Maverick Philosopher

Detachment and Renunciation

The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume Two, The Quest, p. 130, #242:

Detachment from the world is an absolute necessity for the man who seeks authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. But renouncement of the world is not necessary to any except those who have an inborn natural vocation for the monkish life.

It is not easy, but one can be in the world but not of the world. Paradoxically, however, the monastic life is an easier way to detachment. To live a life of monkish virtue in a monastery is relatively easy; to do so in the world, hard.  This is why monasteries were established in the first place.

At the Entrance to the Monastery

The sign reads, 'Peace.' It neglects to say that the desert is a place of unseen warfare. 

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 what Lorenzo Scupoli called il combattimento spirituale. They felt thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone. They prefer deserts to flesh pots when it comes to hunting. Those who luxuriate in the latter have already been captured.

Moderns who enter the desert for spiritual purposes need to be aware that they may get more than they bargained for.

A Contemplative Nun on Thomas Merton

This just over the transom from Karl White:

Hope you're well. May be of interest.

‘I have never met a real contemplative who found Merton useful’: Letters reveal Sister Wendy’s ambivalence about Gethsemani’s famous monk | America Magazine July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God. www.americamagazine.org

Hi Karl,

Your message arrives at an opportune moment. The day before yesterday I received Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation: According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Garrigou-Lagrange's work is the real deal from perhaps the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists.

 

While reading the chapter on infused contemplation, I thought of Thomas Merton. Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular -- to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).  Cooper attributed the evolution (devolution?) to Merton's failure to achieve infused contemplation. As I read him, however, Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted. All the Merton commentators that I have read agree that he came to question the contemptus mundi he expressed in The Seven Storey Mountain.  As for whether or not Merton attained infused contemplation, if he had why are there no references to it in his journal? There is a paucity of spiritual disclosure in those private pages of a monk who one would think would reveal the most intimate secrets of his inner life. I have read all seven volumes of his journal several times over. He is one of those key figures without whom you cannot understand the 'Sixties.

 

Thanks for the link.  I read the Ellsberg-Sr. Wendy correspondence with interest.

 

Regards,

 

Bill

What Did He Expect?

He prayed for the ability to see himself objectively, but then complained that he did not like what he saw.

Downplay Both

If you downplay your wins, downplay your losses. The pain of defeat is worse than the pleasure of victory is good. But you have the power  to regard them as equal. In some measure the pain of loss can be lessened. The Stoic therapy is no cure, but it is a palliative. If our predicament is a splitting headache, said therapy is a couple of aspirin. Take it and them for what they are worth.

"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

Material bread or spiritual bread?

Substack latest.

Meditation as Disciplined Non-Thinking

A Brunton passage elucidated.

Substack latest.

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

Two Types of Contemplative

Those of the first type try to see into eternity by piercing the veil of space and time. They attempt to look beyond this world. The mystics and religious contemplatives are of this type. A second type is content to view the world of space, time, and matter under the aspect of eternity. Not a look beyond the world into eternity, but at it from an eternal point of view. Some philosophers are of this type. One thinks of Spinoza.  His amor dei intellectualis is an  intellectual love of God or nature, deus sive natura.

The latter is a God's eye view of the world, the former a view of God. The genitive construction is a genitivus objectivus. One naturally thinks of the visio beata of the doctor angelicus.

(There I go alliterating again. A stylistic defect? And peppering one's prose with foreign expressions is considered by some to be stylistically suboptimal, pretentious perhaps.)

A Part-Time Monk's Solution to Suggestibility

Substack latest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Prayer

From his magnificent essay, "Self Reliance":

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, -- anything less than all good, -- is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.

While I do not confer upon this passage a plenary endorsement, I am sympathetic to it, as should be evident from Give Us this Day our Daily Bread. 

See also Bernanos on Prayer which is mainly a long quotation from the great novelist.  At the end of the quotation I offer:

The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded  rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.

Suffering Pleasure

We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be patient rather than agent, to be acted upon, to be in the thrall of another, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self.  Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:

. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.

It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities.

The mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won't advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.

Can Rigorous Philosophy be Therapeutic?

Is philosophical analysis relevant to life as she is lived? 

