sacrificial. What is done is done for self-satisfaction, for self-aggrandisement, to be a hero, or to gain merit, or grace, or salvation. I couldn’t argue against him then. There was no way one could know the inner dispositions of people and there was no guarantee that what they said – ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do now…’ etc. – bore any relationship to the truth. We were both locked into a definition of self as a unique and independent entity. And although Christianity has always preached an agapaic love, love for the other, whether God, enemy, or friend, for his own sake, it has also always had difficulty with this because it goes against the grain. Altruism does not come easily. Paul was not a bit shy about enumerating his many acts of self-sacrifice in exhorting people to be like him and ultimately like Christ who emptied himself. Was this a bit of self-glorification on Paul’s part? It could easily seem so. We tend to be suspicious of people who parade their virtues and self-sacrifices in public. As for Christ, how could one even begin to imagine the consciousness of the God-man? The total reversal of values of the Sermon on the Mount is a beautiful ideal, inspiring even, but not for the average person. So, to say that Christianity is better because it involves unselfish love of God is not as simple and straightforward as it might seem.

On the other hand to describe meditation as preoccupation with self and, worse, Buddhism as a sort of religious auto-eroticism, is a complete distortion of facts. As with Christianity Buddhism is about love. However the approach is different. Buddhism asks the questions, ‘Who is it that loves?’ and, ‘Who is loved?’ Christianity sees no need for these questions. The commandment is for the individual to love God and neighbour. But Buddhism asks, ‘Who is this ‘I’?’ and, ‘Who is this neighbour?’ The question of God, since he is not an object of experience, is left on one side. The surprising, and shocking, answer of Buddhism is that there is no ‘I’, and consequently, therefore, neighbour is not just an ‘other’. The private world of the self is a mental construction, an exclusive, non-public world with a distorted and myopic view of reality. Through meditation we can learn to penetrate the barriers which isolate us in our private subjective worlds. We come to see that the barriers are mental constructs and every bit as insubstantial as the self. We also begin to see that each of us is part of the Whole and, this is the strange and incomprehensible bit, at the same time we retain our identity as individuals.

Buddhists and Christians have a similar goal but each expresses it differently. Christians want to be able to say with Paul, ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me.’ They want to be subsumed into the cosmic Christ, to become one with Him. What this means we do not know and those who have experienced it, like Paul, cannot describe it. This Christ, the Word of God, who already was in the beginning, is both the origin and the goal of the cosmic process. Christians take part in this process as individuals. The traditional Christian way of putting it is that we enter life maimed by Original Sin, which creates an existential gulf between the individual and God, and handicapped by its affects we have, first of all, to be made whole by Sanctifying Grace and then, by denying our natural human tendencies, through asceticism, mortification and self-denial, eventually achieve union with Christ.

The Buddhist view has nothing to say about the transcendent. It is concerned only with the fact that life is impermanent and is full of suffering and that there is a way to end the suffering, not negatively by denying life, but by transcending it. About the moment of transcendence, Nirvana, and what lies beyond, or whether there is, or is not, a beyond, it can say little or nothing. On the way to transcendence two facts become apparent. One is that there is no permanent, individual substratum called self. The other is that all creatures share the same nature. Out of the second arises a compassion akin to the Christian ideal of agapaic love. At a rational level the two religions seem poles apart. At the practical level of lived experience each has much to learn from the other.

Posted in Self | No Comments »

Person

September 4th, 2007

Why is Buddhism so insistent on anatta? Why are Christians, and indeed all religions, so insistent that selfishness is not a good thing? The answer must lie in the nature of the person and in the nature of reality itself. There is so much here that needs to be thought out.

First, as humans we are social beings. What is born is a living body with the potential to become a person. We are made persons as a result of the social interactions of our families with us and our interactions with the surrounding milieu. How good a job is made of making us persons depends on the quality of these contacts. The more loving, the more they give, and the more we are allowed to grow. We are easily damaged and stunted by rejection, indifference and exploitation. Therefore what exists is not an ‘I’ with a right to claim priority for itself over all others, or even some others. What exists is not an independent individual in total possession off itself.

