Maverick Philosopher

Impediments to Meditation

This just in from a New Zealand reader:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator? A Good Koan?

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. 

Channing on Fenelon

Comments on the Character and Works of Fenelon 

(Submitted by Dave Bagwill)

. . . 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.

The Epicurean Cure

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.

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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.

Of Death and Detachment

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?

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A Philosopher's Prayer

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

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

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

The Monastery Sign

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.

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Grace

Is it possible to take grace seriously these days?

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

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

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

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

Aspiration Date

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.

A Goal of Meditation

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

Notes After a Meditation Session

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

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

2017 'Big Unplug' Begins Today

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) 

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Care of Soul and Body

Care for your soul as if you will die tomorrow; care for your body as if it will last indefinitely. 

(The formulation is mine; the thought is borrowed from Evagrios Pontikos.)

Don't Harbor the Negative

When negative thoughts drift into port, note them, but don't let them drop anchor. Let them drift out again.

Continence

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.

Brunton Quotes Muhammad

"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 . . . .

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Proper Equilibrium

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.

A Peace Worth Wanting? Problems with Pyrrhonian Ataraxia: Passivity and Porcinity

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.

To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated.

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Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Eremitic Option

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.

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Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Stateside readers.

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.  Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon?  Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness.  However you say it, it is true.  The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene. 

Broad generalizations, these.  They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying.  He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery.  Don't get hung up on the exceptions.  Meditate on the broad practical truth.  On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.'  But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical.  Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative.  Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist,  a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for.  They mark out paths not to be trodden.  And their foibles provide  plenty of blog fodder.  For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.

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Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Unnecessary Conversations

These include those with oneself.  Limit the unproductive inner rants and rehearsals.  There is no inner listening if one is talking to oneself.

Meditation Themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Further Questions About Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

A. One Way to Meditate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. Impermanence

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

First of all, that

T. All is impermanent

Can be argued to be self-refuting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D. How Much Metaphysics Does One Need to Meditate?

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

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

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

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Questions about Meditation

An academic philosopher inquires:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Meditation is Hard

Buber Contra Buddhism

Jack Kerouac: A Buddhist Wanderer Comes Home

Michael Walzer on Religion

Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos

In April of 2011, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos.  It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from liberals and leftists and the lamestream media is religion-bashing -- unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace -- but the segment in question was refreshingly objective.  It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough.  It didn't raise the underlying questions.  Which is why you need my blog. 

We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real.  For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though  philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality.  We don't know that there is any world other than this one.  We also don't know that there isn't.  Now here is an existential question for you:  Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinter world?  The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not.  It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is.  When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond. 

Let us be clear what the existential option is.  It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites.  It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death.  (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend.  I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)

The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions.  They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females -- there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.

Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being?  Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life?  The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth.  Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz.  There is a definite logic to their position.  If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters.  The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question. 

This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.'  Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it."  Marx and the commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means.  Millions of eggs were broken, though, and no omelet materialized.

Buddha, too, was famously opposed to speculation.  If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow.  The logic is the same, though the point is different.  The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, the extinguishing  of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara. 

If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then  by all means live in accordance with it.  Put it into practice.  But do you in fact have the truth?  For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded.  If the monks of Mt. Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.

But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions?  There is of course a secular analog.  I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions.  They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible.  Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, who went to the electric chair as atomic spies.  Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up  enablers of  great evil.  In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.

So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being?  For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously.  I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry.  The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it.   But that can't come this side of the Great Divide.  Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize.  We can rest in dogma on the far side, although there we won't need it, seeing having replaced believing.

My Athenian thesis -- that the life of the philosopher is the highest life possible for a human being -- won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have serious doubts about it.  But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise.  For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.  

Philosophy is reason's search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  But reason is not reason unless it strives mightily  beyond itself to sources of truth that transcend it.  So the true philosopher must be open to divine revelation.  If it is the truth the philosopher seeks, then he cannot  confine himself to the truth accessible to discursive reason.

Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration

A Facebook user told me he left  it because it had become for him an impediment to spiritual growth.  I concur and generalize:  inordinate consumption of any and all mass communications media militates against spiritual health for all of us.  Mass media content is a bit like whisky: a little, from time to time, will not hurt you, and my even do some good; but more is not better!

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

Of course, the quick answer I just gave presupposes a metaphysics, a philosophical anthopology and a soteriology that cannot be laid out briefly.    So here are some links to related posts that fill in some of the details.

Meditation: What and Why

Modern Media and the Deterioration of Spiritual Life

Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

Meditation: Three Baby Steps

Soul Food

How to Avoid God

William James on Self-Denial

How Not to Begin the Day

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A Part-Time Monk's Solution to Suggestibility

Al-Ghazzali on Worldly Trifles

From The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48:

Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.

Apatheia and the News

Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do nothing about them?  Apatheia and the news don't go well together.  Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider.  But on the other side of the question:

The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong.  But if you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left.  Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea.  We should all consume less media dreck.  But there is no final retreat from totalitarians.  They won't allow it.  At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual, but also of the mediating structures of civil society.

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Could a Jew Pray the Our Father?

A rather obvious point swam before my mind this morning:  there is nothing specifically Christian about the content of the Pater Noster. Its origin of course is Christian.  When his disciples asked him how they should pray, Jesus taught them the prayer.  (Mt 6:9-13) If you carefully read the prayer below you will see that there is no mention in it of anything specifically Christian: no mention of Jesus as the Son of God, no mention of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us (the Incarnation), no mention of the Resurrection, nothing that could be construed as even implicitly Trinitarian.  So I thought to myself: a believing Jew could pray  this prayer.  There is nothing at the strictly doctrinal level that could prevent him.  Or is there?  

Christians pray the Psalms.  Do any Jews pray the Our Father?  Would they have a good reason not to?  No more than a Christian would have a good reason not to incorporate into his prayer life Plotinus' "It is by the One that all beings are beings" despite the non-Christian provenience of this marvellous and beautiful saying.

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

OUR FATHER, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

UPDATE (31 May).  Andrew Bailey comments:

A long-standing tradition at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame was to recite the Our Father before meetings. Many (but not all) Jewish philosophers associated with the Center would join in these prayers in the years I was there. I asked about it once, and the answer I got was along these lines: "Of course I pray the prayer. Whoever wrote it -- whether Jesus of Nazareth or one of his disciples -- was definitely a Jew, after all."

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What Sort of Prayer is Needed by the Desiccated Intellectual?

Which sort of prayer is appropriate for the proud intellectual?  Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. I (Catholic Way Publishing, 2013), p. 535:

Some souls absolutely need prayer, intimate and profound prayer; another form of prayer will not suffice for them.  There are very intelligent people whose character is difficult, intellectuals who will dry up in their work, in study, in seeking themselves therein in pride, unless they lead a life of true prayer, which for them should be a life of mental prayer.  It alone can give them a childlike soul in regard to God . . . .  It alone can teach them the profound meaning of Christ's words: "Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."  It is, therefore, important, especially for certain souls, to persevere in prayer; unless they do so, they are almost certain to abandon the interior life and perhaps come to ruin.

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The Atheist

Unnecessary Conversation Avoided

Whether it is haiku or not, it is 17 syllables, and a good addition to the Stoic's armamentarium:

Avoid the near occasion
Of unnecessary conversation.

Avoiding the near occasion is not always practicable or even reasonable, but pointless conversation itself is best avoided if one values one's peace of mind.  For according to an aphorism of mine:

Peace of mind is sometimes best preserved by refraining from giving others a piece of one's mind. 

The other day a lady asked me if I had watched the Republican debate.  I said I had. She then asked me what I had thought of it.  I told her, "I don't talk politics with people I don't know extremely well."  To which her response was that she is not the combative type. She followed that with a comment to the effect that while in a medico's waiting room recently she amused herself by listening to some men talking politics, men she described as 'bigots.'

I then knew what I had earlier surmised: she was a liberal.  I congratulated myself on my self-restraint.  At that point I excused myself and wished her a good day.

Companion post: Safe Speech.  "No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

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Negative thoughts are of the other, but in oneself.  They cannot harm what they are of, but they can pollute and disturb what they are in.

Knowing God Through Experience

A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video  featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including  Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig.  Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him.  (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson)

As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation, the belief of many theists is not a result of religious experience. It comes from upbringing, tradition, and participation in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" with its  associated "language game."  I myself, however, could not take religion seriously if it were not for the variety of religious, mystical, and paranormal experiences I have had, bolstered by philosophical reasoning both negative and positive.  Negative, as critique of the usual suspects: materialism, naturalism, scientism, secular humanism, and so on.  Positive, the impressive array of theistic arguments and considerations which, while they cannot establish theism as true, make a powerful case for it.

But my need for direct experience reflects my personality and, perhaps, limitations.  I am an introvert who looks askance at communal practices such as corporate prayer and church-going and much, if not all, of the externalities that go with it.  I am not a social animal.  I see socializing  as too often levelling and inimical to our ultimate purpose here below: to become individuals. Socializing superficializes.  Man in the mass is man degraded.  We need to be socialized out of the animal level, of course, but then we need solitude to achieve the truly human goal of individuation.  Individuation is not a given, but a task.  The social animal is still too much of an animal for my taste.

It is only recently that I have forced myself myself to engage in communal religious activities, but more as a form of self-denial than of anything else.  My recent five weeks at a remote monastery were more eremitic than cenobitic, but I did take part in the services.  And upon return I began attending mass with my wife.  Last Sunday a man sat down next to me, a friendly guy who extended to me his hand, but his breath stank to high heaven.  Behind me some guy was coughing his head off.  And then there are those who show up for mass in shorts, and I am not talking about kids.  The priest is a disaster at public speaking and his sermon is devoid of content.  Does he even understand the doctrine he is supposed to teach?  And then there are all the lousy liberals who want to reduce religion to a crapload of namby-pamby humanist nonsense.  And let's not forget the current clown of a pope who, ignorant of economics and climatology, speaks to us of the evils of capitalism and 'global warming' when he should be speaking of the Last Things.  (Could he name them off the top of his head?)

But then I reason with myself as follows.  "Look, man, you are always going on about how man is a fallen being in a fallen world.  Well, the church and its hierarchy and its members are part of the world and therefore fallen too.  So what did you expect?  And you know that the greatest sin of the intellectual is pride and that pride blinds the spiritual sight like nothing else.  So suck it up, be a man among men, humble yourself. It may do you some good." 

Related: Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to it

On Socializing

William James on Self-Denial

Addendum (31 October):  Joshua Orsak writes, 

I read about your recent experiences with communal
religion. Your self-reflection reminded me of something Rabbi Harold Kushner
writes about in his book WHO NEEDS GOD. He talks about visiting with a young man
who told him, "I hate churches and synagogues, they're full of nothing but
hypocrites and jerks"...Kushner says he had to fight the urge to say, 'yep, and
there is always room for one more'.  

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The Simple Atheist, the Classical Theist, and the Ontic Theist

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

Philosophy and Politics: Frege, Heidegger and Others

A Warning

Apropos of my last entry, a warning to those may be thinking of heading for the desert.  The following observation from a November 2009 post, "Demons of the Desert."

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

Distracted from your distractions, you may get more than you bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.

My Time Away: Where I Was and What I Did

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

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

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

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

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

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

From my journal:

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

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

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

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Monkish Haiku

Avoid the near occasion
Of unnecessary conversation.

The Big Unplug Starts Today

Starting now, I will unplug from this hyperkinetic modern world for a period of days or weeks.  How long remains to be seen.  I will devote myself to such spiritual exercises as prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, hard-core philosophy and theology pursued for truth as opposed to professional gain, and the exploration of nature.

I will avoid unnecessary conversations and their near occasion, socializing, newspapers, telephony, radio, television, blogging, facebooking, tweeting, and all non-essential Internet-related activities. In a word: all of the ephemera that most people take to be the ne plus ultra of reality and importance. (As for Twitter, I am and hope to remain a virgin: I have never had truck with this weapon of mass distraction.)

Why? Some reasons in Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration.

But I am no benighted neo-Luddite.  The air conditioning will stay on in my abode in the shadows of the Superstitions.

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 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)

Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options

Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.  Nonetheless certain parallels there are.  A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.  What they set themselves to achieve instead –- often not recognizing fully what they were doing –- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.  If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.  What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.  And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 244-245.)

This was written 34 years ago, 20 years before 9/11.  It is the charter for Rod Dreher's recent talk of a Benedict Option.  Excerpts from an eponymous article of his:

Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.

For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.

The Great Forgetting is taking a particular toll on American Christianity, which is losing its young in dramatic numbers. Those who remain within churches often succumb to a potent form of feel-good relativism that sociologists have called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which is dissolving historic Christian moral and theological orthodoxy.

A recent Pew survey found that Jews in America are in an even more advanced state of assimilation to secular modernity. The only Jews successfully resisting are the Orthodox, many of whom live in communities meaningfully separate and by traditions distinct from the world.

Is there a lesson here for Christians? Should they take what might be called the “Benedict Option”: communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life?

The broader topic here is that of voluntary withdrawal from a morally corrupt society and its morally corrupt institutions.  There are various options. One could join a monastic order and live in community.  This is the monastic cenobitic option.  There is also the monastic eremitic option: one lives as a hermit within a religious context subject to its rules and having taken vows. Both the cenobitic and the eremitic options can be made less rigorous in various ways.  One could attach oneself as an oblate to a monastery visiting it from time to time and participating in its  communal prayers and other activities (Ora, labora, et lectio are the three 'legs' of the Benedictine 'stool.').  This could also be done in an eremitic way.  (From the Greek eremos, desert.)

Spiritual withdrawal is of course greatly aided by physical withdrawal from cities into deserts and other remote locales; but one could voluntarily withdraw from a morally corrupt society while living in the midst of it in, say, Manhattan.  (I cannot, however, advise setting up as the resident monk in a bordello in Pahrump, Nevada.)

What of the Maverick Option?  As  I have been living it since 1991 it does not involve drastic physical isolation: I live on the edge of a major metropolitan area which is also the edge of a rugged wilderness area.  Ready access to raw nature (as opposed to, say, Manhattan's Central Park) may not be absolutely essential for spiritual development, but it is extremely conducive to it (in tandem with other things of course).  Nature, experienced alone, removes one from the levelling effects of the social.  (Henry David Thoreau: "I have no walks to throw away on company."  That sounds misanthropic and perhaps from Henry David's mouth it was; but it can be given a positive reading.)  It would be the height of folly to suppose that man's sociality is wholly negative; but its corrupting side cannot be denied.  Encounter with nature in solitude pulls one out of one's social comfort zone in such a way that the ultimate questions obtrude themselves with full force.  In society, they can strike one like jokes from a Woody Allen movie; in solitude, in the desert, they are serious.  Nature is not God; but the solitary encounter with it, by breaking the spell of the social, can orient us toward Nature's God. 

I will have more to say of the Maverick Option, its nature and pitfalls, in a later post.

There is also the Jeremiah Option:

Where Jeremiah counsels engagement without assimilation, Benedict represents the possibility of withdrawal. The former goal is to be achieved by the pursuit of ordinary life: the establishment of homes, the foundation of families, all amid the wider culture. The latter is to be achieved by the establishment of special communities governed by a heightened standard of holiness.

Although it can be interpreted as a prophecy of doom, the Jeremiah Option is fundamentally optimistic. It suggests that the captives can and should lead fulfilling lives even in exile. The Benedict Option is more pessimistic. It suggests that mainstream society is basically intolerable, and that those who yearn for decent lives should have as little to do with it as possible. MacIntyre is careful to point out that the new St. Benedict would have to be very different from the original and might not demand rigorous separation. Even so, his outlook remains bleak.

We need to catalog and examine all the options.  A man once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.  He was the wisest of mortals.

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

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

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

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

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

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

Worldly Enough

We must be worldly enough to secure for ourselves a place in the world whereat to practice unworldliness.

The Useless Rehearsal of the Useful

Avoid not only useless thoughts, but also the useless rehearsing of useful thoughts.

Negativity and Animality

Negativity is more difficult to subdue than animality.  No surprise: the mind is more difficult to control than the body.

The Proximate Goal of Meditation

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

Desiderata

To live beyond society, beyond the need for recognition and status. To live in truth, alone with nature and nature's God and the great problems and questions.  There are the ancient dead ones for companionship.  They speak across the centuries.  With them we form a community of the like-minded in nomine scientiae.

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I  read the seventh and final volume of Thomas Merton's journals, The Other Side of the Mountain, in 1998 when it first appeared.  I am currently re-reading it. It is once again proving to be page turner for one who has both a nostalgic and a scholarly interest in the far-off and fabulous '60s.    But what a gushing liberal and naive romantic Merton was!  Here is but one example:

Yesterday, quite by chance, I met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his secretary . . . . Chogyam Trungpa is a completely marvelous person.  Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise. [. . .] He is also a genuine spiritual master. (October 20, 1968, p. 219, emphasis added)

Unfortunately, the 'spirituality' of many 'spiritual masters' is of the New Age type, a type of spirituality that fancies itself beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions and prohibitions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous case of Rajneesh. Chogyam Trungpa appears to have been cut from the same cloth. According to one report,

. . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma.

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that this gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

That Merton could be taken in by the fellow says something about Merton.  A phrase such as 'genuine spiritual master' ought not be bandied about lightly. But perhaps Trungpa's excesses were not in evidence at the time.

Herewith yet another indication of why philosophy is essential to balanced thinking and living.  Jerusalem and Benares are both in need of chastening, and Athens wields the rod.  Although I maintain that philosophy needs completion by what is beyond philosophy, that maintenance is not a license to abandon rational critique.  Every sector of life requires critique, including Philosophy herself, and Philosophy is the Critic.

As for putative 'spiritual masters,' run as fast as you can from any such 'master' or 'guru' who has something to sell you or is not in control of his lower self.

Related articles

Jack Kerouac on How to Meditate

Tongue and Pen

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

Contradiction and Koan

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

The Highest Mastery

The highest mastery is self-mastery. The highest self-mastery is thought-mastery. To control one's thoughts is to control the seeds of one's words and deeds.

The Parable of the Leaky Cup

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

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

Related: Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored