Phronema

It just struck me that the whole point of prayer is to become present to God. To be present to someone is to have one’s attention focussed on them. Once our attention is focussed elsewhere then they are no longer present to us.

I still wonder at our anthropomorphic way of understanding and speaking about God – though I shouldn’t really – it is what comes naturally. But it still surprises me when it comes from people who are professionally religious, like monks and nuns. “This is where God wants you to be… It’s God’s will… etc.” I feel more and more uncomfortable with this idea of God, someone who has specific plans and wishes for each person. Thinking in this way is a roundabout way of justifying whatever it is that we want to do, or whatever it is that happens to us. God no more has specific plans for us than a parent has for his grown up children – other than a general desire that they should be happy and fulfilled in whatever they choose to do. The idea that God wants to determine us in all the little details of living does not fit easily with our perception of ourselves as free and self-determining. If we are made in the image and likeness of God and if God loves us as we are, then God’s relationship to us is not that of a parent to a young child. Maybe this is a clue as to why people persist in thinking of God in this way – a nostalgia for the innocent and uncomplicated relationships of childhood.

I keep coming back to the idea that a new Gospel or ideal is needed. It was interesting reading recently that Graham Greene was riling against the lack of any spirituality or ideals in the average English person in the 1930’s. Walking through — on a Saturday afternoon is not an uplifting experience. I go in sometimes because I have to. Many seem to spend most of their Saturday wandering around the shops and market in a sort of purposeless way and without displaying any great joy or enthusiasm.

Whatever the new Gospel is it must be one of action. There is a very interesting chapter in Hayward and Varela’s book, Gentle Bridges by Livingstone on the development of the brain. The nervous system, he says, is built for action. The action consists of motility, which has three categories: visceration, expression and effectuation. The last ties in very well with Marx’s idea that it is through work that we make ourselves what we are. We are above all social beings, made so by our extended childhood which allows the impartation of culture. The new ideal, or perhaps old one rediscovered, must build on what we are and try to correct what is happening in modern society.

Extended childhood is for the communication of culture and a meaning system. The more I think about it the more it appears that the very early and almost constant exposure to the media and the sort of pop culture it imparts is damaging to say the least.

a) We live in a pluralist society. Most children do not identify with any particular culture except in a minimalist way. In fact many are adept at being one thing at home, another with their peers and another at school.

b) Identity is bound up with fashions, clothes, possessions and peer group rather than family, goals, or ideals.

c) The only alternatives on offer seem to be fundamentalist groupings of one kind or another.

d) The prevailing ethic is an individualistic one where the rights of the individual are considered to have priority over any social considerations.

The ideal must be about making society but not in one of the current fundamentalist ways. It must have a worldview which is modern, coherent, attractive and not so outré that it arouses disdain or derision; a worldview that is open to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

The new gospel must be experiential. The old religions are too much based on dogma and ideology and this is one of the reasons why they no longer appeal. The ideologies are seen to be hollow and the dogmas were formulated and are expressed in terms of an ancient worldview. Buddhism is experiential. It makes no dogmatic claims. It simply says, ‘Here is the problem. This is the solution. Try it and see for yourself.’ The witness of the Buddha and of those who have achieved peace and serenity are powerful testimonies. So it must be with the new gospel, as in the early days of the Christian era when they said, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ At present the Church bears witness to faith, to dogma. There is no correlation between the lives of most Christians and the faith they profess. There are more Catholics in prison, for example, than any other denomination. The horrors in what was formerly Yugoslavia are, in part, due to two different groups of Christians.

I was thinking yesterday at Mass that we need a new Gospel. The Good News seems neither to be news nor particularly good any more. When you explain it to others there is no point in waiting for the jaw-dropping realisation to dawn. It won’t. Much more likely the reaction will be, ‘OK, so?’ Part of the problem, of course, is the fact that there are so few who have discovered the Pearl of Great Price and who live with the joy and unselfconscious generosity of spirit that characterise it. We need a new worldview and it needs to be proclaimed with conviction. Too many have been inoculated against Christianity by exposure to the attenuated strain found in this country. The old Christian cosmology lost the battle with the Newtonian version. Now that the Newtonian one is seen to be inadequate, at least by those with a little science, it does not follow that the Christian one is restored. We live in a vacuum, in that difficult in-between stage of the dialectic while we are waiting for a synthesis to emerge.

