The New Zealander to whom I replied in Impediments to Meditation responds:
. . . you rightly sense that there was a certain selfish ambition in my turning to meditation. Though following your post Meditation: What and Why, my stated ambition was to achieve what you called "tranquility". To use your terminology from the article, I grew quite tired of suffering from a chaotic mind (depression seems to have a fondness for assaulting me with un-invited negative emotional impulses). So I thought it only necessary to turn to meditation as a means of re-gaining sovereign self discipline.
A few questions arise. Being fairly new to this, I don't expect to have a very thorough understanding of the underlying philosophy, so please correct me where I go wrong. Specifically, you say that the ego is necessary for worldly life. So it seems that to let go of the ego is also to let go of worldly life?
Assuming I've got that right, two further questions arise. Firstly, what do you mean by "worldly life?" and secondly, what does it mean to "let go of it?" I take it after all, that one feature of the Doctrine of Creation, is a commitment to the great goodness of creation. I have some anxieties about about saying that only the spiritual is worthwhile; that creation is merely expendable.
Within a Christian framework it is certainly true that whatever God creates is good. I use 'creature' to refer to anything that is a product of divine creative activity, whether animate, inanimate, concrete, or abstract. So creatures are good. If we use 'world' to refer to the sum-total of creatures, then the world is good. But 'world' has perhaps a dozen different meanings. I am using it in a different sense.
So let me introduce 'worldly person' or 'worldling' as the opposite of a spiritual seeker. The worldling lives for this passing world alone. But he doesn't appreciate its transient and ontologically substandard nature. Or if he does, he is not moved to seek the truly real. For the worldling, the passing scene it is as real as it gets, and as good as it gets, and he thinks its ephemeral goods have the power to make him happy. It's not that he thinks about this in any depth, or formulates to himself anything like what I have just written; being a world-immersed fellow, it it s not an issue for him. So he pursues money, power, sex, recognition and all the rest as if they are ends in themselves. He loves creatures, but not as creatures, for he does not relate them back to their Source. He loves them idolatrously.
He is a Cave man if you will; he doesn't appreciate that our predicament is classically and profoundly depicted in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He lives for his ego, to advance himself and distinguish himself in an ultimately futile project to become somebody when he knows deep down that his ego and all its adjuncts will soon be annihilated by death. But he avoids the thought of death and cultivates the illusion that he will live forever. He loses himself in the diaspora of sense objects and social suggestions. To answer my reader's first question, this is what I mean by a worldly life. It is an attitude according to which this passing world is ultimate both in being and in value. Someone with that attitude is a worldling.
His opposite number, the seeker or quester, appreciates the vanity or emptiness of the worldling's life and the worldling's world. He senses that there has to be Something More. He is aware that things are not as they ought to be, and that he is not as he ought to be. He is oppressed by the ignorance, misery, strife, and senselessness all around him. He experiences life as a predicament, and seeks a way out. What's more, he doesn't believe that man, individually or collectively, can bring about his redemption by his own efforts. This distinguishes him from the 'progressive.' He thinks that
. . .there is for man some sort of highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this danger . . . (Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, Scribners, 1912, p. 12)
Meditation is one among several spiritual practices the seeker cultivates in his quest to transcend the worldly attitude. This involves letting go of the worldly life. The quester may remain in the world, but he will not be of the world, to invoke something like the NT sense of 'world.' The quester needn't flee the world and join a monastic order. But if he remains in the world he will find it very difficult not to be swamped and thrown off course by worldly suggestions.
I will end by saying that to pursue meditation fruitfully one has to reform one's way of life. A certain amount of moral ascesis is sine qua non. If you intend to spend your early mornings thinking and trancing, you cannot spend your late evenings drinking and dancing. Re-collection is incompatible with dissipation. But this is a large topic. More later, perhaps.
Recent Comments