Maverick Philosopher

Meditation: How Long and What to Expect

A student from Northern Ireland writes,

I've recently been contemplating practising meditation. I decided to look up what you had to say on the subject, and I was happy to discover the "how to meditate" post. I was just wondering though, how long should a person meditate, and what should a first timer like myself expect to think or feel during the first few meditations?

How long? Between 15 and 30 minutes at first, working up gradually to an hour or more. What to expect?  Not much at first.  Mind control is extremely difficult and our minds are mostly out of control serving up an endless parade of  pointless memories, useless worries, and negative thoughts of all sorts.  In the beginning meditation is mostly hard work.  So you can expect to work hard at first for meager results.   

 

At a deeper level, expectation and striving to accomplish something are out of place.  Meditation is an interior listening that can occur only when the discursive mind with its thoughts, judgements, intentions, expectations, and the like has been silenced.  Meditation is not an inner discourse but an inner listening. 

 

Of course, there is a bit of a paradox here: at first one must intend resolutely to take up this practice, one must work at it every morning with no exceptions, one must strive to quiet the mind -- but all in quest of an effortless abiding in mental quiet wherein there is no intending, working, or striving.

 

Logic greatly aids, though  is not necessary for, disciplined thinking.  Meditation greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined non-thinking.

 

Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency.  In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that some have denied that there is a center or a self.  The aim of meditation is centering.  To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts.  Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden."  Arrival at that hidden source is the ultimate goal of meditation.

 

 

Swimming upstream against a powerful current is not easy and for some impossible. So this is a good metaphor of the difficulty of meditation.  The more extroverted you are, the more difficult it will be. Why engage in this hard work?  Either you sense that your surface self has a depth dimension that calls to you or you don't. If you do, then this is the way to explore it. 

 

 

Meditation reduced to three steps: 

First, drive out all useless thoughts.  Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts.  Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones.  Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper.  Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps.  You may not even make it to the threshhold.  But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.

The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises.  Not easy!

Meditation won't bear fruits unless one lives in a way that is compatible with it and its goals.  So a certain amount of withdrawal from the world is needed.  One needs to 'unplug.'

The attainment of mental quiet is a very high and choice-worthy goal of human striving.  Anything that scatters or dis-tracts (literally: pulls apart) the mind makes it impossible to attain mental quiet as well as such lower attainments as ordinary concentration.  Now the mass media have the tendency to scatter and distract.  Therefore, if you value the attainment of mental quiet and such cognate states as tranquillitas animi, ataraxia, peace of mind, samadhi, concentration, 'personal presence,' etc., then you are well-advised to limit consumption of media dreck and cultivate the disciplines that lead to these states.

De Magistro

Seek the Teacher deep within.

The Mind's Centrifugal Tendency

Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency.  In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that many have denied that there is a center or a self.  The aim of meditation is centering.  To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts.  Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden."  Could there be a stream without a source?  A wind blowing towards objects (Sartre) that blew from no direction and for no cause?

Changing metaphors once again: you say you like riding the wild horse of the mind into dispersal and diremption?  Then do so, and see where it gets you.  If self-loss in the manifold proves to be unsatisfactory, you may be a candidate for re-collection.

Related articles

Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration

Asceticism

A reader writes,

I am a philosopher and a conservative (in many ways) and I enjoy your blog very much. One thing I find rather puzzling (and interesting), though, is your extreme asceticism. Recently, you said:

"Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere.  But it is at least possible that thinking and trancing will."

I guess I wonder just _where_ it is that you are trying to get and what is so great about being there such that it is better than enjoying some drinking and dancing (in moderation, of course).

Well, if I am an extreme ascetic, then what was Simeon Stylites?  I am not now, and never have been, a pillar-dweller exposed to the elements.

 

'Asceticism' is from the Greek askesis meaning 'self-denial.'  On a spectrum from extreme self-indulgence on the left to extreme self-denial on the right, I would place myself somewhere in the middle, moving on my better days right-ward and on the others left-ward.  So you could say that I am a mild-to-moderate ascetic.  I believe in the value of self-denial and self-control in thought, word, and deed.  That self-control with respect to words and deeds are essential to human flourishing I take to be well-nigh self-evident.  Control of thought, however, is also essential to happiness which is why one ought so spend some time each day in formal meditation.  (More on this in Meditation and Spiritual Exercises categories.)

 

But not only is control of thought conducive to, and indeed a necessary condition of, happiness, it is morally obligatory to control and in some cases eliminate some thoughts.  I argue that out in Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? and Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis.

 

Moderate asceticism is good and is enjoined by all the major religions and wisdom traditions.  It is perfectly obvious that many of the problems we face today result from the lack of self-control.  Obesity, for example.  Debt, both at the personal level and at the level of government, is fundamentally a moral problem with at least one of its roots sunk deep in lack of self-control.

 

 

If you are running credit card debt, you are doing something very foolish.  Why do you buy what you can't afford with money you don't have?  You must know that you are wasting huge amounts of money on interest.  Why doesn't this knowledge cause you to be prudent in your expenditures?  Because you never    learned how to control yourself.  Perhaps you were brought up by liberals who think the summum bonum is self-indulgence and 'getting in touch with your feelings.'  By the way, this in another powerful argument against liberalism.  There is no wisdom on the Left.  The last thing you will learn from liberals are the virtues and the vices and the seven deadly sins.  For liberals, these are topics to joke about.

No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of
the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation.

Back to drinking and dancing and the reader's question.  Everything depends on what one considers to be the purpose of life.  To me it is clear that we are not here to have a 'good time.'  For me philosophy is not an academic game but a spiritual quest for the ultimate truth.  The quest involves rigorous, technical philosophy, but it also involves non-discursive spiritual exercises.  These are impossible without a certain amount of moral purification and ascesis.  They are also best pursued in the early hours before dawn.  So right here  is an excellent reason not to waste the evening hours in idle talk, drinking and dancing.  These activities are not conducive to spiritual progress.  That is why some of us avoid them. 

Socrates

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 4, part 1, p. 40, #286:

When Socrates thought and talked, he walked about; but when the transcendental experience struck him, holding him enraptured and thought-free, he remained rigidly still, standing where it caught him.  No probing questions then engaged him, no arguments with his friends then interested him.

The dialectic is dropped when the experience it subserves arrives.

The Halloween Dance

Wife went, I didn't.  She goes every year, I beg off every year.  Angel that she is, she doesn't begrudge me my nonattendance.  I'd rather think and trance than drink and dance.

Why?  Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere.  But it is at least possible that thinking and trancing will.

Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations.  If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer:

A test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study brain activity while the subject is deep in prayer/meditation.  The red in the language center and frontal lobe areas indicates greater brain activity when the subject is praying or meditating as compared to the baseline when he is not.  But when atheists "contemplate God" -- which presumably means when they think about the concept of God, a concept that they, as atheists, consider to be uninstantiated -- "Dr. Newberg did not observe any of the brain activity in the frontal lobe that he observed in religious people."

The upshot?

Dr. Newberg concludes that all religions create neurological experiences, and while God is unimaginable for atheists, for religious people, God is as real as the physical world. "So it helps us to understand that at least when they [religious people] are describing it to us, they are really having this kind of experience... This experience is at least neurologically real."

First of all, why do we need a complicated and expensive study to learn this?  It is well-known that serious and sincere practioners of religions will typically have various experiences as a result of prayer and meditation.  (Of course most prayer and meditation time is 'dry' -- but experiences eventually come.)  The reality of these experiences as experiences cannot be doubted from the first-person point of view of the person who has them.  There is no need to find a neural correlate in the brain to establish the reality of the experience qua experience.  The experiences are real whether or not neural correlates can be isolated, and indeed whether or not there are any. 

Suppose no difference in brain activity is found as between the religionists and the atheists when the  former do their thing and the latter merely think about the God concept.  (To call the latter "contemplating God" is an absurd misuse of terminology.)  What would that show? Would it show that there is no difference between the religionists' experiences and the atheists'?  Of course not.  The difference is phenomenologically manifest, and, as I said, there is no need to establish the "neurological reality" of the experiences to show that they really occur.

Now I list some possible confusions into which one might fall when discussing a topic like this.

Confusion #1: Conflating the phenomenological reality of a religious experience as experienced with its so-called "neurological reality."  They are obviously different as I've already explained.

Confusion #2: Conflating the  religious experience with its neural correlate, the process in the brain or CNS on which the experience causally depends.  Epistemically, they cannot be the same since they are known in different ways.  The experience qua experience is known with certainty from the first-person point of view.  The neural correlate is not.  One cannot experience, from the first-person point of view, one's own brain states as brain states.  Ontically, they cannot be the same either, and this for two sorts of reasons.  First, the qualitative features of the experiences cannot be denied, but they also cannot be identified with anything physical.  This is the qualia problem.  Second, religious/mystical experiences typically exhibit that of-ness or aboutness, that directedness-to-an-object, that philosophers call intentionality.  No physical states have this property.

Confusion #3:  Conflating a religious entity with its concept, e.g., confusing God with the concept of God.  This is why it is slovenly and confused to speak of "contemplating God"  when one is merely thinking about the concept of God.  The journalist and/or the neuroscientist seem to be succumbing to this confusion.

Confusion #4:  Conflating an experience (an episode or act of experiencing) with its intentional object.  Suppose one feels the presence of God.  Then the object is God.  But God is not identical to the experience.  For one thing, numerically different experiences can be of the same object. The object is distinct from the act, and the act from the object.  The holds even if the intentional object does not exist.  Suppose St Theresa has an experience of the third person of the Trinity, but there is no such person.  That doesn't affect the act-object structure of the experience.  After all, the act does not lose its intentional directedness because the object does not exist.

Confusion #5:  Conflating the question whether an experience 'takes an object' with the question whether the object exists.

Confusion #6:  Conflating reality with reality-for.  There is no harm is saying that God is real for theists, but not real for atheists if all one means is that theists believe that God is real while atheists do not.  Now if one believes that p, it does not follow that p is true.  Likewise,  if God is real for a person it doesn't follow that God is real, period.  One falls into confusion if one thinks that the reality of God for a person shows that God is real, period.

We find this confusion at the end of the video clip. "And if God only exists in our brains, that does not mean that God is not real.  Our brains are where reality crystallizes for us."

This is confused nonsense.  First of all God cannot exist in our brains.  Could the creator of the universe be inside my skull?  Second, it would also be nonsense to say that the experience of God is in our brains for the reasons give in #2 above.  Third, if "God exists only in our brains" means that the experience of God is phenomenologically real for those who have it, but that the intentional object of this experience does not exist, then it DOES mean that God is not real.

Confusion #7:  Conflating the real with the imaginable.  We are told that "God is unimaginable for atheists."  But that is true of theists as well: God, as a purely spiritual being, can be conceived but not imagined.  To say that God is not real is not to say that God is unimaginable, and to say that something (a flying horse, e.g.) is imaginable is not to say that it is real.

What I am objecting to is not neuroscience, which is a wonderful subject worth pursuing to the hilt.  What I am objecting is scientism, in the present case neuroscientism, the silly notion that learning more and more about a hunk of meat is going to give us real insight into the mind and is operations and is going to solve the philosophical problems in the vicinity.

What did we learn from the article cited?  Nothing.  We don't need complicated empirical studies to know that religious experiences are real.  What the article does is sow seeds of confusion.  One of the confusions the article sows is that the question of the veridicality of religious experiences can be settled by showing their "neurological reality."  Neither the phenomenological nor the neurological reality of the experience qua experience entails  the reality of the object of the experience.

Genuine science cannot rest on conceptual foundations that are thoroughly confused.

Realms of Experience Beyond the Natural

This from a reader:

I was reading your post on Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It and was struck by a statement you made at the end regarding "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences."  By this you seem to confirm a developing series of thoughts I have had for a few years.  As a benefit of my modernist education my categories of thought roughly corresponded to natural and supernatural.  It seems to me that this type of thinking is wrong and there have been a lot of things crammed into the "supernatural" category by moderns just because they are not "natural."  It would be interesting to see how you break these things out and why they are different.  Specifically as someone who has the religious inclination.

The reader is right: a lot of rather different things have been lumped together under the rubric 'supernatural' just because they are beyond the natural.  But distinctions need to be made.  Now this is a huge topic, and I am not up to doing it justice. 

Corresponding to the phrase the reader quoted, "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences,"  I will say a little about mysticism, religion, and occultism.  Some of this is excerpted from a much longer post that discusses the relations among philosophy, mysticism, religion, and wisdom.

Mysticism 

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone
his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs.  The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition.

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative.  The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth.  If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an
idol.

The Difference Between Mysticism and Religion

Roughly, mysticism is monistic while religion is dualistic, presupposing the ineliminability of  what Martin Buber calls the 'I-Thou relation.' Here is a passage from his I and Thou:

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself -- the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including
Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude
that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation
internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter -- wholly successful only now -- with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives -- and the man
who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality
that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether
accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a
worldly religion, a religion for this life -- which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now,
and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

Occultism

Stay away from this stuff!  Everything reputable that I have read warns against it. The occult region is a sort of borderland between the natural and the properly supernatural which is the sphere of religion and mysticism.  One who meditates deeply and long enough will probably encounter 'items' from this region such as photisms and unearthly voices.  Certain paranormal powers may be released, the siddhis of the Hindus, such as pre-cognition. Don't get hung up on this and maintain a skeptical attitude. What's real will be able to withstand skepsis & scrutiny.  If you are trying to plumb the depths of the self, these are just more objects of consciousness, not consciousness itself in its innermost essence.  Hearing a sound, or seeing a light, inquire: who hears this sound, who sees this light?  Who is the subject for whom these strange appearances are objects?  That being said, photisms and such are signs that you are attaining meditative depth.  There may also be, for all you know, Horatio, angels and demons and disembodied souls hanging around  in this border region, and some of these 'entities' you don't want to mess with.  Some of them are stronger than you are.  So you might begin your session on the black mat by asking for the assistance of any guardians you think there might be. 

In any case, meditation is not a hunt for weird experiences or for paranormal powers.  The pursuit of the latter is a corruption of meditation just as crass petitionary prayer is a corruption of genuine prayer.  Grades of Prayer fills this out a bit. 

Suggestions on How to Meditate

Some time ago I wrote a post entitled Meditation: What and Why? I was meaning to write a follow-up on the how of meditation, but didn't  get around to it. But recently a friend asked for some practical  suggestions. So here goes. I recommend first reading the What and Why entry. There I explain what meditation is and list some of its uses.

Time. The best time to meditate is early in the morning, before sunrise. Any monk will tell you that. One can meditate at other times, but it is easiest in the morning for obvious reasons: it is dark, cool, and quiet, and one's mind, refreshed by sleep, has not yet been sullied by the day's doings.

Posture. There is only one really good meditation posture and that is seated on the ground or floor on a comfortable mat and cushion.  Shankara reputedly could meditate while sitting in snow, but you and I are not Shankara. I use a regulation Zen black meditation mat and cushion. The mat should be thick and large enough so that no part of the legs or buttocks touches the floor. The cushion, which should be very thick and almost spherical in shape, is placed between the buttocks and the mat. The idea is to elevate the buttocks in such a way that one comfortably achieves a posture in which the back is straight. I do not recommend sitting crosslegged in the full- or half-lotus positions, as this can be hard on the knees. I recommend the Burmese posture as illustrated on the left. The knees and shins are flat against the mat, making for comfort and stability, in a posture that can be maintained easily for an hour or more without moving.

Stretching. I like to do a little stretching before beginning the meditation. While seated in the Burmese position, I bend forward and slowly bring my forehead down to the mat. This is more easily achieved if the hands are clasped behind the back and elevated. Breath deeply and proceed slowly. After a few repetitions, stretch the hands toward the ceiling and extend upwards as far as possible. If you are the bhaktic (devotional) type, this gesture can be one of supplication.  I then twist my trunk and neck to the right (left) after placing my  left (right) hand on my right (left) knee. Be careful, no jerking. Finally, I do a series of neck rotations. Placing my chin on my chest, I slowly rotate the neck around, keeping the head as close to the body as possible, Do this a few times in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions.

Breath. Now that you are properly seated, concentrate on your breathing. The main thing is to 'belly breath.' Push the diaphragm out and draw the breath slowly and deeply into the lungs. Then exhale fully without holding your breath at any time. Imagine on the out-breath that you are exhaling not only air but all manner of mental detritus: negative thoughts, useless memories, worries, etc. Attend carefully to the breathing process. This attending is already a form of meditation, a form of entering into the Inner Citadel. Imagine that you are trying to draw your center of gravity lower and lower toward the mat and farther and farther away from the discursive mind.

Relaxation. The next step is to relax every part of your body while keeping the spine straight. Starting from the top of the head with the scalp, forehead, facial muscles, release any tension encountered, proceeding to the neck and shoulders, and all the way down. 'Exhale' all physical tensions along with stale air and useless thoughts.  If nothing else, this feels good and will lower blood pressure.

Theme. So much for preliminaries. One now needs a theme upon which to focus one's attention. There is no end to the number of 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. 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, say, 'Lord' 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.  I describe mental quiet in the above-linked post.

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. 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 the 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. 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.

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.

More later. Further topics: duration; pre-meditation; post-meditation; strange phenomena regularity of practice; ethical prerequisites.

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom

Dennis E. Bradford sent me three comments via e-mail on my recent Butchvarov post.  I omit the first and the third which are more technical in nature, and which I may address in later posts.    Bradford writes,

Second, and this separates me from Butch, Larry [Blackman], and you, I reject your assumption concerning the narrowness of philosophy.  You mention a conceptual impasse that is “insoluble on the plane of the discursive intellect, which of course is where philosophy must operate.”  I object to the “of course.”  To be a philosopher is to be a lover of wisdom and who says that our only access to wisdom is via the discursive intellect?   In fact, I deny that.  As far as I can tell, the Buddha was the greatest philosopher and the wisest human who ever lived, and his view was that limiting our examination only to the domain of the discursive intellect prevents one from becoming wise.

Actually, I don't disagree with this comment.  It is a matter of terminology, of how we should use the word 'philosophy.'  For me there are at least four ways to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality.  This post provides rough sketches of how I view the first three.  I end by suggesting that the pursuit of wisdom involves all three 'postures.'  (Compare the physical postures in the three pictures below.)

 

Philosophy

Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them. Discursive reason is reason insofar as it articulates itself in concepts, judgments, arguments, and systems of argument. As the etymology of the term suggests (L. currere, to run), discursive reason is roundabout rather than direct -- as intuitive reason would be if there is such a thing. Discursive reason gets at its object indirectly via concepts, judgments, and arguments. This feature of discursive reason makes for objectivity and communicability; but it exacts a price, and the price must be paid in the coin of loss of concreteness. Thus the oft-heard complaint about the abstractness of philosophy is not entirely without merit.

Note that I define philosophy in terms of the activity of discursive reason: any route to the truth that does not make use of this ‘faculty’ is simply not philosophy. You may take this as a stipulation if you like, but it is of course more than this, grounded as it is in historical facts. if you want to know what philosophy is, read Plato.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson says somewhere, "Philosophy is Plato, and Plato philosophy."  (I quote from memory!)  And there is this from  Keith's blog. 

The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and every activity that has arisen or will arise out of that.

(Richard Robinson, "Is Psychical Research Relevant to Philosophy?" The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 189-206, at 192.)

This is in line with my masthead motto which alludes to the famous observation of Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

Discursivity, then, is essential to philosophy as a matter of definition, a definition that is not merely stipulative but grounded in a possibility of our nature that was best realized in Plato and what he gave rise to.

Thus Jesus of Nazareth was not a philosopher, pace George Bush. If you insist that he was, then I will challenge you to show me the arguments whereby he established such dicta as "I and the Father are one," etc. I will demand the premises whence he arrived at this ‘conclusion.’ Argument and counterargument before the tribunal of reason are the sine qua non of philosophy, its veritable lifeblood. The truth is that Jesus gave no arguments, made no conjectures, refuted no competing theories. There is no dialectic in the Gospels such as we find in the Platonic dialogues. This is not an objection to Jesus’ life and message, but simply an underscoring of the fact that he was not a  philosopher. (But I have a nagging sense that Dallas Willard says something to the contrary somewhere.)  Believing himself to be one with the Father, Jesus of course believed himself to be one with the ultimate truth. Clearly, no such person is a mere philo-sopher, etymologically, a lover of wisdom; he is rather (one who makes a claim to being) a possessor of it. The love of the philosopher, as Plato’s Symposium made clear, is erothetic love, a love predicated on lack; it is not agapic love, love predicated on plenitude. The philosopher is an indigent fellow, grubbing his way forward bit by bit as best he can, by applying discursive reason to the data of experience. God is no philosopher, thank God!

Agreeing with Bradford that a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, I yet insist that he is a lover and pursuer of wisdom by dialectical means, assuming we are going to use 'philosopher' strictly.  This use of terms does not rule out other routes to wisdom, routes that may prove more efficacious.

Indeed, since philosophy examines everything, including itself  (its goals, its methods, its claim to cognitivity), philosophy must also examine whether it is perhaps an inferior route to truth or no route to truth at all!

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative.  The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before the reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth.  If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an idol.

The reader must of course take these schematic  remarks cum grano salis. It would be simple-minded to think that cold impersonal reason (philosophy) stands in simple and stark confrontation to warm personal love (religion). For philosophy is itself a form of love –- erothetic love -- of the Absolute, and without the inspiring fervor of this longing love, the philosopher would not submit himself to the rigorous logical discipline, the mental asceticism, without which serious philosophy is impossible. (I speak of real philosophers, of course, and not mere paid professors of it.) Good philosophy is necessarily technical, often mind-numbingly so. (The reader may verify that the converse of this proposition does not hold.) Only a lover of truth will put up with what Hegel called die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the concept. On the other hand, religious sentiments and practices occur in a context of beliefs that are formulated and defended in rational terms, including those beliefs that cannot be known by unaided reason but are vouchsafed to us by revelation. So in pursuit of taxonomy we must not fall into crude compartmentalization. The philosopher has his devotions and the religionist has his reasonings.

Mysticism

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs. You should think of the the Latin intuitus as used by Descartes, and the German Anschauung as used by Kant. The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition. The possibility of intellektuelle Anschauung was of course famously denied by Kant.

 Wisdom

The ultimate goal for a human being is wisdom which could be characterized as knowledge of, and participation in, the saving truth.  One who attains this goal is a sage.  No philosopher is a sage, by definition.  For a philosopher, as a lover (seeker) of wisdom, is not a possessor of it.  One does not seek what one possesses.  The philosopher's love is eros, love predicated on lack.    At most, the philosopher is a would-be sage, one for whom philosophy (as characterized above) is a means to the end of becoming a sage.  If a philosopher attains the Goal, then he ceases to be a philosopher.  If a philosopher gets a Glimpse of the Goal, in that moment he ceases to be a philosopher, but then, after having lost the Glimpse (which is what usually happens) he is back to being as philosopher again.

At this point a difficult question arises.  Is philosophy a means to sagehood, or a distraction from it?  I grant that the ultimate Goal cannot be located on the discursive plane.  What one ultimately wants is not an empty conceptual knowledge but a fulfilled knowledge.  Some say that when a philosopher seeks God, he attains only a 'God of the philosophers,' an abstraction.  (See my Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.)  The kernel of truth in this is that discursive operations typically do not bring one beyond the plane of discursivity.  One thought leads to another, and another, and another . . . and never to the Thinker 'behind' them or the divine Other. 

And so one might decide that philosophy is useless -- "not worth an hour's trouble" as Pascal once said -- and that one ought  either to follow the path of religion or that of mysticism.  That is not my view, for reasons I will need a separate post to explain.

For now I will say only this.  Philosophy is not enough.  It needs supplementation by the other paths mentioned.    Analogy.  You go to a restaurant to eat, not to study the menu.  But reading the menu is a means to the end of ordering and enjoying the meal.  Philosophy is like reading the menu; eating is like attaining the Goal. 

But it is also the case that religion and mysticism require the discipline of philosophy.  There is a lot to be said on these topics, and it will be the philosopher who will do the saying.  The integration of the faculties falls to philosophy, and an integrated life is what we aspire to, is it not?  We seek to avoid the onesidedness of the philosopher, but also the onesidedness of the mystic, of the religionist, of the moralist, not to mention the onesidedness of  the moneygrubber, the physical fitness fanatic, etc.

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

Robert Gray e-mails:

Dear Bill,

I am appreciating Kerouac month. Here is something on Buddhism in Buber's I and Thou that may be of use.

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself -- the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man - between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

Thank you for reminding me of these Buber passages which I had planned eventually to discuss.  The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter -- wholly successful only now -- with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives -- and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a worldly religion, a religion for this life -- which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now, and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

 
When I think of the vibrant bond between Sal and Dean, I am reminded of Buber's I-You .
Kerouac's restless spirit sought always to renew the I-You in Neal and in life; Both became submerged in I-It.  (Minding the final paragraphs of On the Road)

Well, both Kerouac and Cassady were brought up Catholic and so were steeped in the ultimate duality of man and God; but both occupied themselves with mysticism with its dissolution of the ultimacy of I-Thou.  And so perhaps we can say that the spiritual lives of both involved an oscillation between I-Thou and I-It.

 

 

Logic's Limit

Logic is not to be denigrated, nor is it to be overestimated. It is an excellent vehicle for safe travel among concepts and propositions. It will save us from many an error and perhaps even lead us to a few truths. But it cannot move us beyond the plane of concepts and propositions and arguments. It aids safe passage from thought to thought, but cannot  transport us beyond thought to the source of thoughts, to their thinker, the transcendental condition without which there would not be any thoughts.  It cannot transport us to the Transdiscursive.  For that a different vehicle is needed, meditation.

Meditation: Three Baby Steps

First, drive out all useless thoughts.  Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts.  Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones.  Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper.  Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps.  You may not even make it to the threshhold.  But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.

The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises. 

Modern Media and the Deterioration of Spiritual Life

During my first visit to St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery (Florence, Arizona)  in February 2004, I purchased Harry Boosalis, Orthodox Spiritual Life According to Saint Siloan the Athonite.  What follows is a passage to give users of the new media pause.  It was published in 2000 before blogging really took off, and before texting, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter:

Writing nearly sixty years ago about the harm of newspapers and base books, one wonders what St. Silouan would say if he lived today. Our world differs markedly from the one in which St. Silouan lived.  In today's 'Age of Information' -- and certainly even more in the world of tomorrow -- the constant influx from the multiple forms of media can only hinder one's pursuit of true prayer.  These modern forms of 'entertainment' and news media, as well as the much more complex web of world-wide communication systems, including the ever-increasing role of computers and the expanding use (or abuse) of the Internet, have contributed to a fundamental deterioration of spiritual life, as well as an overall  'de-personalization' fo contemporary man and society.  Even well-intentioned believers are now infected with this insatiable desire for more and more frivolous information, futile knowledge, and superficial 'entertainment.'  Ultimately, much of this remains not only useless for one's personal well-being, but according to St. Silouan it also has a direct and negative impact on one's spiritual life. (pp. 67-68)

Monks naturally gravitate towards deserts.  But even in a desert one is not safe from media dreck.  So one must seek out the desert in one's desert. 

 

Mental Quiet and Enlightenment/Salvation

In yesterday's post I claimed that the proximate goal of meditation is the attainment of mental quiet, but listed as an ultimate goal the arrival at what is variously described as enlightenment, salvation, liberation, release. In a comment to the post (from the old blog), Jim Ryan raised a difficult but very important question about the connection between mental quiet and salvation. What exactly is the connection? I would like to pursue this question with Jim’s help. I believe he is is quite interested in it since he tells me that he has been thinking about this question for the last twenty years. One way to begin is by outlining the possible positions on the relation between mental quiet and salvation. There seem to be three main positions. On the first, mental quiet and salvation have nothing to do with one another. On the second, there is a positive (non-identity) relation between the two. On the third, the two are identified.

A. Some will say that mental quiet is a merely subjective state with no soteriological import at all. Supposing a resolute meditator works himself into a blissful state of mental tranquility, why should that be taken to be a state of enlightenment or salvation or contact with ultimate truth? Why is it not just a highly unusual subjective state that few attain? Mental quiet on this approach is a non-intentional mental state, one that is not of or about anything. Lacking object-directedness, non-intentional states lack a necessary condition of having a truth-value. So if mental quiet is a non-intentional state, questions of veridicality cannot arise. One could not suppose that someone in this state possesses any insight into anything transcendent of the state. Mental quiet is an intensely blissful state, but not one revelatory of anything external to one’s egoic consciousness. Thus it does not reveal a non-egoic source of egoic consciousness, nor another egoic consciousness such as God.

A*. On an extreme version of (A), both the seeking of and the reposing in mental quiet is escapist: not only does it not put us in touch with reality, it leads the meditator into a state of self-indulgent dreaminess that shuts out reality. The difference between the A-position and the A*-position is that according to the former, achieving mental quiet does not help in the quest for enlightenment/salvation, while according to the latter it positively hinders the quest. A traditional religionist might take this line, maintaining that mental quiet and the mystical states that sometimes arise within it are ‘of the devil,’ a ‘snare and a delusion,’ and that the true path to salvation is via faith, or faith plus works, or faith plus works within an authoritarian structure such as the Roman Catholic Church.

A**. On an even more extreme version of (A), the charge of escapism is buttressed with the further claim that there is is no possibility of enlightenment/salvation. So it is not just that mental quiet is no help in its attainment, or that it hinders its attainment, but that there is nothing to attain. Ideological bedfellows as unlikely as Marxists and Randians would join in taking this A**-line and would denounce mental quiet as an opiate.

B. Although mental quiet is not a state of contact with the saving or enlightening power, it is a necessary condition of such contact: One cannot achieve contact without first being in the state of mental quiet.

B*. A more robust cousin of (B) maintains that mental quiet is sufficient for, though not identical with, contact with the saving or enlightening power.

B.** A less robust cousin of (B) has it that mental quiet is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of contact with the salvific power but is nonethless conducive to such contact in the sense that it raises the probability of such contact. B** allows the contact to be achieved even by someone who has never engaged in any formal meditation practice, or one who has but has never entered mental quiet. There is a passage somewhere in al-Ghazzali where he points out that a person who climbs to the top of a minaret is more likely to feel a cooling breeze than one who remains on the ground. Similarly, the gusts of divine favor are more likely to reach one who has made the right preparations, entry into mental quiet being one such preparation. This image suggests that salvation cannot be caused by the seeker, but must be graciously received. ‘Own-power’ is not enough; ‘other-power’ is needed. Mental quiet is thus a state of mental receptivity or passivity, a state of interior listening in which one opens oneself to a possible communication from beyond one’s egoic consciousness.

C. On a third main approach, mental quiet is identified with enlightenment/salvation. Achieve one and you achieve the other.

Let me conclude by giving my provisional answer to Ryan’s question. As I see it at the moment,(B**) is the best explanation of the relation between mental quiet and salvation/enlightenment. (C) can be rejected quite easily. I suspect that Ryan, given his naturalism, will plump for one of the versions of the A-approach.

Meditation: What and Why

Here are some preliminary thoughts on the nature and purposes of meditation. Perhaps a later post will deal with methods of meditation.

Meditation Defined

We need to start with a working definition. The question of what meditation is is logically prior to the questions of why to do it and how to do it. The proximate goal of meditation is the attainment of mental quiet. I say ‘proximate’ to leave open the pursuit of further, more specific, goals, and so as not to prejudge the ultimate goal which will be differently conceived from within different metaphysical and religious perspectives. It would be tendentious to claim that the ultimate goal of meditation is entry into Nibbana/Nirvana, or union with the Godhead, or realization of the identity of Atman and Brahman. For these descriptions import metaphysical schemes acceptance of which is not necessary to do meditation. All the major religions have  their mystical branches in which meditation is cultivated despite differences in metaphysical schemes.  The meditating monks of Mt. Athos whose mantram is the Jesus Prayer subscribe to a Trinitarian metaphysics according to which Jesus Christ is the Son of God, a metaphysics incompatible with that of a Buddhist who nonetheless can employ a similar technique to achieve a similar result.

The Demons of the Desert

The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by oppponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.

Grades of Prayer

1. The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, and this amounts to idolatry, the worshipping of a false god.

The Inconceivable

It is arguable that all religions and salvation-paths point to the Inconceivable and terminate in it if terminus they have. The Nibbana of the Pali Buddhists. The ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas. A theory of the Inconceivable would have to show that it is rationally admissible that there be something that cannot be grasped rationally. The theory would not be a grasping, but a pointing to the possibility of the Ungraspable. It would include a discursive refutation of all attempts at foreclosing on this possibility. The theory would deploy itself on the discursive plane, but the purpose of it would be to point one beyond the discursive plane, to make a place, as it were, for the possibility of the Transdiscursive.

But such a philosophical project is self-contradictory. If you say that the Inconceivable is possibly existent, then you exclude its necessary nonexistence. You make a determinate predication of the Inconceivable and therefore think it, conceive it, as having the property predicated. But then you fall into contradiction by affirming something of that of which nothing can be affirmed. There is no transcending the duality of thought if you are to think at all. A 'theory' that consists of a pointing to the Transdiscursive must needs be gibberish. The Real is exhausted by the discursively graspable. Outside it, nothing.

Is this a good objection or not?

Logic and Meditation: Complementary Disciplines

Logic is an attempt at disciplining the discursive mind from within the discursive mind. Meditation is an attempt at transcending, by silencing, the discursive mind by using a resource that lies beyond it. Logic is disciplined thinking; meditation is disciplined nonthinking.

Control Your Mind!

A thought arises. Interrogate it: Whither? To what purpose? The climber tests each foothold before putting his weight on it. So should we test each thought before living in it and losing ourselves in it. Why? Because the seed of word and deed is in the thought. To control thought is to control the seed of word and deed. Meditation, if nothing else, is a training in thought control. Daily meditation releases the mind's wonderful power of self-regulation.

The Problem of the Fugitive Thought: Write It Down Before It Escapes!

If you are blessed by a good thought, do not hesitate to write it down at once. Good thoughts are visitors from Elsewhere and like most visitors they do not like being snubbed or made to wait.

Let us say a fine aphorism flashes before your mind. There it is is fully formed. All you have to do is write it down. If you don't, you may be able to write only that an excellent thought has escaped.

"But there is more where that one came from." No doubt, but that very one may never return.

The problem arises in an acute form during the meditation hour. Properly installed on the black mat, one is installed in nondiscursivity. If philosophy is disciplined thinking, meditation is disciplined nonthinking. But then a thought, rich in content and fully formed, intrudes. You would honor it as you honor Athens. But it is the meditation hour: the time to attempt the flushing out of all thoughts without exception, the hour for rapt listening from within the depths of mental quiet. You are pulled between Athens and Benares. If you think one thought you will think two, ten, twenty and you will move farther and farther away from the thoughtless root of thinking. What to do?

If you arise from the mat to go to the desk you break the spell. But you don't want to ignore the thought. Truth must be chased down every avenue. Perhaps the solution is to keep a special notebook by the meditation mat. Write the thought down for later rumination, then get back to thougtlessness.

Meditation Better Than Travel

It is better to dive below the surface of consciousness than to move around on the surface of the earth.

Dis-tracted

We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph -- in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course' and 'it comes with the terrain.' There's no turning back now. We must advance.

Great Minds and Small Matters

A great mind is not upset by a small matter. But it is only with difficulty that we avoid the vexation of the petty. The inference that our minds are paltry seems inescapable. Those who have had a glimpse of the mind's depth-dimension know that there is something wrong with remaining on the plane of the paltry. What is to be done?

Daily meditation helps. An hour of meditating on 'A great mind is not upset by a small matter,' as upon a mantram, has its effect if the meditation is repeated daily. The trick, of course, is to take the thought with you when you quit the meditation chamber. It is easy to be a monk in a monastery; the challenge lies in comporting oneself like one outside it. Just as one does not venture onto the Internet without one's cybershields up to date and at the ready, one ought not go abroad into society without the equivalent mental prophylaxis. Unless, of course, you like mental disturbance.

But you won't learn about any of this in graduate school, not even in the Sage School of Philosophy. An academic inquiry into the logic, ethics, and physics of the Stoics is not the same as a practicing of their precepts. One needs both of course: theoretical inquiry and the exercitium spirituale.

Where does one find the time for meditation in our hyperkinetic age? Better question: How can one fail to perceive the need for meditation, re-collection, contemplatio, Versenkung, Besinnung, in an age as scattered and frenetic as ours has become?

Meditation as Disciplined Nonthinking: A Brunton Passage Exfoliated

‘Meditation’ has two main senses. The first refers to disciplined discursive thinking. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy classically illustrates this first sense. If we use ‘thinking’ as short for ‘discursive thinking,’ we can say that the second sense of ‘meditation’ refers to disciplined nonthinking. Accordingly, meditation₂ is an attempt to silence the discursive mind and enter into a nondiscursive state of awareness.

 

With this clarification in mind, we are ready to appreciate a passage from Paul Brunton:

All thinking keeps one’s awareness out of the Overself. That is why thinking about the Overself merely produces another thought. Only in the case of the sage, who has established himself in the Overself, is thinking no barrier at all. In this case, thinking may coexist with the larger awareness. So it is not enough to be a good thinker; one also has to learn how to be a good non-thinker. Of course, the way to do this is through the practice of meditation. (Inspiration and the Overself, p. 144)

Faith and Prayer: The Case of Ron Franz

One of the minor characters of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild  is the old man to whom Krakauer gave the name 'Ron Franz.' He was 80 years old when his and Christopher McCandless's paths crossed. McCandless made indelible impressions on the people he met, but he affected Franz more than anyone else, so much so that the old man with no surviving next of kin wanted to adopt the 24 year old as his grandson. The story of their encounter is recounted in the chapter entitled 'Anza-Borrego' and is also well told in the movie version of Krakauer's book. Franz came to pin his hopes on the remarkable young man and longed for his return from Alaska. When he heard from a hitchhiker that McCandless had died, he and his faith were shattered:

Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

The Greek Omphalos  = the German Nabel  = navel. So omphaloscopy is navel-gazing, and an omphaloscopist is one who 'scopes out' his navel. But have there ever been practioners of meditation (Versenkung) who literally gazed at their navels or who came close to doing such a thing? A little gazing at my well-stocked library reveals that something like this practice is recommended in the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention, which tradition attributes to St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople. Referring to the central passage of the Method, the anonymous author of The Jesus Prayer reports:

In order to pray, it is said, the disciple must close the door of his cell, place himself in a state of quiet, sit down, rest his chin against his chest, look towards the middle of his stomach, restrain his breathing, and make a mental effort to find the "place of the heart" while repeating all the time "the epiclesisof Jesus Christ." (p. 47)

Of course, the term 'navel-gazing' is almost always used in a deprecating manner by the worldly to refer to any sort of idle practice of 'philosophizing' whether discursively or non-discursively, and when Adorno refers to a man who gazes at his navel, ein Mensch der seinen Nabel beschaut (Philosophische Terminologie I, 142), he shares in the deprecation.

Against Irrationalism

The problem is not that we conceptualize things, but that we conceptualize them wrongly, hastily, superficially. The problem is not that we draw distinctions, but that we draw too few distinctions or improper distinctions. Perhaps in the end one must learn to trace all distinctions back to the ONE whence they spring; but that is in the end. In the beginning people must be taught to conceptualize, discriminate, and distinguish.

A superficial Zen training that attacks the discursive intellect in those who have never properly developed it does a great disservice.

The Strange Case of U. G. Krishnamurti

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all bunk, he thinks, but he can't be done with it. Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it. "Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"

Athens and Benares

Every morning it is the same for me, a struggle between 'Athens' and 'Benares.' Let me explain.