There are two areas where there is a desperate search going on. One is at the level of fundamental physics and it is the search for a Grand Unified Theory which would unite and, hopefully, explain the disparate laws and theories. The other is the search for the meaning of consciousness and self. What does it mean to be a human person? Is my existence, my life meaningful? Do I have a purpose in living, a goal to find and if so how do I go about it?

Newton and Freud shattered my simple belief that I was a soul living in a body which would one day depart for Heaven where all would be happiness and bliss for evermore. I must admit it was not just Newton and Freud. The older I get the more I realise that true happiness, moments of ecstasy and bliss, are more likely to occur in times of agony, doubt and turmoil than in times of leisure and tranquillity. I am not sure that I want eternal rest, or even that eternal rest is a true description of the next life, if there be such a thing.

No, I am sure that there is because I have experienced transcendence and glimpsed the Transcendent in some of those fleeting moments of true happiness. But this knowledge leaves me no wiser as to who I am, what my life is for, or where my true destiny lies. And if I who have spent a lifetime of reading, thinking, searching, praying and meditating have no answers what must it be like for others who are just at the beginning of their journey. I sometimes envy the certainty and conviction of others. I feel guilty at times that I do not stand up more and speak out with firmness and confidence. But I am not confident that my view is right, or any more right than that of others. That is not quite true. I seem to have gone beyond the ideological proclamations. I no longer accept the myths of Christianity as literal truth but as symbols and metaphors pointing at the Truth. I am reminded of the Kena Upanishad:

Who says the Spirit is not known knows; who claims that he knows, knows nothing. The ignorant think that the Spirit lies within knowledge, the wise man knows It beyond knowledge.

Not that I consider myself wise, far from it. However, it is seldom possible to talk about this with others. It would not be understood and so I drift among them trying to hang on to my integrity without upsetting theirs.

I think Christ was a most extraordinary man, A man who knew the Divine within himself and who wanted to show others that they too could come to know God. I think he was very like the Gautama in many ways, cultural differences apart. He wanted to communicate experience not dogma. Buddhism remained firmly rooted in experience but in Christianity dogma took over from, and became more important than, experience. We should be showing people by example how to find inner peace, how to live unselfishly, where true joy lies, but instead all energy goes into indoctrination, into outworn ideologies and the production of catechisms.

I sit on a beach in France writing and wondering what next to say. There is so much that is not sayable. The mind is full of a range of thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, moods and impressions. Many are so fleeting and ephemeral that to try to stop them and pin them down is to distort them. It is these which make up any particular experience, give it flavour, make it that particular reality and no other.
One can capture the gross details, the major parameters and these are true but only partly so. I am not sure that words can ever capture, certainly not the totality of an experience, but just those essential ingredients which give it its particularity. I can remember once by the sea when I was young and had aspirations to be a writer, trying to encapsulate a sunset in words. I never succeeded. And even if I had, to my own satisfaction, succeeded it is doubtful whether my particular words would have created in another’s mind what they meant for me. It is in this that the artistry of writing lies, poetry especially, in being able to communicate something of a particular experience to another.