What exists is an amalgam of relationships. A person is a dynamic nexus of interacting relationships not something whole and complete in itself. This applies to everything in fact. There is nothing which is independently self-existing. Everything is what it is a) because of the relationships of its component elements, and b) because of its relationship to everything else in the scheme of things. This is what Buddhists mean by everything being empty.

This applies to our physical bodies; it also applies to us as persons. We are persons only in that we relate to other persons. So when a person acts selfishly, putting himself before others without taking account of their rights, needs, or feelings, he is denying the fundamental reality that he is part of them and that they are part of him. By diminishing them he is diminishing himself. By hurting them he is hurting himself.

Secondly, it goes deeper than this. Empirical reality is only the tip of the iceberg and the beneath-the-surface dimension cannot be ignored. Our first awareness is of sensation and out of the sensations the empirical world emerges. It imposes itself on us through our senses. We become aware of rough and smooth, hunger and satiety, pain and pleasure, light and dark. We become aware of noises and shapes and then the noises and shapes become speech and faces and I become me, and I responds to you, and the world is no longer part of me and becomes an it. A gulf appears between me and not-me. The process of individuation has begun.

What I do not realise is that the gulf is a mental construct. My mind has created the gulf, that distinction between me and not-me. But in reality there is no gulf, there is no separation. In a way we are like trees. When we look at a tree we tend to see only that which is above the ground. We do not see the network of roots, as extensive as that of the branches. We do not see the transpiration of the leaves, the action of photosynthesis, or the absorption of water and minerals by the roots. We do not see the tree as a source of life, an environment, a habitat for a multitude of other creatures. We see a static object. We do not see a dynamic organism part of and interacting with its environment.

Similarly when we look at ourselves we see actors playing out roles on the stage of the world. We think that we are no more part of the stage and the scenery than are actors in a theatre, that we are no more linked to each other than are the players brought together by the selection process of the theatre company. We see ourselves as self-contained individuals. Such a view is even more wrong than the view of a tree as a static object. Like trees we emerge onto the surface of conscious and empirical reality from roots that are plunged deep into the fabric of Being. Only when we become aware of our roots will we begin to understand what it is to be.

D. W. Mann has this to say

With bodily birth the self is born. The universe of self-experience comes into being through the severance act of birth. But the resultant separateness, which I have said lies at the heart of the self-experience, is from a biophysical perspective more illusory than real. While the body lives, it remains a standing wave of active earth, gathered and propelled by the happenstance channeling of genes into an amnesic emissary from the mineral world. We are of earth but not within it, moving ever so slightly beyond it but always in its outstretched stream, borrowing and returning, dust to dust. Into this fabric each of us weaves, from earth, through man and woman, man into woman, out of woman aloft into life, and finally back into earth, our single stitch of life. The generations quit the earth, like ragged seams. In all but ecstatic moments we feel separate, but in physical fact our bodies join us to the earth, to one another, and to the seemingly separate universe that envelopes us.
Mann D.W., A Simple Theory of the Self, W.W. Norton, New York, 1994 p.42f

And he is only talking about ‘physical fact’. If only we could be aware of the beneath-the-surface dimension. If only we could be aware of the pattern woven by our single stitches.

