Maverick Philosopher

An Impediment to Meditation

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Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism . . .

. . . and whether the self is an illusion.

Top o' the Stack.

This Morning's Meditation

Notes with the help of Augustin Poulain

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Why a Philosopher Should Meditate . . .

. . . and why it is difficult for a philosopher to meditate.  I trust that you are alive to the semantic polyvalence of 'meditate' and appreciate the sense in which I am using the term.

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Two Worries about Meditation

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Taming the Wild Horse of the Mind on the Road to Benares

This morning's meditation session ran from 3:10 ante meridiem to 4:00. Before that I was sketching six blog posts in my journal. My mind was on fire with ideas fueled in part by  some entries from Volume Five of Tom Merton's journal.  As flabby a liberal as he is, both politically and theologically, he is engaged in the seven volumes of his journal in a wholly admirable project of relentless self-examination. I love this argonaut of interiority with all his inner conflicts.

He fled the world but was drawn back to her. The contemplative of contemptus mundi  became a peace activist. He who preached The Silent Life (the tile of one of the best of his books) was an inveterate scribbler of journal entries, articles, poems, letters -- how many volumes of correspondence? Five? --  not to mention too many books some of them good many of them not so good.

His journals are a treasure trove of ideas, references, self-criticism, culture-critical observations, weather reports, whimsical vignettes, extrapolations, autodidactic and amateurish, from his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Camus and plenty of people you've never heard of, Isaac of Stella, Evdokimov, Julien Green . . . I could go on.

Anyway, my mind was racing when I hit the black mat of meditation. Now you can pull in the reins brutally on the wild horse, or let him run. Best to let him run and tire himself out while you observe his antics. After 20 minutes he settled down, leaving 30 minutes for a peaceful dive toward Silence or Mental Quiet, the first stage on the mystical descent. The German Versenkung taken mystically* as opposed to nautically well captures the sinking below the  waves of discursivity into the depths.

Now it can happen that you sink so deep that you fear that you will never come up again. The terror of ego loss grips you. At this point you need a great faith and a great trust, lest you miss the opportunity of a lifetime: to penetrate the veil while enwrapped in the mortal coil. I was offered this opportunity many years ago but the fear of ego death  sent me to the surface again when the whole point is to transcend the ego, to let it go, to give up control.  The ego must die for the soul to live. I am alluding to what may be the deep meaning of Matthew 18:3: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." The little child trusts. Plato: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

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* (KONZENTRATION) Zustand tiefer Konzentration, Meditation absorption , contemplation

die Verbindung zum Göttlichen durch die sitzende, stille Versenkung: connecting with the divine by means of seated, quiet contemplation.

A Minimum of Metaphysics for Meditation

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Buber on Buddhism: Notes on a Trenchant Critique

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Martin Buber's critique of Buddhism, and of mysticism generally, is formidable.

 

Meditation as Disciplined Non-Thinking

A Brunton passage elucidated.

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Two Worries about Meditation

One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha.  He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali  form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any meditation practice. 

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines.  As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to the first friend to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to him an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach  as inner listening.  In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait.  Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God . . . ." But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

This brings me to a second Christian friend who asks, "Do you think the mind clearing function of meditation might be akin to the person Jesus taught us of, the person with a clean and emptied soul that was attractive to the demons as a place to occupy?"  

Yes, there is that danger. A mind cluttered and distracted by  petty thoughts and concerns is, from the point of view of the demons, safe against any irruption of divine light. This is why demons are more likely to be encountered in monasteries than in fleshpots. But once the mind is cleared of mundane detritus, once it returns from the diaspora of the sense world and rests quietly in it itself in its quest for the Unchanging Light, the demons have an opening.  But these facts of the spiritual life are no argument against meditation; they are an argument for caution. One would be well-advised to preface every meditation session with a discursive prayer along these lines: "Lord, I confess my spiritual infirmity and humbly ask to be protected from any and all demonic agents. Lord help me, guardians guard me." Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.  

My second friend is a Protestant, and among other faults, they fail to appreciate the mystical element in Christianity.

Finally:

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent.  Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self.  Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in.  The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self' 

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self? 

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

The 'Summons' of Meditation

This has happened often. I go to the black mat to begin my session.  I go there and assume the cross-legged posture. My purpose is  to enter mental quiet and elevate my mind to the highest. But a petty thought obtrudes. I begin to enact or realize this 'centrifugal' thought by attending to it. But then I receive a 'summons' in the form of a light, sometimes blue, sometimes white, sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes pulsating, sometimes not, usually subtle but phenomenologically  unmistakable.  Nothing so dramatic as to throw me off my horse were I riding a horse.  Just a light, but one that calls me to the topic and into focus, and away from the diaspora of the petty. And then it goes out.

I know that the source of the light is not something physical external to my body.  Perhaps the cause is in my brain. But that is pure speculation, and easily doubted. The phenomenon is what it is and cannot be gainsaid: I can doubt the cause but I cannot doubt the datum in its pure phenomenality. It is indubitable as a pure givenness.  Perhaps the 'summons' is a call from the Unseen Order which lies beyond all sensible 'visibility.' But that too is speculation. Perhaps there is no Unseen Order. In that case the 'summons' would not be a summons.  I cannot be sure that it is and I cannot be sure that it isn't.

Neither underbelief nor overbelief is justified by the experience itself.  But the facts are the facts. The phenomenological facts are that I and other dedicated meditators  have this 'summons' experience and it is followed by mental focus or onepointedness which is some cases takes the more dramatic form of a 'glomming onto' the theme of the meditation.

So am I not within my epistemic rights -- assuming that it even makes sense to speak of rights and duties with respect to matters doxastic -- in treading the path of overbelief? 

Related:

Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief

Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

 

Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

Wherein I stand up for navel-gazing and punch back at a totalitarian denier of Transcendence. Substack latest.

Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

The Upside of the Shutdown: A Salutary Slowdown

A strange vibe supervened the other morning during a leisurely meander over the local hills. It was as if the world's volume had been dialed down. Things had become calmer and quieter. Or so it seemed. "An upside of the shutdown," I said to myself.

The typical American's life is frantic, frenetic, and hyperkinetic. For any really good reason? What's the rush?  Quo vadis? Whither goest thou, thoughtless hustler? 

Meditation the same morning was long and unusually peaceful. The mind-works ground to a halt. I did not want to rise from the mat. After a 70-minute session I did. I reckon that fine long sitting had something to do with the dial-down vibe.

I will speculate further on the improvement of the social atmosphere and its causes.  There is an analog of contagion in the spread of attitude.

I do not hide from myself the fact that some will die of the Chinese disease and that many, many more will have their lives and livelihoods wrecked by the politically-motivated draconian measures of the overzealous.

But why not appreciate whatever good presents itself in any situation?

This Morning's Meditation: Notes with the Help of Poulain

Today's sitting  ran from 3-3:45 am.  It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued.  I was hard by the boundary that separates what Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet.  But I remained this side of the border, and this side of the first stage of the mystical properly speaking.

Poulain's definition is excellent: "We apply the word mystic to those supernatural acts or states which our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily." (Fr. Augustin Poulain, S.J., The Graces of Interior Prayer: a Treatise on Mystical Theology, Caritas Publishing, 2016, viii + 680 pp.  A translation of the French original first published in 1901. Emphasis in original.) Poulain's tome may well be the greatest secondary source on mystical theology ever written.  It is in the same league as The Three Ages [sic] of the Interior Life by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.

The main point here is that one cannot enter the mystical by one's own power.  Grace is needed. Herewith, a crucial difference between Christian and Buddhist meditation.  'Crucial' from L. crux, crucis, meaning 'cross,' has a special resonance in this context.

A New Testament analogy occurs to me: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you."  (Matthew 7: 7-8, KJV.) If a door is locked from the inside, I cannot pass though it by my own power: I must knock.  The knocking is within my power, but the entry is due to the initiative of another who is not in my power. The prayer of simplicity, the fourth degree of ordinary prayer, is within my power and is like the knocking; the first degree of mystical prayer is not in my power and is like the allowance of entry.

About the prayer of simplicity, Poulain says that "there is a thought or a sentiment that returns incessantly and easily (although with little or no development) among many other thoughts, whether useful or no." (8)  Here are three examples of my own that are either Christian or proto-Christian.

The Jesus Prayer:  "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

A favorite line of mine from Plotinus' Enneads: "It is by the One that all beings are beings." 

An invention of mine with a Thomist flavor: "The Lord is Being itself."

In each case, one runs through a short sentence. The run-through is discursive (from L. currere, to run) in that it constitutes an interior discourse. One does not develop these thoughts, but repeats them to oneself incessantly in a condition in which other thoughts obtrude either as distractions or further developments.  There is nothing mystical going on; one remains on the discursive plane even if one whittles longer phrases down to shorter ones.  One has not yet achieved inner quiet. One is merely knocking on the door. To use the Jesus mantram as an example:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me -->  Lord Jesus Christ have mercy --> Lord have mercy --> Lord, Lord, Lord.

The whittling process may lead to one-pointed concentration on one word. This brings one to the edge of the discursive plane. Whether one goes over the edge into the mystic is not up to one. It is a matter of grace or divine initiative.

Poulain, following The Interior Castle of the great Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila,  calls the first degree or stage of mystical union the prayer of quiet or "the incomplete mystic union." (48)  In this state, "the divine action is not strong enough to hinder distractions," and "the imagination still preserves its liberty." (49).

The claim that God's action brings about the first degree of mystical union is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation. The same is true of the claim that the mystical state is one of union with God.  If we put God between the Husserlian brackets, and attend solely to the phenomenology, we can still ground a distinction between the fourth state of ordinary prayer, the prayer of simplicity, which remains on the discursive plane, and the first mystical state.  

During the session of 25 July 2019 I experienced a sudden, unanticipated, unwilled,  shut-down of all thoughts. Mental silence supervened all of a sudden, on its own.  It subsided soon enough, and the philosopher's attempt at analysis only speeded its departure. If one is granted a taste of this blissful quiet one must simply receive it, without analysis, and with gratitude. The experience of inner quiet, whether or it it is the effect of a transcendent Source, is undeniable and unmistakable.  

On 7 December 2109 I sat from 3:30-4:22 am.  From my notes:

Very good session. A touch of grace, hard to describe: a pacifying presence of something beyond my mental operations. Subtle, but unmistakable.

On 18 February 2020, the experience was as of a subtle summons, a summoning away from mental chatter and the useless rehearsals of stale thoughts, toward silence, waiting, patient attention, interior listening and hearkening. Hearken, horchen, gehorsam, Gehorsamkeit.

Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati

Vito Caiati writes,

 . . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?

What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor.  (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.

But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up.  And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it.  It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.  

I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.  

The same problem does not arise for Christianity.  In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance.  Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization.  There is no need for special experiences.  Perhaps we can say that the soteriology  of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic.  But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.

As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had.  They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.  

But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA.  This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat.  And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.  

Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique.  You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now.  You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes, 

Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority.  For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience.  Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center.  This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere.  Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing.  The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise.  A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov.  The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.

Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process.  The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind.  One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)

My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra.  (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.)  He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this.  He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.  

I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.

I conjecture that what  Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side.  Christians not so much.  But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation.  The unity of a sentence without which  it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.

The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.

Double Cultural Appropriation!

Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.  

My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong. 

To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form.  If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong.  Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on. 

One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns.  I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take.  I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?

Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day.  Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major? 

Who owns truth?

Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.

There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen.  Their appropriation cannot be illicit.

My appropriation of Asian wisdom -- which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern -- is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation.  Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good. 

ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:

Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.

Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?

Post-Session Fruits of a Formal Session

The fruits of a formal meditation session sometimes come after the sitting. I sat for only about a half-hour this morning, trying with little success to let go of every thought as it arose, in search of the state void of thought at the source of thought.  After I arose from the mat, however, unsought unearthly calm descended. Call it Grace. Grace graciously granted ab extra. Its coming is an advent from Elsewhere. Pali Buddhism, magnificent as it is, makes no place for it. A defect, I'd say.  A point for Christianity. These are the metaphysically deepest and richest religions. They can and should learn from each other.

Companion entry: Grace

 

Time Apportionment as between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation?  One correspondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation.  So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation.  A hard saying!  I find it very easy to spend five to eight hours per day reading and writing philosophy. But my daily formal meditation sessions are almost never more than two hours in duration.  There is also mindfulness while hiking or doing other things such as clearing brush or washing dishes, but I don't count that as formal meditation.

What are the possible views on this topic of time apportionment?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble.  (I am pretty sure he had his countryman Renatus Cartesius in mind.) But he didn't proffer his remark in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem.  Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic. Note that Pascal made an exception in his own case.  He left behind a magnificent collection that comes down to us as Pensées.  So no philosophy is worth an hour's trouble except Pascal's own. It would have shown greater existential consistency had the great thinker devoted himself after his conversion to prayer, meditation, and charitable works.  But then we would have been the poorer for it.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation.  Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted.  The view of the ordinary cave-dweller or worldling.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy.  But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time.  The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6.  More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)?  Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks,  vol. II,  The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

• The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
• The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences .  . . .
•  . . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

Prayer over Meditation?

This from a reader:

As a theist who meditates, would you prioritize prayer over meditation or vice versa? For example, I'm a theist; I like to run, meditate, and pray before work every day. If crammed for time, would you say that one or two are more worthwhile or more important, or that its just a matter of preference?

Also I'm using Sam Harris' Waking Up app to meditate. I generally like it but he is unrelentingly determined to get listeners to realize the illusion of the self. Would you recommend using a different resource? The app just helps me stay consistent.

One difference between prayer and meditation is that prayer can be performed instantly by the invocation of a divine name -- Lord! -- or very quickly by the use of a short phrase such as 'Lord, give us light!' or by the use of the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy, 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Of course, one can repeat the Jesus Prayer as a sort of Christian mantram.  If one does that, then one is engaging in a form of meditation especially if one whittles the phrase down to one word in order to achieve mental onepointedness.

Meditation, on the other hand, takes much more time: location, posture, breath, and the control of thoughts.  Reining in the wild horse of the mind  might consume twenty minutes or more. One can pray in any place, in any posture, and in any mental state and in any bodily condition, even under torture.  Jesus prayed on the cross.  Not so with meditation.  So if you are pressed for time you can always pray.

Which is more important, prayer or meditation? The answer depends on what exactly is meant by these terms and what your final metaphysics is. Here, as elsewhere, terminology is fluid and a source of misunderstanding. As I understand prayer it always involves the I-Thou relation and the duality of creature and Creator. To pray is to presuppose that there is Someone who hears and can answer prayers. In petitionary prayer one addresses a petition to another Person. One asks for a mundane or spiritual benefit for oneself or for another.  Inner listening, too, is a kind of prayer in which the I-Thou polarity is preserved.  This listening is a kind of obeying. To hear the Word of God is to obey the Word of God.  Horchen (hear, hearken), gehorchen, Gehorsam (obedience).

Meditation is an excellent propadeutic to prayer as inner listening because one cannot listen unless one is in a quiescent and receptive state.  Mental quiet is the proximate goal of meditation. It is good in itself but it is also good for inner listening.  No theology is required for meditation up to the point of mental quiet, but once it is achieved one can bring one's Judeo-Christian theology into it.

In classical Western theism as I understand it, Duality always has the last word and is never superseded or aufgehoben.  The individual soul is never absorbed into the Godhead.  The Eastern systems, by contrast, tend toward Ultimate Monism.  "I am the eternal Atman."  The Self of all things is who I am at bottom, and one can realize through meditation the ultimate identity of the individual self (jivatman) and the eternal Atman = Brahman).   How this differs from the nirvanic obliteration of the individual self in Buddhism is a matter of dispute. Early Pali Buddhism with its anatta/anatman doctrine denies that there is any self at all, little or big. The ego or I is accordingly an illusion and the goal of meditation is to penetrate this illusion.  

To answer your question, prayer is more important for a convinced orthodox Christian than meditation.

I avoid all electronics early in the morning before and during prayer and meditation. They have absolutely no place there.

As for Sam Harris, see Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion.

The Trick in Meditation

I had a good session on the black mat this morning from 2:55 to 3:35  ante meridian. When I went to the mat, I was riding high on the wild horse of the mind, and of course enjoying the ride as I always do.   But I reined in the beast within five minutes or so and slipped into one of the antechambers of quiescence where thoughts persist but at a slower pace and of a nobler sort. For example, "Who is thinking these thoughts?" "I am thinking these thoughts." "Who am I?" And then the thought arose: to identify the thinker of thoughts is to objectify that which, as the thinker of thoughts, cannot be objectified. Of course, THAT is just another thought: it is the thought of the irreducibly subjective, and thus nonobjectifiable ultimate subject of thinking. Just another bloody thought! And so still at a remove from the Source of thoughts. But then I slipped a little deeper down as these thoughts vanished. Next thing I knew I caught myself falling over. I had fallen asleep. This was about forty minutes into the session. And that brings me to my point.

The trick in meditation is to achieve cessation of all thoughts while remaining fully alert.  So you need to do two things: rein in the wild horse of the mind, and then abide in full alertness in the resultant mental quiet. 

But this is only the first stage in meditation proper.

Be Here Now

The practice thereof will do you good. You don't have to swallow the whole of Ram Dass, whose Be Here Now I read way back when.

Spiritual Practices and Metaphysical Dogmas

It would be foolish to let the dubiousness of metaphysical dogmas dissuade you from spiritual exercises and the good achievable by their implementation. Don't let the weakness of the three pillars supporting the Buddhist edifice, anatta, anicca, dukkha, keep you from a long and salutary session on the black mat.

Related: A 'No' to 'No Self'

Meditation as Inner Listening

Our friend Vlastimil V. worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha.  He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali  form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. 

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines.  As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to Vlastimil to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to Vlastimil an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach  as inner listening.  In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait.  Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order.  But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent.  Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self.  Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in.  The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self' 

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self? 

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

 

From Agitation to Quiescence

The freshness of morning mind ought to be respected and cultivated. But it is not easy to keep the early hours free and clear of all internal rants and rehearsals, especially in these trying times. This morning I succumbed and when I hit the mat of meditation at 3:45 my mind was far from quiescent.

One might be tempted to write off such sessions as inauspicious, and quit the mat, but this is a mistake. Some of my best meditations have emerged from mental turmoil.  The depth of the dive is often in inverse relation to the febrility of the initial ratiocination. But daily persistent practice is essential.  

And of course no electronics whatsoever in the early hours: from 2 AM to 5 AM or later everything is off or disconnected: land line, cell phones, modem, radio, television. Wifey is asleep; cats are up but they don't talk.  One can taste sweet solitude in one's home as hermitage if one wants it.  It helps to live in a quiet neighborhood with neighbors few and far-between, far from the madness of cities which breeds the madness of leftists.