After all, many percepts coming from ‘outside’ are not percepts of enduring things at all. They are shadows and reflections, they are smears of milk and dust that may be wiped away, vanishing effectively for ever . They are things that burn or dissolve before our eyes.
(Donaldson M., Human Minds, Allen Lane, London 1992 p. 37)

And so I sit here at a loss. I no longer have the burning desire to capture in words the ephemera of this moment. Then, when I was young, I think it was partly insecurity – not knowing what life was, or even myself. Hence the urge to capture the fleeting moment in order to give it solidity and, somehow, prolong a reality and a dynamic over which I had no control. I was powerless. The only power I had, if I could obtain and master it, was to capture the fleeting moment, enclose it in words, which could then at will be opened any time in the future to realise the experience again. Now I know that is not possible and that it is based on a distorted view of reality. Reality is not fixed, not concrete, not based on something solid and substantial. Reality is constant flux, a dynamic process and it is the process which is ultimately real and not the things which are forever emerging from it and being absorbed back into it.

Hence the emptiness. Things are empty and insubstantial. They are moments. They are the individual notes which emerge in the playing of the music of the dance. The knack is not to fixate on any particular note, or series of notes, but to listen to the music. Only if one can hear the music can one join the dance. Most people not only do not hear the music, they are not even aware that reality is the music, the dance. Hence they can make only noise, a dreadful cacophony, though there are some who play beautifully even though they may not be aware of it. Next to me is a French couple with two daughters – one very severely brain damaged. The love and care they give her, their patience and gentleness, is a very pure note in our discordant world. Sometimes very old people, or those who are severely handicapped, are ugly and painful to look at and many, children especially, turn away in horror and revulsion. But it is important not to look just at the individual but at the whole process which surrounds them. This is often a beautiful one filled with love, care, compassion and a shining commitment.

But how does one begin to hear the music? And how does one identify the melody among all the disharmonies and counter medleys? And if one can succeed in identifying the music how does one teach others to hear? And so I am not trying to capture this now. I am listening and all I hear, under the surge of the sea, is silence. It is in the silence that the music is heard, but so often we are afraid of silence. It is in the emptiness that one touches the Real, but we are so afraid of vertigo that we cling to things.

Reading Varela* has made me more aware than ever of the yawning gulf at the heart of existence. The more I think about it the less I can think of being as static. To exist is to be rushing headlong, to be projecting oneself into the future, into relationships. Again the more I think about it relationships seem to be the very stuff of existence. The tiny bit of solitude of these last few days makes me realise once again that the essence of being human is in relating to other human beings. Simply to relate – to love, to converse, to be with, to help, to make bonds, links. Saint-Exupéry’s fox in The Little Prince knew all about it. We all know this in our heart of hearts but we are taken in too easily, men are anyway, by the ideology that life is for doing, consuming, spending.

The two of the most pernicious ideas today are the individualistic ethics of egoism and consumerism. These do not touch the essence of human existence. These lock a person into a solipsist modality and he ceases to grow; he becomes bored, empty, effete. A yawning gulf appears within and he knows neither what is its cause, nor what to do about it. All he can do is try to fill it with a ceaseless round of stimulation, sensation, pleasure, drugs, sex whatever will stifle the pangs, the angst, the fear.

It is so important not to be afraid of the emptiness, the gulf. The Buddhists, in this respect, are so much wiser than us. We want so much to cling to a foundation and, by definition, a foundation has to be static. Perhaps the Christian focus is wrong, wrong because it sets us in the wrong direction, to talk about faith, or Christ, as a rock. It is even more wrong to talk about eternal rest. Stasis is death, to cease to be alive. Ultimate reality is… We do not have words to describe it. There is no foundation. There is only to move, to love, to dance, to be; no substantives (in a sense), only verbs.

*Varela, F. J., Thompson, E, Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience The MIT Press, 1993, p. 119

It is quite true that now is all that there is. We all live for the future, for a goal. Our desires, our heart is in the not now. But the now is all that there is. This is reality. There is no other. In this present reality is all that there is. ALL is in this reality. It is filled, the pleroma. Paul and Teilhard de Chardin and others talk about the Parousia, the Omega point, towards which everything is progressing – but I wonder. In a way Eliot is right. Time past and time future are both contained in time present, though in different ways. But to say that only now exists is not to say that all time is eternally present. Now is eternally present, it is all that is, and time plays as a sort of passacaglia or fugue in it.