Posted in Reality | No Comments »

Commitment

September 3rd, 2007

Concerning commitment. There is a profound mystery here and I would like to clarify it as much as I can. One of the things that has always intrigued me is how a priest, monk, or nun can go through years and years of religious life, praying the office daily, receiving the Sacraments daily and not be transformed. Their lives, outwardly at least, are centred on God and they are daily recipients of Sanctifying Grace, oned with Christ in the Eucharist. Yet they can remain indifferent to the needs of others, be petty and selfish, worldly and materialistic. Many have been involved in gross child abuse. I have a feeling that this apparent hiatus is due to a faulty Sacramental theology which places too much emphasis on ex opere operato and not enough on the dispositions of the administrator and recipient of the sacraments. According to traditional sacramental theology it is simply necessary to receive the Sacraments, only minimal dispositions are required. Sanctifying Grace will work its magic, unfelt and unseen in the soul, gradually transforming the individual so that at the moment of death he, or she, will be able to respond to the face to face encounter with God. This is all very comfortable and it lets everybody off the hook of total commitment. It places all the emphasis on the next life. There the fruits will ripen and be harvested. In this life nothing may be visible but the tiniest of buds.

The Gospels are quite clear on the need for total commitment. They also require the purity and single-mindedness of a child. This one-pointedness, as the Buddhists put it, demands that everything one does should be an aspect of this focused commitment. There should be no holidays from it, no pampered relaxations, no little indulgences ‘because on has deserved them’, no time out. All this sounds very daunting and austere and it certainly puts most people off. No doubt that is why the church has relaxed the requirements of the Gospel. But I am coming more and more to the conclusion that total commitment is, not the only way – God is infinite mercy and the variety of callings is vast – but essential for those who would presume to teach others about God.

I don’t believe either that this is an ‘either – or’ matter. There has to be a way of integrating this focus on God with all the day to day activities of ordinary life. This, again, is nothing new. de Caussade wrote about the ‘sacrament of the present moment’. But arriving at the state where one is able constantly to be aware of God does not come easily. The world intrudes, the body intrudes; so do feelings and other people. It is not easy to be both involved and detached. When one has a tenuous hold on existence the difference between trivial and frivolous matters and those which are fundamental and important becomes glaringly obvious. The knack is to hang on to this glaring obviousness all the time.

Posted in Religion | No Comments »

Meditation again

September 1st, 2007

It is difficult holding the attention on the cusp of focus on the body (sitting, breathing etc.) and focus on awareness, without drifting off in a train of thought or fantasy. It is difficult to maintain this balancing act because it is non-eventful, often boring, with nothing happening. Habituation quickly takes place and attention drifts. I am beginning to understand the frustrations and agonies of meditation, especially as so much more time is invested in an activity that seems to yield so little benefit. The trouble with daydreaming, trains of fantasy thoughts, is that the mental world is just as real, sometimes more real, than the physical here and now. If the physical here and now is colourful, pleasant or exciting, if it grabs the attention, then of course it dominates. If, however, the physical here and now is dull, uneventful and boring, then the mind displaces it with fantasy. This is why the purveyors of fantasy, soaps, videos, Mills and Boone etc. are so popular. Most people want to escape from the lives of quiet desperation that they lead. Unfortunately the truth does not lie in this mental fantasy world. It can only be found in the physical here and now.

How to penetrate the physical here and now and see it for what it is? How to see beyond, behind, through (whatever the appropriate adverb is) it? There are so many hidden assumptions that have to be uncovered. There is one’s particular worldview that has to be seen as relative rather than absolute; there is the mode of being of the seer himself. This last depends on the previous two, but also on self-understanding and perceived need.

Kolakowski p. 38 on Buddhism.

If, instead of employing our intelligence in satisfying our needs – a vain effort anyway, since the mounting spiral of needs never stops – we try to suppress them and to realise that both the world and the self are an illusion, we can achieve a state of plenitude wherein no imaginary beings imprison us in our apparent exclusivity and separateness from the divine.

I agree with the first part. The second part is badly put. It is not so much that the world and self are an illusion, rather, that neither is as we often understand it. The world is real but it is not an external, fixed and permanent stage on which we act out lives. It is an interactive process of which we are part. The self is not coterminous with the ego but, again, is an interactive process involving other selves and the world. Quite what these processes are, how they relate and where they are going I don’t fully understand – yet. Nor do I agree that the suppression of needs is the right way to proceed. It is the other extreme from gratifying every need. So, back to patient process of practicing simple awareness of being present to oneself, present to others, to the physical here and now, to the Spirit within.

[Kolakowski, Leszek;Religion, Fontana, London 1993]

Posted in Meditation | No Comments »

In the now

August 31st, 2007

There is an old story about a group of ancient Greeks, a group of mercenaries known as the Ten Thousand. They were part of Cyrus’ army when he was defeated at the battle of Cunaxa on the Euphrates by the Persian King Artaxerxes. They were led by the Athenian general and historian Xenophon. For months they struggled through hostile lands and over alien mountains, despairing sometimes of ever seeing home again. Until, at long last, on scaling the last mountain they saw, in the distance, the Black Sea. And a great cry went up, “Thalassa, thalassa.” (The sea, the sea.) They were as good as home.

I remember once in the American Mid-west looking around me and thinking – go for a thousand miles in any direction and you still will not reach the sea. For someone born and bred within yards of the Atlantic it was a very claustrophobic feeling. For me, as for the ancient Greeks, to be by the shores of the sea was to be in touch with home. The waters that lapped the eastern shores of America were the same waters that surged round the shores of Europe.

To be in the now is like being at sea, the same sea that touches simultaneously every coast in the world. To be present to this moment now is to be in the same now, the same present moment, of every single person. It may be the only thing we share, but share it we do. Many, perhaps most others, are not present there with us. They are, perhaps, wandering the alien mountains of the mind, or captured by fantasies, or enthralled by dreams, or preoccupied with their obsessions and compulsions, infatuated with money, or sex, or power, or just drifting. But for many this now is real, unforgettable, palpable reality. It may be raw and bleeding; it may be ecstatically happy; it may be of the utmost significance, but whatever it is, it is unmistakably real. This is the now that we share, whether we realise it or not. This is the now which is pregnant with possibilities. It is the fulcrum on which we move our lives.

But some, very many people, are imprisoned in this now by suffering, by pain, anguish, grief. If they could escape from it of course they would, but such is the centripetal effect of suffering that it draws all our attention, all our energy, away from wider perspectives into the affliction from which there is no escaping. For many more of us our awareness of these people in this now which we all share — that they are hurting, that they are in despair, that they are facing torment and death — this awareness is distressing. We feel for them. We would, if we could, help them, but we feel so powerless.

Tibetans have a practice they call Tonglen. It is a form of breathing meditation, a way of exercising compassion. Compassion means, literally, to suffer with. As one breaths in one breaths in all the pain, anguish and suffering of those with whom we share this present moment. As one breaths out one breaths out peace, gentleness and love. We may be separated by thousands of miles but we are all linked by this present moment now. We are linked by our common humanity. We are linked by the Spirit who lives and breaths in us and comes to the aid of our weakness. In this now we all touch Reality.

Posted in Reality | No Comments »

Now

August 30th, 2007

I am reading a book about Zen meditation by Elaine MacInnes which is very helpful, especially in its insistence on being in the body in the present moment. Only this is real. The past does not exist, nor the future; only the present moment. If one is to become aware of Reality it can only happen in the present moment. One of the reasons why falling in love is such an exhilarating experience is because when one is with ones lover one is wholly in the now, in the present moment. All the senses are absorbed by her, her beauty, the music of her laugh, the shape of her, the texture of her skin, her smell. Past and future no longer matter. All that matters is this magic now when all ones senses are captivated by this object of every desire and the prospect of possessing her, of being oned with her.

However, such an experience can so dominate the attention that all perspective is lost. Meditation allows us to place some distance from the attention and objects of desire. In meditation there is no object of desire. There is no object. Dualism runs right to the heart of the psyche; mind-body, body-soul, subject-object, I-Thou. Sartre describes the tyranny of The Other seen as a constant threat to the ego, which is tender and diminutive, hesitant to reveal itself lest it be dominated by, or worse, rejected by the other. And yet, paradoxically, the longing to annihilate this rift runs equally deep. Hence the desire to possess the other if possible. Failing that to overcome or annihilate the other. Failing that the only recourse is into a private stronghold, walled and barred against the outside. The experience of enlightenment, on the other hand, is that there are not two. There is neither ego, nor other. Tat tvam asi. That art thou.

The trouble when one gets to my age, especially if they have a health problem which makes them aware of impending mortality, is that they become aware of all the things they have not done and of the things they have done but now no longer can. The imagination becomes filled with regretful nostalgia, wishful ‘if only’, and a longing to be able to live dozens of lives so that one could do all the things one desires. But it is not to be. I can see how this could generate bitterness and mordant regrets. I can see why the idea of reincarnation might be very attractive, if only one could carry over memories from life to life. But all this is due to a failure to understand what the process of life is, where it leads and what it means.

Life is not about experiencing for the sake of experience, nor about savouring and enjoying the new, the exciting, the exotic. Nor is life about cultivating the ego, expanding and embellishing it so that it can stand on its own in an alien universe. Life is about love. Only love can annihilate the gap between the ego and the other and make the two one without diminishing either. On the contrary. This is why love is at the heart of all religions.

Descartes was right in a way in assuming a split between mind and body. Though I think the split is not so much between mind and body as between being in a world of fantasy and ratiocination and being a physical and mental unity of awareness. Zen meditation is concerned, I think, with getting back to that original awareness before self-awareness allowed us to construct a mental world of fantasy and concepts, of day-dreams and wishful projections. We live too much in the head and the mind is a cork bobbing on a sea of emotions, feelings and moods. Meditation helps us to get out of the head and to be fully in the now so that we are physically present in our actions and not, as so often, miles away.

But why should inhabiting the now be so important? Why should one go through years of discipline and long hours of meditation simply to be fully present to oneself? Part of the answer is that only the now exists and our actions and reactions can only take place in the now. Too often the remembered past and the imagined future colour, distort even, our perceptions and determine our actions. To live in the now is to be fully present to oneself, to the others we meet, to the world we inhabit. It is also, though I haven’t quite worked out why, to be aware of the limits of existence and therefore of the transcendent.

In a sense, the fantasy world of the mind is a timeless world. The past and the future can be made present at will and the present can be made to disappear. Being timeless there can be no progress. The process of becoming is held in abeyance. It is a sterile place. The world of the now is a world that is constantly becoming, a world of a multitude of possibilities. It is not closed in on itself but open. It is open to and aware of the stream of life, open to the kaleidoscope of nature, to the actions and interactions of others, to being. Being in the now is not the total absorption in a task, or an activity, or a sensation, so that one is hardly aware of anything else. Being in the now is to be present to the now and, at the same time, present to all that is going on within and without.

(MacInnes, E; Light Sitting in Light: A Christian’s Experience of Zen, Fount, London 1996)

Posted in Reality | No Comments »

Awareness

August 29th, 2007

The reason why Buddhism is so concerned with detachment is because it frees one, not just in a physical sense, but also to be able to experience. Thomas Merton, in his Asian Journal, was struck by how often he encountered ordinary Tibetans going about their everyday tasks humming a mantra. Normally our minds are filled with trains of discursive thought in a reciprocal dialogue with the senses. Thought initiates feelings and emotions; bodily feelings and emotions initiate thoughts. There is a constant interplay which only ceases when the attention is absorbed by a particular task or social interaction. Even there, habituation often allows thoughts and feelings to gain a foothold and interfere with the task in hand.

In meditation, at the beginning at least, the object is to break the thought-feeling interaction and simply become aware. Focusing the attention on the breath, or the mantra does eventually lead to simple awareness. It also leads to something else much more subtle. This simple awareness is a limit situation.