No Time to Meditate?

Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471) has some advice for you:

If thou withdraw thyself from void speakings and idle circuits and from vanities and hearing of tidings thou shalt find time sufficient and convenient to have sweet meditations. (The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX)

Related: Safe Speech

Is There a Self? A Reader Requests Reassurance

A reader reports that he has recently gone through "a season of depression and extreme anxiety" and has come to doubt what he hitherto believed to be true, namely that there is a self.  He now fears that Sam Harris may be right in the following passage I quote in Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion:

It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

What the reader wants from me are reasons in support of his belief that there is a self in the teeth of Harris' claim that the self is a cognitive illusion. Whether or not I can strictly refute the 'No Self' view, I can show that it is not rationally compelling and that one can very reasonably deny it. Here we go.

An Operator-Shift Fallacy

1) The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Harris looks to be guilty of an operator-shift fallacy. The following is a non sequitur:

a) It is not the case that I find X

ergo

b) I find that it is not the case that there is X.

2) So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.

A Transcendental Argument

3) What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even if the self cannot be experienced as a separate object alongside the usual objects of introspection/reflection.  For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'

This is a sort of transcendental argument for the self. We start with a plain fact, namely, that a search is going on, a search for the referent of 'I' given that I am not identical to my property, my body, or any introspectible contents. We then ask: what makes it possible for this search to proceed? We conclude that there must be something that is searching, and what might that be? Well, me! I am searching.  The I, ego, self is not exhausted by its objectifiable features.

A Dogmatic Assumption

It is simply false to say what Harris says, namely, that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?  My point is that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

The Diachronic Unity of Consciousness

4) There are also important considerations re: diachronic personal identity.  Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self.  A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self.  After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience.  I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self.  But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence.  I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable.  And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.

This reasoning may or may not be sound.  The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self -- no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness -- that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question.  For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject.  Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.

All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness.  Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up?  Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal!  Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man!  Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal?  No.  He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)

The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.

To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.  For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody. 

The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object.  Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.

The above blend of phenomenological and dialectical considerations suffices to ensure at least a standoff with Harris and other latter-day Buddhists/Humeans. 

More on Meditation: Worldling and Quester

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.

Impediments to Meditation

This just in from a New Zealand reader:

Firstly let me say, your blog "Maverick Philosopher" has been truly inspiring for me. Particularly insofar as it has freed me from the sense that I need to pursue my love of philosophy and theology from within the academy.

I am happy to have been of some help. The academic world is becoming more corrupt with every passing day, and reform, if it ever comes, will be a long time coming. Conservatives with a sense of what genuine philosophy is are well-advised to explore alternative livelihoods. After spending 5-10 economically unproductive years in a Ph. D. program, you will find it very difficult to secure a tenure-track job at a reasonably good school in a reasonably habitable place. And if you clear the first hurdle, you still have to get tenure while ingratiating yourself with liberal colleagues and hiding your true thoughts from them. If you clear  both hurdles, congratulations! You are now stuck in a leftist seminary for the rest of your career earning peanuts and teaching woefully unprepared students.

Secondly, I wanted to say that your posts on meditation have been enlightening, and I have chosen to take it up as a daily feature of my routine. Having said that, there is something I have found mildly frustrating. 

Within the first few minutes of beginning to meditate, I get a small glimpse of what you once called the "depth component". That is, I can feel myself beginning to find that state of mental quiet. But, then I become aware of it; I think "I'm doing it! I'm getting there!" and, in that moment, I snap back into a discursive mode. Thereafter, it is as if I am shut out for the rest of the day, and I find it impossible to quiet my mind again.

The phrase I used was 'depth dimension,' not 'depth component.'  It is a 'dimension' situated orthogonal to the discursive plane rather than a part of anything. The following from Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation gives an idea of what I mean:

There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique.  You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now.  You have to assume something like what St. Augustine assumes when he writes, 

Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

The fact that you have touched upon mental silence is an encouraging sign: it shows that you have aptitude for meditation. The problem you are having is very common, and for intellectual types, very hard to solve. We intellectual types love our discursive operations: conceptualizing, judging, arguing, analyzing, and so forth. And so, when we start to slip into mental quiet, we naturally want to grasp what is happening and how we got there. This is a mistake! Submit humbly to the experience and analyze it only afterwards. This is not easy to do.

Besides the discursive intellect and its tendency to run on and on, there is also one's ego to contend with. The ego wants to accomplish things, meets its goals, distinguish itself, and collect unusual 'spiritual' experiences with which to aggrandize itself. "I am getting there!" "I am making progress." "I saw a pulsating white light!" "I am  a recipient of divine grace." "I am achieving a status superior to that of others."  I, I, I. Meditation fails of its purpose if it ends up feeding the ego. The point is rather to weaken it, subdue it, penetrate it to its core, trace it back to its source in Augustine's 'inner man' or the individual soul.

But now I am drifting into metaphysics, which is unavoidable if we are going to talk about this at all.  On the one hand, the ego is a principle of separation, self-assertion, and self-maintenance. Without a strong ego one cannot negotiate the world.  Meditation, however, is a decidedly unworldy activity: one is not trying to advance oneself, secure oneself, or assert oneself.  Indeed, one of the reasons people investigate such spiritual practices as meditation is because they suspect the ultimate nullity of all self-advancement and self-assertion. They sense that true security is not to be had by any outward method. 

So while the ego is necessary for worldly life, it is also a cause of division, unproductive competition, and hatred. It is the self in its competitive, finite form. But as I see it,  the ego is rooted in, and a manifestation of, a deeper reality which could be called the true self or the soul.  There is much controversy as to the nature of the deeper reality, but there is widespread agreement that the ego needs to be chastened and deflated and ultimately let go.  

The ego resists meditation because in its deepest reaches meditation is a rehearsal for death. (See Plato, Phaedo, St. 64) For in letting all thoughts go, we let go of all objects of thought including material possessions, the regard of others, our pet theories, our very bodies, our self-image. In short, in deep meditation we seek to let go of the ego and everything that it identifies with.  If you get to the verge of really letting go, you may be gripped by a great fear, the fear of ego-death.  I got there once, years ago, but I shrank back in fear. I may have blown the opportunity of a lifetime.  One must have the trust of the little child mentioned at Matthew 18:3: "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (KJV)

Grace

Is it possible to take grace seriously these days?

Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat.  For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by someone, then I go beyond the given: I move from phenomenology to theology. No philosopher worth his salt can escape the question whether such a move is or is not an illicit slide. An experience describable as having a gift-character needn't be a gift.

Still, the experience was what it was, and could not be doubted a few moments ago, nor now in its afterglow. It is in such experiences that we find the phenomenological roots of the theology of grace which, growing from such roots, cannot be dismissed as empty speculation or projection or wish-fulfillment or anything else the naturalist may urge for its dismissal.

There cannot be a phenomenology of the Absolute but only a phenomenology of the glimpses, gleanings, vouchsafings, and intimations of the Absolute.  To put the point with full philosophical  precision: there can only be a phenomenology of the glimpses, etc. as of the Absolute. That curious phrase from the philosopher's lexicon expresses the latter's professional caution inasmuch as no experience that purports to take us beyond the sphere of immanence proves the veridicality of its intentional object.

On the other hand, the fact of the experience, its occurrence within the sphere of immanence, needs accounting.  However matters may stand with respect to the realitas objectiva of the experience, its realitas formalis needs to be explained. I would venture to say that the best explanation of the widespread occurrence of mystical experiences is that some of them are indeed veridical.

A Goal of Meditation

To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.

Notes After a Meditation Session

The discursive mind loves the dust it kicks up. We love distraction, diversion, dissipation, and diremption, even as we sense their nullity and the need to attain interior silence. This is one reason why meditation is so hard. We love to ride the wild horse of the mind. It is much easier than swimming upstream to the Source.

Or to unmix the metaphors, it is much easier to ride than rein in that crazy horse. But we have the reins in our hands, and it is just a matter of having the will to yank back on them. (10 September 1997)

Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

Is there a better way to begin a new year than by a session upon the black mat?  No, so I sat this morning from 2:50 to 3:45.  There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique.  You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now.  You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes, 

Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority.  For the intentionality of mind, its outer directedness, conspires against the experience.  Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center.  This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere.  Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing.  The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise.  A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov.  The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.

Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process.  The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind.

My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra.  He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this.  He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.

I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.'  Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves.  Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.

I conjecture that what  Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine  was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive.  Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side.  Christians not so much.  But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation.  The unity of a sentence without which  it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.

The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. 

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Micro-Totalitarianism

Meditation Themes

There is no end to the number of meditation themes; one must choose one that is appealing to oneself. One might start discursively, by running through a mantram, but the idea is to achieve a nondiscursive one-pointedness of attention. Here are some suggestions.

1. A Christian of a bhaktic disposition might start with the Jesus Prayer which is used by the mystics of Eastern Orthodoxy: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." One tethers one's mind to the mantram to the exclusion of all other thoughts, repeating it (in thought) over and over. One then gradually whittles it down to one  word, 'Lord,' for example, by progressively dropping 'a sinner,' 'on me a sinner,' 'have mercy on me a sinner,' and so on. One then repeats 'Lord,' 'Lord, 'Lord,' . . . in an attempt to sink into mental quiet.  

Mental quiet is the first phase of meditation proper.  Achieving it is difficult and rare, and what one does to achieve it is merely preliminary to meditation proper.  A resolute, daily meditator may reasonably hope touch upon mental quiet once a month. 

If one feels oneself slipping into mental quiet, then one must let go of the mantram and simply abide passively in the state of quietude, without reflecting on it, analyzing it, or recalling how one got to it. Philosopher types who 'suffer' from hypertrophy of the discursive faculty may find this well-nigh impossible.  The approach to mental quiet is a phase of active working; this is difficult enough. Even more difficult is the phase in which one lets  go of this work and simply rests in it. There will be a very strong temptation to analyze it. If at all possible, resist this temptation.

2. A more metaphysically inclined Christian who is fond of St. Augustine might experiment with his phrase, 'Lord, eternal Truth, unchanging Light,' reducing it to one word, whether 'Lord' or 'Truth' or 'Light.'

3. I have had good results with a line from Plotinus' Enneads, "It is by the One that all beings are beings." This is a very rich saying that can be mulled over from several directions. Everything that is, IS. What is it for a thing TO BE? And what is the source of the being of that-which-is? It is by the One that all beings are. What does 'by'  mean? And what is the One? Although one starts discursively, the idea is to penetrate this ONE, to become at-one with it, to achive at-one-ment. As Plotinus would say, it is a flight of the alone to the all-One. Of course, it cannot  be grasped: any grasping is discursive.

One is digging for the  nondiscursive root of the discursive mind, a root that is itself rooted in the ONE which is the source of all phenomenal entities and unities.

4. A classical theme of meditation is the Self, or, if you insist, the absence of a Self. Here is one of the ways I approach this theme. I start by closely attending to my breath. I think of it objectively as air entering though my nostrils and travelling to my lungs. And then I think about my body and its parts. Here on this mat is this animated body; but am I this animated body? How could I be identical to this animated body? I have properties it doesn't have, and vice versa.  Am I this breath, these lungs, this cardiovascular system, this animated body? Or am I the awareness of all of this? How could I be any object? Am I not rather the subject for whom all  objects are objects? Am I not other than every object? But what is this subject if it is not itself an object? How could there be a subject that was not an object or a potential object? Is it nothing at all? But there is awareness, and awareness is not any object. There is patently a difference between the awareness of O and O, for any O. To be for a human being is to be in this transcendental difference. Is this difference nothing? If it is not nothing, what differs in this difference? 

One can pursue this meditation in two ways. One can reduce it to a koan: I am awareness and I am not nothing, but I am not something either. Not nothing and not something. How? I am something, I am nothing, I can't be both, I can't be neither. What then is this I that is nothing and something and not nothing and something? One can take this as a koan, an intellectual knot that has no discursive solution but is not a mere nugatory puzzle of linguistic origin, to be relieved by some Wittgensteinian pseudo-therapy, but a pointer to a dimension  beyong the discursive mind. The active phase of the meditation then  consists in energetically trying to penetrate this riddle.

Note that one needn't dogmatically assume or affirm that there is a dimension beyond the discursive mind.  This is open inquiry, exploration without anticipation of result.  One 'senses' that there is a transdiscursive dimension.  This is connected to the famous sensus divinitatis.  If there were no intimation of the Transdiscursive, one would have no motive to take up the arduous task of meditation.  I am referring to the genuine article, not some New Age relaxation technique.

Or, instead of bashing one's head against this brick wall of a koan, one can just repeat 'I,' 'I', 'I' in an attempt at peacefully bringing the discursive intellect to subsidence.  But in a genuine spirit of inquiry and wonder.  No 'vain repetitions.'

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Further Questions About Meditation

 This continues the thread begun in Questions About Meditation. Vlastimil writes,

I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice?

Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you think that vipassana practice as such is not exerting that tendency and that the tendency is rather exerted by the combination of the practice with certain doctrines brought into the practice.

E.g., yesterday I read (in a Buddhist manual by Daniel Ingram) that when practising vipassana -- in a way that increases the speed, precision, consistency and inclusiveness of our experience of all the quick little sensations that make up our sensory experience -- "it just happens to be much more useful to assume that things are only there when you experience them and not there when you don’t. Thus, the gold standard for reality when doing insight practices is the sensations that make up your reality in that instant. ... Knowing this directly leads to freedom."

Will the vipassana practice tend me to believe that "useful" assumption, so useful for becoming to believe the Buddhist doctrines? Also, can I make any serious progress in that practice without making that assumption?

A. One Way to Meditate

Let me tell you about a fairly typical recent morning's meditation.  It lasted from about 3:10 to 4 AM.  

After settling onto the meditation cushions, I turned my attention to my deep, relaxed, and rhythmic breathing, focusing on the sensation of air passing in and out through the nostrils.  If distracting thoughts or images arose I would expel them on the 'out' breath so that the expulsion of air coincided with the 'expulsion' of extraneous thoughts.  If you have already learned how to control your mind, this is not that difficult and can be very pleasant and worth doing for its own sake even if you don't go any deeper.  

(If you find this elementary thought control  difficult or impossible, then you ought to be alarmed, just as you ought to be alarmed if you find your arms and legs flying off in different directions on their own.  It means  that you have no control over your own mind. Then who or what is controlling it?)

I then visualized my lungs' filling and emptying.  I visualized my body as from outside perched on the cushions.  And then I posed a question about the awareness of breathing.

There is this present breathing, and there is this present awareness of breathing.  Even if the breathing could be identified with, or reduced to, an objective, merely physical process in nature, this won't work for the awareness of breathing.

What then is this awareness?  It is not nothing.  If it were nothing, then nothing would appear, contrary to fact.  Fact is, the breathing appears; it is an object of awareness.  So the awareness is not nothing.  But the awareness is not something either:  it it not some item that can be singled out.  There is at least an apparent contradiction here: the awareness-of is both something and nothing.  A Zen meditator could take this as a koan and work on it as such.

Or, in an attempt at avoiding logical contradiction, one might propose that the awareness-of is something that cannot be objectified.   It is, but it cannot be objectified.

I am aware of my breathing, but also of my breathing's being an object of awareness, which implies that in some way I am aware of my awareness, though not as a separable object.

Who is aware of these things?  I am aware of them.    But who am I?  And who is asking this question?  I am asking it.  But who am I who is asking this question and asking who is asking it?

At this point I am beyond simple mind control to what could be self-inquiry. (Cf. Ramana Maharshi)  The idea is to penetrate into the source of this awareness.  One circles around it discursively with the idea of collapsing the circle into a non-discursive point, as it were. (I just now came up with this comparison.) 

B.  Does doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs?

I don't think so.  The Vipassana meditator's experiences are interpreted in the light of the characteristic Buddhist beliefs (anicca, anatta, dukkha).  They are read in to the experiences rather than read off from them.  A Christian meditator could easily do the same thing.  I reported an unforgettable experience deep in meditation in which I felt myself to be the object of a powerful, unearthly love.  If I take myself to have experienced the love of Christ, then clearly I go beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  Still, the experience fits with Christian beliefs and could be taken in some loose sense to corroborate it.  The same goes for the Vipassana meditator.

C. Impermanence

For example, does one learn from meditation that all is impermanent?

First of all, that

T. All is impermanent

Can be argued to be self-refuting.

Here goes.  (T) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (T), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (T) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.  (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing, and indeed continuously changing.)

Note also that if (T) is true, then every part of (T)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (T), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (T) undermines the permanence/impermanence  contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (T) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger  sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful  'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Now perhaps the Vippassana meditator gets himself into a state in which he is aware of only momentary, impermanent dharmas. How can he take that to show that ALL is impermanent?

There is also a question about what a belief would be for a Buddhist.  On my understanding, beliefs are "necessary makeshifts" (a phrase from F. H. Bradley) useful in the samsaric realm, but not of ultimate validity.  They are like the raft that gets one across the river but is then abandoned on the far shore.  The Dharma (teaching) is the raft that transports us across the river of Samsara to the land of Nirvana where there is no need for any rafts -- or for the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.

D. How Much Metaphysics Does One Need to Meditate?

Assuming that meditation is pursued as a spiritual practice and not merely as a relaxation technique, I would say that the serious meditator must assume that there is a 'depth dimension' of spiritual/religious significance at the base of ordinary awareness and that our ultimate felicity demands that we get in touch with this depth dimension.

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) I would add that meditation is the difficult task of swimming upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.

As St. Augustine says, Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi; in interiore homine habitat veritas.  The truth dwells in the inner man; don't go outside yourself: return within. 

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Questions about Meditation

An academic philosopher inquires:

 

As usual, I want to ask you about something (something you're free to blog about).

 

Since December 2015, I've practised mindfulness meditation, with low intensity. Just 20 minutes or so each or every other day, paying calm (if possible) attention to things as they were happening in my mind or in my body. It's been great, mainly as an antidote against anxiety.

 

These days I have asked myself, could I gain something more, or something deeper, from my practice? If so, how? By practising more intensively, even painfully? Or by praying during, or after, my practise? The first path is carved with admirable precision in some Buddhist, step-by-step manuals . . . . But it might eventually lead me into a land of -- what seems like -- mental disorder and metaphysical madness (sensory overload, intensive fear or disgust, the impression of no self and of the nullity of classical logic).  On the other hand, no comparably detailed manuals for following the latter path seem to be available . . . .

 

So I wonder, what would be your suggestion to someone who considers meditating more seriously and in line with really good sources yet who wants to turn neither insane nor Buddhist?

 

First of all, I am glad to hear that you have taken up this practice.  Philosophers especially need it since we tend to be afflicted with 'hypertrophy of the critical faculty' to give it a name.  We are very good at disciplined thinking, but it is important to develop skill at disciplined nonthinking as well. Disciplined nonthinking is one way to characterize meditation.  One attempts to achieve an alert state of mental quiet in which all discursive operations come to a halt.

 

It is very difficult, however, and 20 minutes every other day is not enough.  You need to work up to 40-60 minute sessions every day.  Early morning is best, the same time each morning.  Same place, a corner of your study, say.  Posture?  Seated cross-legged on cushions, with the knees lower than the buttocks. Kneeling has spiritual value, but not for long periods of prayer or meditation.  Breath?  Slow, even, deep, from the belly.

 

There needn't be any physical pain; indeed, there shouldn't be.  If the full lotus is painful, there is the half-lotus, and the Burmese posture.  Depending on the state of my legs and joints, I adjust my body as needed for comfort and stability.  A lttle hatha yoga is a useful preliminary.  Or just plain stretching, holding each stretch for 20-30 seconds.

 

A certain mild ascesis, though, is sine qua non for successful meditation/contemplation.  You have to live a regular life, follow the moral precepts, abstain from spiritual and physical intoxicants, and so on.  A little reading the night before of Evagrios Pontikos, say, is indicated; filling your head with mass media dreck & drivel contraindicated.  

 

Meditation is an inner listening.  The receptivity involved, however, opens one to demonic influence.  So there is a certain danger in going deep.  It is therefore a good idea for a Christian meditator to begin his session with the Sign of the Cross, a confession of weakness in which one admits that one is no match for demonic agents, and a supplication for protection from their influence.  I recommend you buy a copy of the spiritual classic, Unseen Warfare by Lorenzo Scupoli. (Available from Amazon.com) Anyone who attempts to make spiritual progress ought to expect demonic opposition. (Cf. St. Paul, Epistle to the Ephesians, 6:12: ^"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.")

 

Since you are interested in the Buddhist approach to these matters, you may find useful my post, The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli.

 

Could deep meditation drive one mad?  I would say no if you avoid psychedelic drugs and lead an otherwise balanced life.  You could meditate two hours per day with no ill effects.  

 

But if you go deep, you will have unusual experiences some of which will be disturbing.   There are the makyo phenomena described by Zen Buddhists. (Whether these phenomena should be described as the Zennists describe them is of course a further question.)  For example, extremely powerful and distracting sexual images.  I once 'heard' the inner locution, "I want to tear you apart."  Inner locutions have a phenomenological quality which suggests, though of course it does not prove, that these locutions are not excogitated by the subject in question but come from without.  Demonic interference?

 

But on another occasion I felt myself to be the object of a very powerful unearthly love.  An unforgettable experience.  A Christian will be inclined to say that what I experienced was the love of Christ, whereas a skeptic will dismiss the experience as a 'brain fart.'  The phenomenology, however, cannot be gainsaid.

 

Will deep meditation and the experiences that result drive you to accepting Buddhist teaching according to which all is impermanent (anicca), unsatisfactory (dukkha), and devoid of self-nature (anatta)?  I don't think so.  Many Buddhists claim that these doctrine are verified in meditation.  I would argue, however, that they bring their doctrines to their experiences and then illictly take the experiences as supporting the doctrines.  

 

For example, if you fail to find the self in deep meditation does it follow that there is no self?  Hardly.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now that was quick and dirty, but I have expatiated on this at length elsewhere.

 

Does the path of meditation lead to the relativization of classical logic, or perhaps to its utter overthrow?  This is a tough question about which I will say something in a subsequent post that examines Plantinga's critique of John Hick in the former's Warranted Christian Belief.

 

Finally, I want to recommend the two-volumed The Three Ages of the Interior Life  (not the one-volumed edition) by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.  (Available from Amazon.com) This is the summit of hard-core Catholic mystical theology.  This is the real thing by the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists.  You must read it.  No Francine namby-pamby-ism here.

 

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My Time Away: Where I Was and What I Did

A reader sent the following about half-way through my digital fast and blogging hiatus.

. . . I was hoping that when you emerge from it you might have some practical wisdom on how you went about it. What has your daily schedule been like? Have you struggled with the nagging urge to check everything all the time? I have been thinking a lot about the issues you raised both in The Big Unplug post and in your post on Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration . . . . Thanks for reading this and for the writing you have contributed over the years - it has truly been  signal amidst a great deal of noise.

How did I go about it?  I got as far away as practicable from the hype and hustle and hyperkineticism of the modern world.

From July 26th to August 30th I lived in a hermitage on the grounds of the most remote monastery in the Western hemisphere in a place of great natural beauty.  I have decided not to post any photographs or reveal the identities  of any interlocutors in keeping with the monastic spirit of silence, solitude and seclusion.

An average day went something like this.  Up at my usual time of 2:00 AM. (The monks arise at 3:30.) Instant coffee.  I drank no good coffee for five weeks as part of the self-imposed discipline.  Spiritual-philosophical reading until 3:00: Bible, Garrigou-Lagrange, Edith Stein, Theresa of Avila, et al.  Formal, seated meditation until 3:30 in the hermitage.  Then a 10-15 minute hike through a dark and spooky canyon to the oratory for Vigils at 4:00.  This is the first hour of the liturgia horarum, the liturgy of the hours.  It lasts one hour weekdays, one hour, twenty minutes on Sundays.  Some of the 'little hours' are as short as ten minutes.  The liturgy, chanted by the monks, is essentially psalmody with Christian elements interspersed.  After Vigils, a light breakfast outside the monks' refectory. Then back to the hermitage for study and writing.  I usually attended three of the seven hours per day and meditated on a 'regulation' Zen cushion and mat three times per day.  I gave myself the rule, "No pray, no eat."  So I attended Vigils before breakfast, Sext before the main meal, taken with the monks in the refectory, in silence of course, with one of the monk doing a reading, and Vespers before supper.

Did I struggle with the urge to check my 'devices' all the time?  Not at all.  I brought only a laptop computer for writing, but there was no wi-fi at the hermitage.  For that I had to hike to the monastery proper where I could tap into a weak wi-fi signal.  I did that a grand total of four times in five weeks, and only to check e-mail.  The only other device I had with me was a primitive cell phone which was useless to me in the remote location.

From my journal:

Here in the hermitage I stand naked before my own conscience.  Its penetrating power is enhanced by the exterior and interior silence.

No Escape.  And now it is night.  Alone in the hermitage which is itself alone and off by itself under stars undiminished by light pollution.  Dead silence.  No distractions of the usual sort: other people, pets, television, radio, Internet.  Just me, my books, and my past -- and the spiritual dimension that the silence and solitude allow to approach.  The hour glass of my existence is running out, which is why I am here to repent of my sins and prepare for death.  The hour of death is the hour of truth when the masks fall, and evasions evaporate.

Modern man, distracted and diverted by endless self-referential yammering, firmly entrapped within the human horizon, is so deluded and lost as to be incapable of even raising the question, seriously, of whether anything lies beyond that stifling horizon.

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Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

The Proximate Goal of Meditation

To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely to believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.

Contradiction and Koan

What is a contradiction from one angle is a koan from another. In a contradiction, logical thought hits a dead end.  Discursive thought's road end, however, may well be the trail head of the Transdiscursive.

The Parable of the Leaky Cup

There is no point in begging for water with a leaky cup.  Water thereby gained is immediately lost again.  First fix the cup, then beg for water.

So also with the glimpses and gleanings and intimations from Elsewhere. They won't be retained in a perforated vessel.   And if they are not retained, then they cannot do you any good.  Moral fitness and intellectual discrimination are necessary for their recognition, proper evaluation, retention if judged salutary, and existential implementation.   If you can't act right or think straight, then mystical, religious, and paranormal vouchsafings, whether they come 'out of the blue' or as a result of formal spiritual practices,  may do more harm than good.  They may inflate the ego or lead it into the dark regions of the occult.

Related: Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

Meditation is Hard

Thoughts don't like to subside.  One leads to another, and another.  You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty, thoughts that you will soon post to your weblog, all the while realizing that mental blogging is not meditation.

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden," said Emerson and you would swim upstream to the Source.  So you make an effort, but the effort is too much for you.  Perhaps the metaphor is wrong. One from al-Ghazzali might be better. 

A cooling evening breeze is more likely to come to the desert dweller if he climb to the top of the minaret than if he stay on the ground.  So he makes an effort within his power, the effort of positioning himself to receive, when and if it should come, a gust of the divine favor.

He waits for the grace that may overcome the gravity of the mind and its hebetude.

To meditate is to wait, and therein lies or sits the difficulty.

This morning's session (sitting in plain English) was good and lasted from 3:30 to 4:25.  Fueled by chai: coffee is too much the driver of the discursive.  But now the coffee is coming in and I'm feeling fabulous and the thoughts are 'percolating' up from who knows where.

The Discursive as Distraction

The search for the Real takes us outside ourselves. We may seek the Real in experiences, possessions, distant lands, or other people. These soon enough reveal themselves as distractions. But what about ideas and theories? Are they simply a more lofty sort of distraction? “Travelling is a fool’s paradise” said Emerson. Among lands certainly, but not among ideas?

If I move from objects of sense to objects of thought I am still moving among objects. To discourse, whether in words or in thoughts, is to be on the run and not at rest. But is not the Real to be found resting within, in one’s innermost subjectivity? Discourse dis-tracts, pulls apart, the interior unity.

Noli foras ire, said Augustine, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. “Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.”

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Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation?  One corresondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation.  So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation.  A hard saying!

What are the possible views on this topic?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble.  But he didn't say that in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem.  Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation.  Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted.  The view of the ordinary cave-dweller.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy.  But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time.  The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6.  More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)?  Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks,  vol. II,  The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

• The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
• The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences .  . . .
•  . . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

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Anthony Flood on Philosophy as Misosophy, Part I

 

Re-collection

Recollection is a flight from the diaspora  of animal inclinations and social suggestions.  One collects oneself.  Life is one long battle against the centrifugal pull of these two.  Time too flees and flies not just by passing unaccountably but also by losing itself in the diaspora of its own modes, past, present, and future.  What is, is not, because its element, time, is not, but is past, or future, or fleeting.

Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief

One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience.  Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely.  I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical and paranormal nature.

A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation.  I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love.  I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone.  Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do. 

The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition.  He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.

Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described  as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent.  Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief.  Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term.  But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was the love of Christ (subjective genitive), that would be an overbelief.  The experience could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, a few years after having the experience, I have no practical doubts about it either:  I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories. 

Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality.  There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open.  First, is it of something real?  Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of? 

Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain."  But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd.  The experience was certainly not of that.  The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.

Indeed, it is arguable that the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word I just now coined.  [Correction, 11 July: James uses 'under-belief' on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience.] If an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained within it, or reading into it what manifestly is not contained within it. 

Pounding on such a boneheaded skeptic, however, does not get the length of a proof of the veridicality of my experience. 

We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions.  Are there perceptual beliefs?  If yes, are they not overbeliefs?  I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me.  But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes.  The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .

Or is it rather underbelief  if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality beyond my visual perception?

Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?

Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief?  Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective?  Beliefs are either true or false.  Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences.  I think James would reject this.  For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs.  I'll dig up some passages later.

Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation.  But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief.  One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self.  Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses.  The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object.  Granted.  It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self.  To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real.  How justify that on the basis of a close inspection of experience?  It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance.  Are we acquainted with it?

The irony shouldn't be missed.  Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self.  Buddhism is a religion.   

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Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics.  (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)

In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:

I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

The above can be distilled into three propositions:

1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.

2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.

3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.

Harris continues:

The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

To continue with the distillation:

4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity.  There is nothing irrational about it.

5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."

6.  One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.

7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.

There is much to agree with here.  Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5).  Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss.  My present concerns are (6) and (7).

Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights.  Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience?  Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion.  But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation.  I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period.  Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.

So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds:  there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.

It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it. 

It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.

Here is an analogy.  An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses.  He searched  high and low, from morning til night.  Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place.  His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!

The analogy works with the eyes as well.  From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes.  My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place.  Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.

It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self.  It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.

It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?

My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own. 

For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

 

 

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Going to the mat of meditation at the appointed time when the caffeine-induced riot of thoughts clamors for blogic expression.

Max Black in Meditation