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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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*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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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'?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
. . . 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.
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)
Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 5, p. 183, entry of 25 December 1964:
St Maximus [the Confessor] says that he who "has sanctified his senses by looking with purity at all things" becomes like God. This is, I think, what the Zen masters tried to do. A letter from John Wu spoke of running into [D. T.] Suzuki at Honolulu last summer. They talked of my meeting with him in New York. Suzuki was going to ask me a question but didn't. "If God created the world, who created the Creator?' A good koan.
Nice try, Tom, but surely that old chestnut, sophomoric as it is, is not a good koan. Or at least it is not a good koan for one who is intellectually sophisticated. And this for the reason that it is easily 'solved.' A koan is an intellectual knot that cannot be untied by discursive means, by remaining on the plane of ordinary mind; a koan is a sort of mental bind or cramp the resolute wrangling with which is supposed, on an auspicious occasion, to precipitate a break-through to non-dual awareness.
God is the Absolute. The Absolute, by its very nature, is not possibly such as to be relativized by anything external to it. In particular, qua absolute, God does not depend on anything else for his existence or nature or modal status. It follows straightaway that he cannot have a cause. If to create is to cause to exist, then God quite obviously cannot have a creator. Since God cannot have a creator, one cannot sensibly ask: Who or what created God? Or at least one cannot ask this question in expectation of an answer that cites some entity other than God.
Classically, God is said to be causa sui. This is is to be read privatively, not positively. Or so I maintain. It means that God is not caused by another. It does not mean that God causes himself to exist. Nothing can cause itself to exist. If something could cause itself to exist, then it would have already (logically speaking) to exist in order to bring itself into existence. Which is absurd.
Equivalently, God is ens necessarium. In my book, that means that he is THE, not A, necessary being. He enjoys a unique mode of necessity unlike 'ordinary' necessary beings such as the set of natural numbers. Arguably, there is a nondenumerable infinity of necessary beings; but there is only one necessary being that has its necessity from itself (i.e., not from another) and this all men call God.
Accordingly, to ask who created God is to presuppose that God is a contingent being. Given that the presupposition is false, the question can be dismissed as predicated on misunderstanding. This is why the question is not a good koan. It is easily solved or dissolved on the discursive plane. Nothing counts as a koan unless it is insoluble on the discursive plane.
"But if God doesn't need a cause, why does the world need a cause?" The short answer is: because the world is contingent. We must regress from the world to God, but then that at God we must stop. No vicious infinite regress.
A Much Better Christian Koan: The Riddle of Divine Simplicity
I have just demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the old chestnut from John Stuart Mill is no good as a koan. But suppose we dig deeper. It is not wrong to unpack the divine necessity by saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds. But it is superficial. For this is true of all necessary beings. What is the ground of the divine necessity?
I would argue that the divine necessity rests on the divine simplicity according to which there are no real distinctions in God. See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for details. This implies, among other things, that God does not instantiate his attributes; rather he is (identical to) them. God has omniscience by being omniscience, for example. As St Augustine says, "God is what he has." The same goes for the other attributes as well. If you think about it you will soon realize that the logical upshot is that every attribute is identical to every other one.
God's being the Absolute implies that he is unique, but uniquely so. God is uniquely unique: he is not one of a kind, but so radically One that he transcends the distinction between kind and instance. God is not the unique instance of the divine kind: he is (identically!) his kind. That is why I say that God is uniquely unique: he is unique in his mode of uniqueness.
But surely, or rather arguably, this makes no discursive sense which is why very astute philosophical theologians such as A. Plantinga reject the simplicity doctrine. although he doesn't put it quite like that. (See his animadversions in Does God Have a Nature?) Almost all evangelical Christians follow him (or at least agree with him) on this. (Dolezal is an exception.) How could anything be identical to its attributes? To put it negatively, how could anything be such that there is no distinction between it and its attributes?
We are beginning to bite into a real koan: a problem that arises and its formulable on the discursive place, but is insoluble on the discursive plane.
On the one hand, God as absolute must be ontologically simple. No God worth his salt could be a being among beings, pace my evangelical friends such as Dale Tuggy. On the other hand, we cannot understand how anything could be ontologically simple. There are no good solutions to this within the discursive framework. There are solutions, of course, and dogmatic heads will plump for this one or that one all the while contradicting each other. But I claim that there is no ultimately satisfactory solution to the problem. Note that this is also a problem for the divine necessity since it rest on the divine simplicity.
My suggestion, then, is that here we have a candidate for a good koan within Christian metaphysics.
The Ultimate Christian Koan
This, I have long held, is the crucified God-Man. It is arguably absurd (logically contradictory) as Kiekegaard held that God become a man while remaining God. It is the height of absurdity that this God-Man, the most perfect of all men, should die the worst death the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.
If to accept this is to accept the crucifixion of the intellect, then here we have the ultimate Christian koan.
. . . a very common error of exalted minds. He applied too rigorous and unvarying a standard to the multitude. He leaned to the error of expecting the strength of manhood in the child, the harvest in seed-time. On this subject, above all others, we feel that we should speak cautiously. We know that there is a lenity [leniency] towards human deficiencies full of danger ; but there is, too, a severity far more common, and perhaps more ruinous. Human nature, as ordinarily exhibited, merits rebuke ; but whoever considers the sore trials, the thick darkness, the impetuous will, the strong passions, under which man commences his moral probation, will temper rebuke with pity and hope. There is a wisdom, perhaps the rarest and sublimest attainment of the intellect, which is at once liberal and severe, indulgent and unbending ; which makes merciful and equitable allowance for the innocent infirmities, the necessary errors, the obstructions and temptations of human beings, and at the same time asserts the majesty of virtue, strengthens the sense of accountableness, binds on us self-denial, and points upward, with a never-ceasing importunity, to moral perfection, as the great aim and only happiness of the human soul.
Channing, William Ellery, 1780-1842. The works of William E. Channing, D.D (Kindle Locations 2721-2729). Boston : James Munroe.
Fenelon was a quietist. Here is something on quietism with excepts from the writing of Molinos, Guyon, and Fenelon.
Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):
We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.
He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:
God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.
This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause . . . .
And is evil "readily endurable"? See for yourself whether that proposition stands up to a close reading of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or any other catalog of human horrors.
The Hellenistic systems, the systems of late antiquity (Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism), despite their riches and insights offer us no real solution to the human predicament, a fact of which Augustine was well aware.
Whether or not there is a cure, man cannot be his own doctor.
St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, p. 11:
My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me.
I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different senses in this passage. The one sense is spiritual while the other is physical.
The saint is praying that he be given the strength to detach himself spiritually from the transient objects of worldly desire before death physically detaches him or his soul from his body. The saint is not assuming that physical detachment will occasion spiritual detachment. To expect such a thing would be naive. It would be as if a man who spent his entire life 'on the make,' in hot pursuit of property and pelf, pleasure and power, were suddenly at death to renounce the earthly lures and to have a burning desire to meet his Maker.
The saint is assuming, though, that spiritual detachment can be achieved only while one is in the body, and that after one quits it one will be stuck with the spiritual attachments one has at the hour of death.
Physical death does not have the power to detach me spiritually from worldliness with its vapours and follies. For this is possible: my body dies but my soul lives on fully attached to the objects of worldly desire. We may speculate that Hugh Hefner is presently still lusting after nubile females. It is just that he presently lacks the physical apparatus with which to realize his lusts.
This too is possible: I remain physically attached to my body while living spiritually detached from the bagatelles of this life.
This is a fertile field for further thought. What exactly is spiritual attachment? How is it put in place, and how is it mitigated? One mode of mitigation is by meditation: one distances mentally from one's thoughts; one observes them as from a distance, refusing to live in or lose oneself in them.
And how can the soul be physically attached to the body if only one of them is physical? Is perhaps the soul's physical attachment to the body reducible to a special sort of spiritual attachment whereby I become embodied by spiritually attaching myself to a chunk of the physical world, a particular animal organism? By taking a particular animal organism to be me?
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.
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 il combattimento spirituale. They felt as if 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, phenomenologically, if not really.
Is it possible to take grace seriously these days?
Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat. For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by someone, then I go beyond the given: I move from phenomenology to theology. No philosopher worth his salt can escape the question whether such a move is or is not an illicit slide. An experience describable as having a gift-character needn't be a gift.
Still, the experience was what it was, and could not be doubted a few moments ago, nor now in its afterglow. It is in such experiences that we find the phenomenological roots of the theology of grace which, growing from such roots, cannot be dismissed as empty speculation or projection or wish-fulfillment or anything else the naturalist may urge for its dismissal.
There cannot be a phenomenology of the Absolute but only a phenomenology of the glimpses, gleanings, vouchsafings, and intimations of the Absolute. To put the point with full philosophical precision: there can only be a phenomenology of the glimpses, etc. as of the Absolute. That curious phrase from the philosopher's lexicon expresses the latter's professional caution inasmuch as no experience that purports to take us beyond the sphere of immanence proves the veridicality of its intentional object.
On the other hand, the fact of the experience, its occurrence within the sphere of immanence, needs accounting. However matters may stand with respect to the realitas objectiva of the experience, its realitas formalis needs to be explained. I would venture to say that the best explanation of the widespread occurrence of mystical experiences is that some of them are indeed veridical.
We each have an expiration date on which we will draw and expel our last breath. And there was a day on which we first drew breath. But more significant than either is one's spiritual aspiration date, the date, if it comes at all, on which one awakens to the Quest.
The discursive mind loves the dust it kicks up. We love distraction, diversion, dissipation, and diremption, even as we sense their nullity and the need to attain interior silence. This is one reason why meditation is so hard. We love to ride the wild horse of the mind. It is much easier than swimming upstream to the Source.
Or to unmix the metaphors, it is much easier to ride than rein in that crazy horse. But we have the reins in our hands, and it is just a matter of having the will to yank back on them. (10 September 1997)
I'll be offline and incommunicado for the month of July. The plan is for normal operations to resume on or about 1 August.
I ask my valued correspondents to refrain from sending me any links to events of the day or commentary thereon. I am going on a 'news fast' which is even more salutary for the soul than a food fast is for the body.
From time to time 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)
The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.
Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.
Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.
Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.
Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.' Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.
The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.
"Contemplation for an hour is better than formal worship for sixty years." (Paul Brunton, Notebooks vol. 15, Part I, p. 171, #16)
Brunton gives no source. Whatever the source, and whether or not Muhammad said it, it is true. Aquinas would agree. The ultimate goal of human existence for the doctor angelicus is the visio beata. The Beatific Vision is not formal worship but contemplation.
Islam may be the "saddest and poorest form of theism" as Schopenhauer says, and in its implementation more a scourge upon humanity than a boon, but it does have genuine religious value. I would also add that for the benighted tribesmen whose religion it is it is better than no religion at all.
That last sentence is not obvious and if you disagree you may be able to marshal some good reasons.
Why do I say that Islam for certain peoples is better than no religion at all? Because religion tames, civilizes, and teaches morality; it gives life structure and sense. Religion imparts morality in an effective way, even if the morality it imparts is inferior. You can't effectively impart morality to an 18-year-old at a university via ethics courses. Those courses come too late; morality needs to be inculcated early. (Reflect on the etymology of 'inculcate' and you will appreciate that it is exactly the right word.) And then, after the stamping-in early on, ethical reflection has something to chew on. Same with logic: logic courses are wasted on illogical people: one must already have acquired basic reasoning skills in concrete situations if there is to be anything for logical theory to 'chew on.'
Now this from the Scowl of Minerva:
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne, vol. II (Dover, 1966), p. 162. This is from Chapter XVII, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" (emphases added and a paragraph break):
Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical. The man of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meagre fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy-tales. If only they are imprinted early enough, they are for man adequate explanations of his existence and supports for his morality.
Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need for countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it . . . .
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 15, Part II, p. 76, #316:
He will maintain a proper equilibrium between being aware of what is happening in the world, remaining in touch with it, and being imperturbable towards it, inwardly unaffected and inwardly detached from it.
Small is the number of those who can appreciate this as an ideal, and smaller still those capable of attaining it. Smallest of all is the number of those who attain it.
The Pyrrhonians see clearly that part of our misery in this life is due to our inability to attain certain knowledge. Wanting certainty, but unable to secure it, we are thrown back upon conflicting beliefs that inflame passions. The heat of the passions seems to vary inversely with the rational unprovability of the beliefs that stoke them. The Pyrrhonians try to find happiness in the midst of this misery. We are to suspend judgment (belief) and thereby attain peace of mind. Theirs is not a theoretical but a therapeutic conception of philosophy. The Skeptic therapy diagnoses our illness as belief and prescribes the purgation of belief as the cure. Martha C. Nussbaum (The Therapy of Desire, Princeton UP, 1994, 284-285) puts it well:
In short, says the Skeptic, Epicurus is correct that the central human disease is a disease of belief. But he is wrong to feel that the solution lies in doing away with some beliefs and clinging all the more firmly to others. The disease is not one of false belief; belief itself is the illness -- belief as a commitment, a source of concern, care, and vulnerability.
. . . Greek Skepticism, attaching itself to the medical analogy, commends this diagnosis and proposes a radical cure: the purgation of all cognitive commitment, all belief, from human life.The Skeptic, "being a lover of his fellow human beings, wishes to heal by argument, insofar as he can, the conceit and the rashness of dogmatic people" (PH 3.280).
We note the radicality of both the diagnosis and the cure. Since belief as such makes us ill, the cure must lie in the purgation of all beliefs including, I assume, any beliefs instrumental in effecting the cure. Just as a good laxative flushes itself out along with everything else, doxastic purgation supposedly relieves us of all doxastic impactation, including the beliefs underpinning the therapeutic procedures. You might say that the aperient effect of epoche is to restore us to mundane regularity.
I reject the Skeptic Way, its destination, and its 'laxatives.' I agree that we are ill, all of us, and that that part of our misery in this life is due to our inability to attain what we desire and feel is our birthright, namely, certain knowledge, in particular, certain knowledge of ultimates. But I reject both the diagnosis and the cure. The problem is not belief as such, and the solution is not purgation of belief.
Pyrrhonism is rife with problems. Here is one about the value of ataraxia. It is a value, but how high a value?
The Passivity of Ataraxia
The notion that ataraxia (mental tranquillity, peace of soul, freedom from disturbance) is either essential to happiness or the whole of happiness is a paltry and passive conception of happiness. The peace of the Pyrrhonian is not the "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Phillipians 4:7), but a peace predicated upon not understanding -- and not caring any more about understanding. Could that be a peace worth wanting?
The Skeptic who, true to his name, begins with inquiry abandons inquiry when he finds that nothing can be known with certainty. But rather than have recourse to uncertain belief, the Skeptic concludes that the problem is belief itself. Rather than go forward on uncertain beliefs, he essays to go forward belieflessly. Inquiry, he maintains, issues in the psychological state of aporia (being at a loss) when it is seen that competing beliefs cancel each other out. The resulting evidential equipoise issues in epoche (withdrawal of assent) and then supposedly in ataraxia.
Now mental tranquillity is a high value, and no one who takes philosophy seriously can not want to possess more of it. But the Skeptic's brand of tranquillity cannot be the highest value, and perhaps not much of a value at all. The happy life cannot be anything so passive as the life of ataraxia. We need a more virile conception of happiness, and we find it in Aristotle. For the Stagirite, happiness (eudaimonia) is an activity (ergon) of the soul (psyche) in accordance with virtue (arete) over an entire life. (Cf. Nicomachean Ethics.) His is an active conception of the good life even though the highest virtues are the intellectual and contemplative virtues. The highest life is the bios theoretikos, the vita contemplativa. Though contemplative, it necessarily involves the activity of inquiry into the truth, an activity that skepticism, whether Pyrrhonian or Academic, denigrates.
The Porcinity of Ataraxia
Disillusioned with the search for truth, our Skeptic advocates re-entry into the everyday. Unfortunately, there is something not only passive, but also porcine about the Skeptic's resting in ataraxia. Nussbaum again:
Animal examples play an important part in Skepticism, illustrating the natural creature's freedom from disturbance,and the ease with which this is attained if we only can, in Pyrrho's words, "altogether divest ourselves of the human being" (DL 9.66). The instinctive behavior of a pig, calmly removing its hunger during a storm that fills humans with anxiety, exemplifies for the Skeptic the natural orientation we all have to free ourselves from immediate pain. It also shows that this is easily done, if we divest ourselves of the beliefs and commitments that generate other complex pains and anxieties. Pointing to that pig, Pyrrho said "that the wise man should live in just such and undisturbed condition" (DL 9.66).
How is that for a porcine view of the summum bonum? I am put in mind of this well-known passage from John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, Chapter II:
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Is the Skeptic Committed to Ataraxia's being a Value?
The Skeptic aspires to live belieflessly, adoxastos. He aims to live beyond all commitments, or at least beyond all commitments that transcend present impressions. (It is a nice question, one best left for later, whether our Skeptic can, consistently with his entire approach, cop to a commitment to something as Chisholmianly noncommital as his here and now being-appeared-to-sweetly when, for example, he eats honey. Does he not here and and now accept, affirm, believe that he is being-appeared-to-sweetly when he consumes honey? Sticking to impressions, he does not accept, affirm, believe that the honey IS sweet, but 'surely' he must accept, affirm, believe that he IS (in reality) presently being appeared-to-sweetly. No?)
Setting aside for now our parenthetical worry, what about the commitment to the pursuit of ataraxia? He who treads the Skeptic Path is committed to the value of ataraxia, and this value-commitment obviously transcends his present impressions. It is the organizing principle behind his therapeutic procedures and his entire way of life. It is what his quasi-medicinal treatments are for. Ataraxia is the goal, the 'final cause' of the therapy. So here we have yet another doxastic-axiological commitment that is part and parcel of the Skeptic Way. We see once a again that a life without commitment is impossible.
Nussbaum considers how a Skeptic might respond:
I think he would now answer that yes, after all, an orientation to ataraxia is very fundamental in his procedures. But the orientation to ataraxia is not a belief, or a value-commitment. It has the status of a natural inclination. Naturally, without belief or teaching, we move to free ourselves from burdens and disturbances. Ataraxia does not need to become a dogmatic commitment, because it is already a natural animal impulse . . . Just as the dog moves to take a thorn out of its paw, so we naturally move to get rid of our pains and impediments: not intensely or with any committed attachment but because that's just the way we go. (305)
This quotation is right before the pig passage quoted above. Nussbaum does not endorse the response she puts in the mouth of the Skeptic, and she very skillfully presents the difficulty. The Skeptic, whether he aims to be consistent or not, must adopt a Skeptical attitude toward ataraxia "if he is to avoid disturbance and attain ataraxia." (Nussbaum, 301) He cannot be committed to ataraxia or any of the procedures that supposedly lead to it without running the risk of disturbance.
I would add that our Skeptic cannot even be committed to the possibility of ataraxia. The pursuit of ataraxia enjoins a suspension of judgment as to its possibility or impossibility. For any claim that humans are capable of ataraxia is a claim that goes beyond the impressions of the present moment, a claim that can give rise to dispute and disturbance. But it is even worse that this. It occurs to me that our Skeptic cannot even grant that he or anyone has ever experienced ataraxia in the past since this claim too would go beyond the impressions of the present moment.
Suppose you went to this doctor for treatment. You ask him how successful his procedures are. "How many, doc, have experienced relief after a course of your purgatives and aperients?" The good doctor will not commit himself. He has no 'track record' he will stand by. No point, then, is asking about the prognosis.
How then can the Skeptic save himself from incoherence? It seems he must reduce the human being to an animal that simply follows its natural instincts and inclinations. Divesting himself of his humanity, he must sink to the level of the animal as Pyrrho recommends. Indeed, he must stop acting and merely respond to stimuli. Human action has beliefs as inputs, and human action is for reasons. But all of this is out if we are to avoid all doxastic and axiological commitments.
We now clearly see that the Skeptic Way is a dead end. We want the human good, happiness. But we are given a load of rhetoric that implies that there is no specifically human good and that we must regress to the level of animals.
But even this recommendation bristles with paradox. For it too is a commitment to a course of action that transcends the moment when action is impossible for a critter that merely responds instinctually to environmental stimuli.
Is there a better way to begin a new year than by a session upon the black mat? No, so I sat this morning from 2:50 to 3:45. There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique. You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now. You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes,
Noli foras ire,in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.
The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority. For the intentionality of mind, its outer directedness, conspires against the experience. Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center. This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere. Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing. The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise. A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov. The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.
Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process. The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind.
My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra. He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this. He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.
I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.
I conjecture that what Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side. Christians not so much. But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation. The unity of a sentence without which it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.
The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre.
Monks come in two kinds, the cenobites and the eremites or hermits. The cenobites live in community whereas the hermits go off on their own. Eremos in Greek means desert, and there are many different motives for moving into the desert either literally or figuratively. There are those whose serious psychological conditions make it impossible for them to function in modern society. Chris Knight is such a one, who, when asked about Thoreau, replied in one word, "dilettante." That's saying something inasmuch as Henry David was one monkish and solitary dude even when he wasn't hanging out at Walden Pond. Somewhere in his fascinating journal he writes, "I have no walks to throw away on company."
Others of a monkish bent are wholly sane, unlike Knight, so sane in fact that they perceive and reject the less-than-sane hustle of Big City life. Some are motivated religiously, some philosophically, and some share both motivations. I have always held that a sane religiosity has to be deeply philosophical and vice versa. I think most of the Desert Fathers would agree. Athens and Jerusalem need each other for complementation and mutual correction. Some of the monkish are members of monastic religious orders, some attach themselves as oblates to such orders, and some go it alone. Call the latter the Maverick Variation.
And of course there are degrees of withdrawal from society and its illusions. I have been called a recluse, but on most days I engage in a bit of socializing usually early in the morning in the weight room or at the pool or spa where a certain amount of banter & bullshit is de rigueur. I thereby satisfy my exiguous social needs for the rest of the day. Other mornings, sick of such idle talk and the corrrosive effect it can have on one's seriousness and spiritual focus, I head for the hills to traipse alone with my thoughts as company. But I am not as severe as old Henry David: I will share my walk with you and show you some trails if you are serious, fit, and don't talk too much.
I am a Myers-Briggs INTP introvert. Must one be an introvert to be a hermit? No. The most interesting hermit I know is an extrovert who in his younger days was a BMOC, excellent at sports, successful at 'the chase,' who ended up on Wall Street, became very wealthy, indulged his every appetite, but then had a series of profound religious experiences that inspired him to sell all he owned and follow Christ, first into a cenobium, then into a hermitage.
A tip of the hat and a Merry Christmas to Karl White of London for sending me to this Guardian piece which profiles some contemporary monkish specimens.
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!
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