Richard Sorabji:

Stoic cognitive therapy consists of a package which is in part a philosophical analysis of what the emotions are and in part a battery of cognitive devices for attacking those aspects of emotion which the philosophical analysis suggests can be attacked. The devices are often not philosophical and are often shared with other schools. But I believe it is wrong to suppose that they are doing all the work. The work is done by the package and the philosophical analysis is an essential part of the package. Admittedly somebody who just wanted to be treated passively as the patient of a Stoic therapist would not have to understand the philosophical analysis. But anyone who wants to be able to deal with the next emotional crisis that comes along and the next needs to learn how to treat themselves and for this the philosophical analysis of emotion is essential. What is under discussion here is the role of philosophical analysis as relevant to life.

I am indebted to Bernard Williams not only for expressing a diametrically opposite view but for discussing it with me both orally and in print.¹ His case demands the most careful consideration. His claim . . . is that rigorous philosophy cannot be therapeutic.

Read more.

Why Live a Long Time?

Soul-making in this vale takes a long time.

Are You an Old Soul?

Don't be put off by the New Age-y vibe of this article.  There are real insights here, and the internal links are worth following out. 

Purgation of Memory and Purgatory of Memory

The manuals of mysticism enjoin the purgation of memory. But not all such purgation is good. Vexing memories of folly and excess, of time-wastage and wrong-doing, are an earthly purgatory which the purgation of memory, if it could be achieved, would eliminate.

Prosecute the purgation of memory but not to the detriment of memory's purgatory.

The Philosopher Prays for Light, not Loot

We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.

.................

For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."

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

 

Lent and Media Dreck

Lent is a good time for a plenary news fast, or, if you can't quite manage that, a time to moderate your intake of media dreck. It suffices to be aware of the overall drift of events as the Left pursues its pernicious purposes; there is no necessity of recording every particular outrage.  And this for two reasons. First, there is little we can do about it; second, it's a passing scene soon to pass away entirely, and we with it.

Precious peace of mind ought not be sacrificed on the altar of activism.  Just keep an eye on what is coming down the pike so as to be ready before it arrives.

When Henry David Thoreau was asked whether he had read the news about the fire at so-and-so's farm, he replied that he didn't need to: he understood the principle of the thing.

Every day should include some time for the cultivation of one's higher nature.  Unlike the lower nature, it needs cultivating.

From time to time, however, we should devote special time to be still and listen beyond the human horizon.  Modern man, crazed little hustler and  self-absorbed chatterbox that he is, needs to enter his depths and listen.

"Be still, and know that I am God."  (Psalm 46:10)

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) This beautifully crafted observation sets us a task: Swim upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.

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." (St. Augustine) 

Bernanos on Prayer

Georges Bernanos has the protagonist of his The Diary of a Country Priest (Image Books, 1954, pp. 81-82, tr. P. Morris, orig. publ. 1937) write the following into his journal:

 

The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!

This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.

But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?”

The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded  rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.

Related: "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

Prayer

Because we are spiritual beings, we pray. Because we cannot be lamps unto ourselves, we need to. 

Something Good from these Politically Trying Times?

One positive upshot of these times that try our souls is that more and more of us will come to appreciate the hopelessness of this world and the people in it. Self-satisfied worldlings will find it difficult to retain their worldliness and self-satisfaction as civil order collapses and the tide of irrationality rises. Their naive faith in humanity will experience a serious rebuke. They will come to realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from our dire predicament by human, all-too-human, means.  Some will despair unto anti-natalism or even suicide.   But others will enter upon the Quest for a saving Reality beyond this passing scene of ignorance and evil.  They will tread the paths of prayer and meditation. Feeling for the first time the pangs of spiritual hunger, they will turn in the right spirit to the great scriptures and the writings and practices of the sages.  Their smug complacency will be a thing of the past.

The Lazy, the Ambitious, and the Wise

The lazy do not work. The ambitious work hard -- but for their own enhancement and advancement. The sage works, but without ambition, with detachment from the fruits of action.

A Part-Time Monk's Solution to Suggestibility

We are too open to social suggestions.  We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment.  They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say.  'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people.  This is the way of the world.  We are too suggestible.

Thus nowadays people cannot see that lust and gluttony are deadly vices.  The weight of suggestion  is too onerous.  The counter-suggestions from a religious upbringing are no match for the relentless stuff emanating from the mass media of a sex-saturated, hedonistic society.  For spiritual health a partial withdrawal from society is advisable.  It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it. 

A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck.  Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort.  Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles.  No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual reading and writing, in silence, and alone.

So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.

 

But society and technology are in conspiracy against you.  Have you noticed that the newer modems are not equipped with on/off switches?  A bad omen for the life of the soul and the care thereof.  I cannot abide a wi-fi signal during my sleeping and monkish hours.  So I bought an extra power strip and put it in series with the modem and the main power strip.  Wife is instructed to turn it off before she goes to bed.  And of course all computers and cell phones are off during the night and during the hours of monkishness.

Let it Go!

You allow mental clutter to collect in memory, and then you repeatedly sift through it, keeping it alive and present. What good is the memorial rehearsal of failures, foibles, and fatuities, of missed opportunities, and unpleasant encounters?

Let it go, not quite forgetting the details, but relaxing one's grip on them, while preserving the lessons.

A Philosopher's Sign of the Cross

In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.*

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.

In the Principle was the Exemplary Expression, and the Exemplary Expression was with the Principle, and the Exemplary Expression was the Principle.

.........................

*That unity-in-difference, and difference-in-unity, is a dialectical  difference.  It is an affront to the discursive intellect with its abrupt and frozen diremptions, but approximates the fluidity of life.

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.

Benjamin Jowett on Grace

A stunning formulation for your delectation from the translator of Plato and the don of Balliol College:

Grace is an energy; not a mere sentiment; not a mere thought of the Almighty; not even a word of the Almighty. It is as real an energy as the energy of electricity. It is a divine energy; it is the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need.

An observation magisterial on all counts, combining as it does truth, economy of expression, and literary beauty: "the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need."  Could it do with a bit of paring? How about this:

. . . the energy of God's plenary affection rolling shoreward toward human need.

Companion posts:

Grace

Post-Session Fruits of a Formal Session

Knocking and Waiting

You can knock, knock, knock on heaven's door, or you can wait for God like Simone Weil.  But if man is on his own, to allude to a title by Ernst Bloch, then knocking and waiting are futile gestures.

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.

The Lure of the Good

Some of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience.  The love of truth and the love of beauty do the same.  One is free to ignore these intimations of an Order Unseen, but this mysterious freedom is itself a pointer beyond. For the one who seeks a way out from behind the veil of Ignorance,  the Good cannot be on a par with Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

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"Was für eine Philosophie man wähle, hängt sonach davon ab, was für ein Mensch man ist." Johann Gottlieb Fichte.  Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, 1794 §5

"The kind of philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is."

In Mitte der Ewigkeit

Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben

auf Erden hier.

Wie Schatten auf den Wegen schweben

und schwinden wir.

Und messen unsre trägen Tritte

nach Raum und Zeit;

und sind (und wissen’s nicht) in Mitte

der Ewigkeit ...

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803)

Practice the 'Step Back'

Keep the obtrusions of memory and perception and anticipation at mental arm's length. Practice the 'step back.' Rather than 'go with the flow' of centrifugal mind, examine whither it tends. To a place worth visiting?  Harder still, well-nigh impossible, is to examine whence it comes. Swimming upstream to the hidden Source of the stream is much harder than impeding the outward flow.  Content yourself for now with mental continence, an analog of, and probably impossible without, sexual continence. The practice of non-attachment is recommended by the major wisdom schools in the East and the West.

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'?

Virile Ascesis

Julius Evola (Doctrine of Awakening, 233) preaches a virile ascesis which is neither renunciation, nor worldflight, nor inaction, nor quietism, nor mortification. 

Ascesis requires detachment, but one can be both detached and active in the world. The vita activa is possible without contemptus mundi. One can even be a warrior like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita whom Lord Krishna commands to do his duty and slay the enemy but with detachment from the fruits of action. Imagine slaughtering a fellow human being with equanimity!  An impossible ideal? (An ideal impossible of realization is of course no ideal at all.)

In the world but not of it. In the thick of it, but without anything sticking to you, like the lotus flower that floats on the water without getting wet.

The Trick

The trick is to maintain one's equanimity in the face of the samsaric storm. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery, but difficult ex claustro. The trick is to be in the world, and active in it, but not of it. Not easy, and perhaps impossible. Withdrawal and Weltflucht are perhaps all that some of us can ever achieve.

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

 

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.

"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

This is another topic that it would have been great to discuss with Dale Tuggy during his visit thereby bringing my supposed 'gnosticism' into collision with his supposed 'spiritual materialism.'  The problems are very difficult and I do not claim to have the answers.  The first thing and the main thing, as it seems to me, is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the issues and their difficulty.

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I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or for another, as in the case of intercessory prayer. In many of its forms petitionary prayer borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the person who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.  When Paul Tibbets, Jr. took off in the Enola Gay on his mission to Hiroshima in August of 1945, a Catholic priest blessed his mission, petitioning God for its success.  I'll leave you to think about that.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable.  Some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?  But much of it is objectionable.  What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material  benefits?

The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits.   In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of  cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity, or at least with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others. 

The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence.  So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.'  A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread. 

But one morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian.  The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical.  'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30)  What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day.  On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*

This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  Man lives, not by physical bread, but by meta-physical 'bread.'

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day.  And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it?  Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian.  The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance. 

Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical

Here is a question that vexes me.  Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically?  Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?

"Man is spirit."  Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor?  "Man has a higher origin."  'Higher' is metaphorical.  "Man is made by God in his image and likeness."  Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?

I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract.  I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.  But I got nowhere as could have been expected:  anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction.  It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation. 

The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.

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*  For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

Prayer

Do you pray for worldly benefits and boons such as bodily health and material wealth, whether for yourself or for others? Or do you pray for spiritual goods such as detachment?

Do you pray that your desires be fulfilled and your aversions avoided? Or do you you pray to get beyond desire and aversion?

I should have pressed these questions in my dialog with Dale Tuggy over the weekend. His spirituality is more 'materialistic' while mine is more 'gnostic.' I readily admit that there are problems on both sides.

Equanimity

It is quite a moral challenge these days to maintain one's equanimity while doing one's quotidian bit to battle the lunacy of the destructive Left.  It's easy to be a monk in a monastery. It is rather more difficult to be one in the world.

Apologia Pro Vita Mea: A Reply to a Friendly Critic

Vito Caiati responds to yesterday's Could it be like this?

In yesterday's post, you write, “So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.”

The "always a little out of breath" bit gives my statement of a personal credo a perhaps excessively romantic and needlessly literary accent.  But the questing life is the highest life for me, and not just for me. That I sincerely believe. I will add, however, that integral to an examined life is a critical examination of whether the highest life is indeed the examined life. So I am aware of the danger of erecting a dogmatic edifice of my own.

While I appreciate the intellectual and spiritual sentiment that underlies this assertion, I am troubled by two things: First, the fact, which you have acknowledged in the past, that only a minute portion of humanity possesses either the “aptitude” or “stamina” to engage in [the search for] “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.”  That this is the case is beyond dispute, but why should it be so?  

It is indeed beyond dispute and is further evidence that the human condition is a predicament, and a nasty one, a predicament to which there may be no good solution.

I find the question very troubling. Historical demographers estimate that between 80 and 100 billion human beings have lived and died since the origin of our species.  The figure is staggering, but as staggering is the fact that all have met their ends in complete ignorance of ultimate truth. 

But we don't know that, Vito. It is after all possible that when Thomas Aquinas had the mystical experience that put an end to his writing, he veridically experienced the ultimate truth and enjoyed an earthly foretaste of the Beatific Vision.  And if the angelic doctor's amanuensis, Reginald, never had any such experience but believed what the master taught, and if what he taught was true, then Reginald too was in contact with the ultimate truth, not in propria persona, but "through a glass darkly," that glass being faith. And the same holds for all the millions of Christians, not to mention adherents of other religions, throughout the ages who have believed without verifying glimpses into the Unseen and also without being able to give good reasons for their belief.  It may have been that all these folks were in contact with ultimate truth even if they can't be said to have known such truth in a manner to satisfy exacting modern requirements on knowledge.

Disease, hunger, violence, physical or mental infirmity, and indigence have precluded even the notion of such a search for most.  The lack of a philosophical or religious inclination has precluded it for almost all of the rest. Thus, a gross and general ignorance of final matters has been and remains the lot of mankind.  Something is profoundly wrong here, and the conviction that a few might have the means and inclination to diverge from the norm is, at best disquieting, and at word [worst?], questionable.

So even if an ultimate, saving truth could be discovered by a proper search, circumstances and personal inadequacy have prevented and will prevent the vast majority from ever finding it on their own.  Something is indeed "profoundly wrong here."  But of course this is just one more goad to the seeker's seeking. 

Second, the search, whether it has taken a religious or philosophic form, has endured for thousands of years and produced no definite or even probable answers, so why continue to engage in it? The assumption appears to be that if pursued with the right attitude, sufficient dedication, and intellectual honesty, it will yield something of this “ultimate truth.” But is it not the case that all the evidence weighs against this belief?

The problem is not that no definite answers have been produced, but that there are too many of them, they contradict one another on key points, and that this is good reason to be skeptical of any particular answer.  To add to the trouble, what I just said will be denied by many intelligent and sincere philosophers.  They will insist that their worldview is either true or more likely to be true than any other, and that the plethora of mutually incompatible worldviews is no decent argument to the contrary. But this too is just part of the predicament we are in, a predicament that the spiritually sensitive find intolerable and seek a way out of.

I am not saying that one is not entitled to devote oneself to this search, but I do not understand the conviction that it a worthwhile pursuit. All sorts of scientific questions remain unresolved, some for hundreds of years, but in approaching them, we are encouraged by the signs of small progress that have been made.  We have no such intellectual incentives in the matters of which you speak. Now, I understand that we have not been able to reach any sort of agreement on a host of other matters, from politics to morals, but in such cases, we at least understand the rough givens with which we are dealing. Of “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters,” we lack such an understanding. This is hardly encouraging.

This is the nub of the matter. I said in effect that the best life for a human being is a life whose dominant purpose is the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. (By the way, this search does not exclude politics and morality which rest on controversial philosophical assumptions.) And of course I mean a truth that one existentially appropriates (makes one's own) and lives. There are several ways of objecting to my thesis. Some will claim to have the truth already, and see no point is seeking what one possesses.  There are the dogmatic atheists for whom God and the soul are no longer issues. There are the dogmatic theists who have an answer for everything.  There are the dogmatic agnostics who are quite convinced that nothing can be known or even reasonably believed about ultimates (God, the soul, the meaning of human existence) and who think bothering one's head over these questions is simply foolish and might even drive one crazy such that the best way to live is to focus on the easily accessible foreground objects in the Cave and to make friends with finitude, accepting whatever mundane satisfactions come along until death puts an end to it all.

Vito may be flirting with the agnostic camp. He wonders how what we may as well call The Quest could be "a worthwhile pursuit." One of his arguments is that very few are in a position to pursue the Quest. The other is that the Quest, although pursued by the best and the brightest since time immemorial, has arrived at no solid result acceptable to all thinking people.

To the first point, I would say that the value of the Quest does not depend on how many are in a position to pursue it.  To the second point, I would say that no serious quester give up the Quest for the reason Vito cites.  The Quest is his vocation; he is called to it even if he cannot explain who or what is calling him. He finds deep satisfaction in the searching and the momentary glimpses of insight, and his satisfaction is reinforced by his conviction that the paltry objects pursued by the many are relatively worthless. He sees the vanity, the emptiness, of the world that most find most solidly real. Name and fame, property and pelf, are to him bagatelles.  The Quest is his spiritual practice and it is satisfying to the quester even when there is no tangible outcome. He likes to pray, meditate, study, reason, think, write.  This is all underpinned by a faith that there will be a favorable outcome, if not here, then Elsewhere.

On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion

Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68:

A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer.  It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude.  What passes for prayer in temples, churches, and synagogues is therefore a compromise dictated by the physical necessity of an institution.  It may be quite good but too often alas! it is only the dressed-up double of true prayer.

Where would we be without institutions?  We need them, but only up to a point.  We are what we are because of the institutions in which we grew up, and natural piety dictates that we be appropriately grateful.  But their negative aspects cannot be ignored and all further personal development requires those who can, to go it alone.

We need society and its institutions to socialize us, to raise us from the level of the animal to that of the human.  But this human is all-too-human, and to take the next step we must tread the solitary path.  Better to be a social animal than a mere animal, but better than both is to become an individual, as I am sure Kierkegaard would agree.  To achieve true individuality  is one of the main tasks of human life.  Spiritual individuation is indeed a task, not a given. In pursuit of this task institutions are often more hindrance than help.

For some, churches and related institutions will always be necessary to provide guidance, discipline, and community.  But for others they will prove stifling and second-best, a transitional phase in their development.

For any church to claim that outside it there is no salvation -- extra ecclesiam salus non est -- is intolerable dogmatism, and indeed a form of idolatry in which something finite, a human institution contingent both in its existence and configuration, is elevated to the status of the Absolute.

But now, having given voice to the opinion to which I strongly incline, I ought to consider, if only briefly, the other side of the question.

What if there is a church with a divine charter, one founded by God himself in the person of Christ? If there is such a church, then my charges of intolerable dogmatism and idolatry collapse. Such a church would not be just a help to salvation but a means  necessary thereto. Such a church, with respect to soteriological essentials, would teach with true, because divine, authority.

But is there such a divinely instituted and guided church? To believe this one would first have to accept the Incarnation.  And therein lies the stumbling block.

If the Incarnation is actual, then it is possible whether or not we can explain or understand how it is possible. Esse ad posse valet illatio.  Necessarily, what is, is really possible, whether or not conceivable by us. It is not for our paltry minds to dictate what is actual and what is possible. On the other hand, if the best and the brightest of our admittedly wretched kind cannot see how a state of affairs is possible, then that is evidence that it is not possible.  If, after protracted and sincere effort motivated by a love of truth, the Incarnation keeps coming before the mind as contradictory, and the attempts at defusing the apparent contradiction as so much fancy footwork, then here we have (admittedly non-demonstrative) evidence that the Incarnation really is impossible. 

And then there is the ethical matter of intellectual integrity. (Beliefs and not only actions are subject to ethical evaluation.) One can easily feel that there is something morally shabby about believing what is favorable to one when what one is believing is hard to square with elementary canons of logic.

This then is the predicament of someone with one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem.  The autonomy of reason demands insight lest it affirm beyond what it is justified in affirming. At the same time, reason in us realizes its infirmity and helplessness in the face of the great questions that bear upon our ultimate fate and felicity; reason in us is therefore inclined in its misery to embrace the heteronomy of faith.

How are we to resolve this problem?  Are to accept a revelation that our finite intellects cannot validate? Or are we to stand fast on the autonomy of finite reason and refuse to accept what we cannot, by our own lights, validate? (By 'validate' I do not mean 'show to be true' but only 'show to be rationally acceptable.')

My answer, interim and tentative, is this.  The ultimate resolution involves the will, not the intellect. One decides to accept the Incarnation or one decides not to accept it.  That is to say: the final step must be taken by the will, freely; which is not to say that the intellect is not involved up to the final step. The decision is free, but not 'arbitrary' in the sense of thoughtless or perfunctory.  No proof is possible, which should not be surprising since we are in the precincts of faith not knowledge.  One who accepts as true only what he can know or come to know has simply rejected faith as a mode of access to truth.

"But if the doctrine is apparently contradictory and an offense to discursive reason, then one's decision in favor of the Incarnation is irrational." 

I think this objection can be met. What is apparently contradictory may or may not be really contradictory, and it is not unreasonable to think that there are truths, non-contradictory in themselves, that must appear contradictory to us in our present state.  This is a form of mysterianism, but it is a reasoned mysterianism.  Human reason can come to understand that human reason cannot validate all that it accepts as true.

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'

Spiritual Practices versus Theological Dogmas

It would be foolish to let the dubiousness of theological dogmas distract you from spiritual exercises and the good achievable by their exercise. Don't let the apparent absurdities of the Chalcedonian definition stop you from saying the Jesus Prayer.

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

 

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

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)