According to Karl Jaspers limit situations are dramatic events, like the birth of a child, marriage, or death of a loved one, in which we become aware of the limits of existence. The fact that we are aware of the limits as limits means that we have in some obscure way seen beyond them. A horizon is only a horizon because we can see beyond it. We are not normally aware of the limits of our existence just as we are not normally aware of the limits of our field of view.

In that simple awareness of meditation, in that, often boring, non-eventful state, we are aware, very dimly perhaps, of the limits of existence, of the horizon of our being. We have acquired an awareness of transcendence. During the day, whenever we are doing anything which does not require mental attention, the mantra, which has being saying itself quietly in the depths somewhere, surfaces and becomes conscious. Once again we are in touch with transcendence and everything falls into perspective. All this is very gentle, very subtle and is easily swamped by feelings. Hence the need for detachment. To quote Peter Harvey:

The citta of one on the Buddhist path should not be at the mercy of outside stimuli, nor of its own moods etc. but should be an island of calm, imbued with self-control, self-contained. It should no longer be scattered and diffused but should be more integrated and consistently directed towards one goal, nibbhana. (Harvey, P.; The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirvana in Early Buddhism, Curzon Press. London 1995 p. 55)

I think this process of becoming one-pointed and detached is a return to innocence. Particular memories, attachments and feelings are all aspects of a component of the personality. They are personality-factors. While they are alive and active they designate something of what we are. Time does not heal the wounds of the bad deeds of the past as long as the roots that gave rise to them are still alive and active, and they are active as long as the memories and attachments still have the power to move us. So they have to be exorcised. The process of detachment involves a review, more or less drawn out, of the past. Memories are paraded before the eye of the mind until we can look at them with neither desire nor loathing. To quote Harvey again,

He or she is thus very self-contained and self-controlled, with a “diamond-like citta”, unperturbed and “unsoiled” by anything. His or her senses are not tied to their objects and he has perfected “dwelling alone” by letting go of everything, such as the personality-factors, with no attachment or repugnance. (op. cit. p. 63)

The result will be to see everything like a child, fresh, new, full of wonder, filled with beauty and joy. This is not an easy process. It will involve much suffering. I think the only thing to do is to take each day as it comes, sometimes perhaps, each hour and look no further than the present moment. There is a very telling comment by William Johnston – ‘Buddhists speak out of the experience of enlightenment, Western theologians talk out of books.’ (William Johnston; letter to The Tablet 21 February 1998)

Posted in Meditation | No Comments »

Sanctifying Grace

August 28th, 2007

Reading Zaehner on nature mysticism. References to Sanctifying Grace leave me feeling uncomfortable. What is sanctifying grace? I believe it to be the relationship between God and the person. What is the difference between the relationship of God to the person in Sanctifying Grace and his relationship to the person who has no SG? We need a definition of person and soul. God is the ground of being and therefore relates to each being in an ontological sense. This relationship is not normally perceptible.

As Person and Subject, God relates to persons in a personal way. This, likewise, is not normally perceptible. Is this relationship what is meant by SG? Are the various kinds of mystical experience perceptions of this relationship?

What does it mean not to be in a state of Grace? Does being in a state of Grace mean openness to Being? This entails living authentically and relating to others with openness and love. If so, there are no, conscious at least, obstacles to the development of the relationship between being and Being.

Does not being in the sate of grace mean being egotistical and selfish, closed to Being, seeing others either as threats to one’s ego, or as opportunities to be used, manipulated, exploited or possessed? In which case there is no understanding of the unity and interdependence of being, nor of the dependence of being on Being. Individuals are seen as unitary and fragile, competing for existence in an, if not hostile, at least an indifferent universe. Such people cannot develop as persons because their basic orientation is closed and inward looking. They are not able to take the risk of opening themselves in love to achieve transcendence and, ultimately, what Christians call salvation. Not unless something jolts them out of their blindness.

My unhappiness with the term sanctifying grace is that it reifies and makes almost a commodity of what is, essentially, a relationship. Not to be in SG is to refuse to recognise and respond to Being. Traditional Catholic theology would limit this relationship (SG) to the sacraments. Individuals come into existence (are born) and have, of necessity an ontological relationship with God. The personal relationship, if that is what SG is, only comes into existence at Baptism. This relationship is then deepened and developed only through repeated reception of the sacraments.

It seems to me improbable in the extreme, given the nature of God and the nature of the human person, that the personal relationship between them should be conditioned by and limited to the rituals of an institution which has only been in existence for a fraction of human history and has never touched more than a fraction of people. Theologians talk about SG as a unique gift which derives from God alone. It is not something naturally human. St. John, on the other hand is quite clear that to love (he makes no qualifications) is to know God, ‘for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.’ (1John 4:7)

Posted in Being human | No Comments »

Supernatural

August 27th, 2007

I have been reading about Padre Pio. It struck me that he was a throwback to a fathers-of-the-desert type of spirituality. He had a fuga mundi attitude and a preoccupation with extreme forms of ascesis (vigils, the discipline etc.). He wrestled with demons who used to smash up his cell and throw things at him. He had many preternatural gifts, stigmata, perfume, bilocation. He was not at all what you could call a psychologically well-balanced person. Now it is interesting thing that in the middle of the twentieth century he could become an icon of holiness alongside Mother Teresa. She had a universal appeal. Padre Pio attracted the more conservative Catholic signs-and-wonders brigade.

The interesting thing in all this is the perception by many that the supernatural dimension is filled with good and bad spirits, that there is constant warfare between them and that we mortal humans are caught up in this war. It is easy to stereotype good and evil, both people and our own internal feelings, and paint them large on a cosmic canvas. People are hungry for signs and wonders. It is all too easy to exaggerate internal struggles and project them outwards. It is also only too easy to blame forces beyond one’s control for one’s own failings and it is comforting and reassuring to have the protection of spiritual amulets and talismans.

All this assumes a worldview which is two-dimensional, the natural and the supernatural. Between the two is an, almost, unbridgeable gulf. From time to time messengers, angels, are sent to communicate important information. These are received by a few select people. There are also special people who are granted visions and mystical knowledge. Again these are few and select. For the vast majority the natural world is the domain of our experience and the only knowledge we have of the supernatural is second hand. Hence the importance of the Church. It is the guardian and guarantor of what has been revealed. It is the administrator of the Sacraments. These are natural things, oil, water, bread and wine, which, when used with the proper rituals, communicate supernatural grace to individuals; essential if, after death, one is to achieve eternal bliss in Heaven. This supernatural grace is not usually experienced, only by mystics and other spiritual giants. But, if it is to be received, it has to be believed in. Faith is essential for salvation. Hence the importance of people like Padre Pio, and the children of Fatima, and all the other people whose experiences and visions bolster this worldview and reinforce faith.

This is not, however, the only worldview and the more one examines it the more this becomes clear. According to the Religious Experience Research Unit, formerly at Oxford, now at University of Wales, Lampeter, perhaps as many as 60% of people have religious experiences of one kind or another at some time in their lives. These are not limited to believers or church-goers. This should not be a surprising statistic if we accept what the Bible says, that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’. There must, therefore, be something of God in us, naturally. These experiences are varied but there is a common theme running through the majority and that is of unity, what David Hay calls relational awareness. For most ‘primitive’ people – American Indians, Australian aborigines – the natural world is shot through with the supernatural. These are not two separate dimensions but rather two aspects of the same. Both Hinduism and Buddhism hold that there is only one reality. For most people the view of this reality is distorted by ignorance, or by maya, the illusion that the ephemeral and transitory are real and permanent. For both these religions the purpose of religion is to help people become aware of and pierce the hidden assumptions which blind them to reality as it really is. Not easy.

Posted in Reality | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »