In religious acculturation the most important element is barely touched upon—so that we don’t even recognize the very experience of it when it arises spontaneously. We don’t in any way link it to religion. I find it interesting that the etymology for religion Cicero once offered is right on target—at least for me. He thought the word derived from “again” and “reading”—relegare. When we expand the concept to include pondering on things, as in reflecting upon, we are very close to the idea of contemplation—thus to “reflecting on the higher or the elevated.” Others have preferred deriving the word from religare, meaning to fasten or to bind fast, thus pointing to a bond between the human and divine. But the sense of that word (binding) also holds the notion of an obligation, an obligation laid on us. And, indeed, my own religious acculturation had plenty of that. It was commandment-based. Do this; do not do that. And there are consequences. Thus religion came in the form of behavioral dicta—not at all dissimilar to “Look before you cross the street—or you might be run over,” the main difference being that the “run over” portion of the teaching was projected in time to a vague and misty sort of place. We were even taught to pray under the rubric of obligation—never ever under the rubric of nutrition. Yet prayer is the closest we get to contemplation in these contexts—and the genuine religious life is actually centered on it.
We were children, of course. The acculturation was more social than religious. Religious acculturation ought to be life-long, and should have institutional support to channel the wisdom in more or less formal ways, but this isn’t in the cards. Usually after 10, maximally after 18 years of age, religious education altogether ceases. Not surprisingly the vast majority is far more ignorant of religion than, say, of high school science. Now, to be sure, coming from a family where Montessori education is highly regarded—and entirely ignored by the world—my view of the rest of education, never mind religious, is equally unprintable. Therefore the religious life, when it is actually practiced, especially by a few members of the laity, is the world’s most hidden activity of all.
At least in West—saying which I engage in one of those ploys you’ll find in Games People Play. (To take the air out of some windbag mouthing generalities, wait until he finishes and then say, “Yes, but not in the East.”) Some religious traditions—I’m thinking of Buddhism—place detachment and inward-directed contemplation much more prominently than the avoidance of sin, obedience to doctrine, and ritual practices—or the euphoric acceptance of Christ preferably in a crowd with lots of people shouting hallelujahs. Perhaps in those Eastern reaches more of the acculturation sticks and lasts beyond childhood.
What comes first? Inner awakening—which is fed (literally, actually, tangibly) by contemplative activities—or behavioral conformity? The first is first, I think. If it is not awakened and active in the person, morality of behavior, even after it has become a habit, is much too easily eroded by unhappy circumstances. Inner awakening is like a spring. Once it flows, it is avidly watched—and when the turmoil of life starts to clog up its channel, the motivation to clean it out and help it flow again arises right out of the pain of life.
Concerning nutrition and prayer in the Christian tradition, I suggest this earlier short post.
Showing posts with label Contemplation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contemplation. Show all posts
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Contemplative Life
From the vast continents of ordinary life, the contemplative variety appears quite close to what here I call the borderzone—the edge of a flat earth, as it were, where the great chasm of eternity suddenly appears. Contemplatives? They are religious—and not merely nuns or monks or priests or bishops or abbots and abbesses. Such people, to the extent they live an active life, are not living the contemplative (or so it’s said). And certainly not laymen. And least of all the married.
But concepts like that, concepts like the contemplative life, do sprout near the borderzone—and not just within Catholicism—and if we look at them closely, they turn out to mean something other than they signal to the uninterested public. The concept of jihad comes to mind; by that we understand anything from Holy War to terrorism, but to the pious at the core of Islam, the word means spiritual struggle. All right. If you think me a propagandist for Al Qaida, that’ll be my jihad to live down. Or let us take the Buddhist concept of nirvana, defined as extinction, disappearance, the state of being blown-out, like a candle. The Online Etymology dictionary helpfully Latinizes the word as de-spiration—all life sucked out of you. And that is the “pearl of great price” the Buddhists seek? Nothingness? Well, “contemplative life” and “nirvana” are similar in this sense: to most people they suggest something negative, to others something of the greatest value. But to get the second meaning, one has to unfold the concept.
Perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to call contemplative life soul life or inner life. Now the problem is that a certain special way of seeing reality hides beneath these phrases. That way is a hierarchical conception of our dual nature in which the physical, hormonal, outer, and social are at the lower and a corresponding spiritual, empathic, intuitive, and communal are the higher level. And then the contemplative life is minimally defined as one where more of our being takes place inwardly, in the soul, than takes place outwardly, in the body, in the world. It’s as simple as that; but it is difficult because it takes gradual development even to tease these two realms apart enough to recognize that they each have a separate and real existence.
Let me illustrate this by examining words like mental (often associated with contemplation) and emotional (linked to the physical). By mental people mean conceptual, intellectual. By emotional they mean the heat we feel in the chest from anger or joy: the breath increases; you feel it, it moves you. The contemplation of an infinite regress or the square root of minus-one do not, by contrast, have any emotional toning (except for Brigitte, who invariably expresses her disgust!) Now let’s proceed to sort these concepts out.
First of all the mental is much more than merely concept juggling. It includes within it what we call consciousness, the definition of which I leave to those foolhardy enough to try and inevitably to fail. It includes the mysterious will—which is something other than reflexive action. It includes imagination, a faculty I do not (like Aquinas) associate with the lower realm. It does include intellect—which we do not find in the body-machine. It also includes the experience of being drawn toward some and repelled from other things—visible and invisible. Empathy and apathy: the real sources of emotion. That the body should immediately respond when we feel these things by mirroring the soul’s movements by hormonal discharges (hence the heat and the breathing) merely confirms the close linkage between soul and body, not that emotions are physical. The few that genuinely are are also merely reflexes we have in common with all animals. Thus I am absolutely sure that a disembodied soul will have emotions—and that emotions are not, repeat not, grounded in the sensorium.
The reader who nods reading this will do so from experience—thus because his or her inner life has developed its autonomy enough to have noted these two realms, their hierarchical relationship, and their potential independence. For someone like that, the suggestion that the contemplative life is real, outside of temples and cloisters too, will not be surprising—even if she or he is more accustomed to think of it as the creative life.
But concepts like that, concepts like the contemplative life, do sprout near the borderzone—and not just within Catholicism—and if we look at them closely, they turn out to mean something other than they signal to the uninterested public. The concept of jihad comes to mind; by that we understand anything from Holy War to terrorism, but to the pious at the core of Islam, the word means spiritual struggle. All right. If you think me a propagandist for Al Qaida, that’ll be my jihad to live down. Or let us take the Buddhist concept of nirvana, defined as extinction, disappearance, the state of being blown-out, like a candle. The Online Etymology dictionary helpfully Latinizes the word as de-spiration—all life sucked out of you. And that is the “pearl of great price” the Buddhists seek? Nothingness? Well, “contemplative life” and “nirvana” are similar in this sense: to most people they suggest something negative, to others something of the greatest value. But to get the second meaning, one has to unfold the concept.
Perhaps the simplest way to approach this is to call contemplative life soul life or inner life. Now the problem is that a certain special way of seeing reality hides beneath these phrases. That way is a hierarchical conception of our dual nature in which the physical, hormonal, outer, and social are at the lower and a corresponding spiritual, empathic, intuitive, and communal are the higher level. And then the contemplative life is minimally defined as one where more of our being takes place inwardly, in the soul, than takes place outwardly, in the body, in the world. It’s as simple as that; but it is difficult because it takes gradual development even to tease these two realms apart enough to recognize that they each have a separate and real existence.
Let me illustrate this by examining words like mental (often associated with contemplation) and emotional (linked to the physical). By mental people mean conceptual, intellectual. By emotional they mean the heat we feel in the chest from anger or joy: the breath increases; you feel it, it moves you. The contemplation of an infinite regress or the square root of minus-one do not, by contrast, have any emotional toning (except for Brigitte, who invariably expresses her disgust!) Now let’s proceed to sort these concepts out.
First of all the mental is much more than merely concept juggling. It includes within it what we call consciousness, the definition of which I leave to those foolhardy enough to try and inevitably to fail. It includes the mysterious will—which is something other than reflexive action. It includes imagination, a faculty I do not (like Aquinas) associate with the lower realm. It does include intellect—which we do not find in the body-machine. It also includes the experience of being drawn toward some and repelled from other things—visible and invisible. Empathy and apathy: the real sources of emotion. That the body should immediately respond when we feel these things by mirroring the soul’s movements by hormonal discharges (hence the heat and the breathing) merely confirms the close linkage between soul and body, not that emotions are physical. The few that genuinely are are also merely reflexes we have in common with all animals. Thus I am absolutely sure that a disembodied soul will have emotions—and that emotions are not, repeat not, grounded in the sensorium.
The reader who nods reading this will do so from experience—thus because his or her inner life has developed its autonomy enough to have noted these two realms, their hierarchical relationship, and their potential independence. For someone like that, the suggestion that the contemplative life is real, outside of temples and cloisters too, will not be surprising—even if she or he is more accustomed to think of it as the creative life.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
The Contemplative Life: Another Look
As I plow deeper into my seventies, it’s becoming ever more obvious that physical activities and preoccupations are at best utilitarian…that a triumph here and there is also meaningless, thus activities in time seem to be empty too. But here a paradox arises. I feel this viscerally—and that word refers to the physical, doesn’t it?
The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.
We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.
Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.
Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”
To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.
Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.
The shocking thing for me is that I now think of the contemplative life in a physical way, thus as authentic, real, and hard. A few decades back the idea of contemplation always struck me either as airy-fairy, passive, or a kind of pointless hedonism.
We do, don’t we, think of the real as physical, tangible. But let me try to sort that out. Let me use an abstract designator. Whatever appears real to us, we label X. We learn this association in our youth, when the physical is compelling, therefore the physical is X; but in advancing times, another aspect of our experience emerges much more dominantly; and to express its reality, we reach for a familiar label. The real is the real, but at different times, based on different experiences, we associate it with a different aspect of reality.
Now I’m prepared to define the contemplative life as the activity of the spirit when it is unconstrained. It is everything left over after we have set aside the things we do in order to survive. It has a passive as well as an active component, and creativity is its most obvious active element. Let me put things into bins.
Reading or writing books, creating or enjoying art, thinking and conversing, music, community and dialogue, praise and worship, expressing joy and revulsion, science and discovery, poetry and philosophy—and also, curiously, certain forms of exercise and sport, gardening, and free “making” of things for their own sake—we do none of these things “in order to survive.”
To survival belongs showering, putting on socks, eating, and so forth. Also administration, making order, buying and selling, and social acts done to compel or because we are compelled. Here I’d put all forms of pressure and persuasion, all production, and all other common economic activities.
Needless to say, in this realm the material is intrinsically braided into the immaterial so that even the free action of the spirit always has a physical component. Thus I feel inclined to create a third bin yet. There I would put useful work done in full spiritual presence. The greatest periods of joy for me are linked to work—not least money-making work—when I managed to do that work with sufficient concentration so that, paradoxically, I was detached from its survival aspects and doing it purely pro bono.
Monday, December 28, 2009
In Praise of Contemplation
We die and go to heaven, say, but what shall fill our blessed time? The learned doctrines speak of contemplation of the highest High, but we’ve no grasp of contemplation except as passivity.
Eternity is more forbidding than it is inviting—because it more suggests a sound that keeps on going without any ups or downs. There is no start, no climax, no conclusion and such a something spells out boredom to any person long accustomed to the high-low tribulations of life on this here blessed earth.
The problem here, I would propose, is with the concepts, what they hold, not with that which they could mean. For most of us the act of contemplation is actually an active occupation, our minds alive and well. We stare at grand designs of beauty and complexity, see them now in parts and now in wholes, we look at this and cannot understand it until, with effort, we also study that and then, once more, fit this to that and see the new emerge. In this activity we never think of time—unless some urgent need distracts us from the pleasure, joy in which we’re caught.
Eternity, turns out, is just duration, a mere container of our selves. Nothing suggests that contemplation has no ups or downs. Quite to the contrary. If the beauty we behold is infinite, and if our own involvement is an active part of it, if we engage in contemplation because we’re drawn to it, like to a project, if the Beauty draws, teases, and tempts us to explore it, why then that idle harping on the clouds turns into something not unlike what down here we engage in at those blessed times when, no broken washer, dryer interfering, we give rein to our own desire to spend our time on that which pleases most.
Eternity is more forbidding than it is inviting—because it more suggests a sound that keeps on going without any ups or downs. There is no start, no climax, no conclusion and such a something spells out boredom to any person long accustomed to the high-low tribulations of life on this here blessed earth.
The problem here, I would propose, is with the concepts, what they hold, not with that which they could mean. For most of us the act of contemplation is actually an active occupation, our minds alive and well. We stare at grand designs of beauty and complexity, see them now in parts and now in wholes, we look at this and cannot understand it until, with effort, we also study that and then, once more, fit this to that and see the new emerge. In this activity we never think of time—unless some urgent need distracts us from the pleasure, joy in which we’re caught.
Eternity, turns out, is just duration, a mere container of our selves. Nothing suggests that contemplation has no ups or downs. Quite to the contrary. If the beauty we behold is infinite, and if our own involvement is an active part of it, if we engage in contemplation because we’re drawn to it, like to a project, if the Beauty draws, teases, and tempts us to explore it, why then that idle harping on the clouds turns into something not unlike what down here we engage in at those blessed times when, no broken washer, dryer interfering, we give rein to our own desire to spend our time on that which pleases most.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Our Strange Environment
Someday we may discover—after we have passed the border—just how strange an environment surrounded us in life, especially if we spent our time in a modern, highly mechanized urban civilization, out of intimate contact with nature.
Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.
The other root of this notion arises from retirement—and age. In a way, with leisure, I’ve been thrown back into my youth, a period of greater openness, then, as now, to the world of intuitions and ideas, not in the sense of concepts but of perceptions of a higher character. And these, it seems to me, are often indistinguishable from the perceptions that reach us by way of the natural world—the plants, the grasses, the trees, the birds, the animals. The living things, strange though it may sound, are also the worlds of poetry, music, epics, tales, novels, great dramas, and immortal myths.
That on which we focus our attention—that, in turn, takes root in us. Attention is a kind of identification. If we attend to the myriad issues and problems of modern life, that modern life invades our soul and takes up its residence in us. And our perception of reality then becomes, well, industrialized. We see everything in terms of the outer—because we attend to it, indeed must do so.
One of the powerful tools we have to combat this invasion of our natural waters by alien flora and fauna is recurring, periodic detachment. That doesn’t have to take the form of meditation, diaries, worship, or things of that nature. We can also recover our fundamental reality by walks in parks, gardening, or working with our hands outdoors or in.
With age—in which experience has amassed a great deal of visceral as well as formal knowledge—attentive listening eventually produces the strange feeling that what we take to be reality is an artificial construct. It mostly hides that which are, in our essence, and that which really surrounds us, not just in the immediate quarter-mile or so but including the heavens above reaching infinitely far outward (on the visible plain) and in realms only known from myths (in the invisible).
Keep notes. Someday we may have occasion to compare them.
Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.
The other root of this notion arises from retirement—and age. In a way, with leisure, I’ve been thrown back into my youth, a period of greater openness, then, as now, to the world of intuitions and ideas, not in the sense of concepts but of perceptions of a higher character. And these, it seems to me, are often indistinguishable from the perceptions that reach us by way of the natural world—the plants, the grasses, the trees, the birds, the animals. The living things, strange though it may sound, are also the worlds of poetry, music, epics, tales, novels, great dramas, and immortal myths.
That on which we focus our attention—that, in turn, takes root in us. Attention is a kind of identification. If we attend to the myriad issues and problems of modern life, that modern life invades our soul and takes up its residence in us. And our perception of reality then becomes, well, industrialized. We see everything in terms of the outer—because we attend to it, indeed must do so.
One of the powerful tools we have to combat this invasion of our natural waters by alien flora and fauna is recurring, periodic detachment. That doesn’t have to take the form of meditation, diaries, worship, or things of that nature. We can also recover our fundamental reality by walks in parks, gardening, or working with our hands outdoors or in.
With age—in which experience has amassed a great deal of visceral as well as formal knowledge—attentive listening eventually produces the strange feeling that what we take to be reality is an artificial construct. It mostly hides that which are, in our essence, and that which really surrounds us, not just in the immediate quarter-mile or so but including the heavens above reaching infinitely far outward (on the visible plain) and in realms only known from myths (in the invisible).
Keep notes. Someday we may have occasion to compare them.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The Journal: A Tool of Contemplation
In my experience keeping a journal is one of the most valuable tools for contemplation. But a word about that word: certain words have awkward shadows. By contemplation I simply mean a centered inner state, balance, calm, and clarity. It might be put into the language of martial arts and called readiness; in that category readiness is also means emptiness. Nothing interferes with the steady look at reality as it is. I also like the word “sovereign,” used as an adjective, because in a state of contemplation we feel above the fray but not superior to it in a down-the-nose sort of way, just above it, ready to act, able to refrain, mistress or master of the self.
A contemplative journal is not a record of what I did yesterday. To-do lists are much more efficient for tracking. The point of an inner journal is to help me become aware. Its subject matter, in my case, is often something that troubles, irritates, or exercises me. I look at that and examine why I’m agitated. In due time—usually about a page of handwritten material later—the problem begins to sort. Another half-page later, calm begins to manifest. The irritation has receded. I see it clearly now. My various internal constituencies have calmed down. I am aware of the sources of my anxiety. These are almost always reflexive and therefore unexamined reactions. They combine and produce a collective shouting. I examine the matter with awareness, like an Inspector General, uninvolved. Then I see why I was reacting, see the point or pointlessness of it. If there is a point, I can jot it on a to-do list. In nine cases of ten, the root of irritation is something minor or unimportant—as seen under the species of eternity.
I don’t use the valuable time of journal writing—best done first thing in the morning—for tackling intellectual, analytical problems. Those are best done when I’m already “present.” Intellectualizing has no effect on inner states unless the activity is difficult enough so that it really deepens concentration. The process of journal-keeping serves me to clear away useless or energy-consuming “states”; states, in this context, are moods, preoccupations, emotionally-toned anticipations, anxieties—but also feelings of triumphalism (“Just wait till I tell him that! I can hardly wait to see the confusion on the bastard’s face.”). Upcoming events have a way of throwing a shadow backward from the future—even relatively minor events, e.g., having to go to the dentist for a cleaning or a checkup. These shadows disturb my equilibrium. Big meetings, trips, presentations—indeed any and all occurrences that in some way involve the self, disturb routine, or offer opportunities for momentary failure or success. These shadows are like strings—and I’m the puppet. But I want that feeling of sovereignty. From within that feeling, I am not at all concerned with the outcome. I am above it. I’m in a state of readiness. Que sera, sera. And I feel that without any kind of accompanying resignation or reservations. That is sovereignty, and looking at the day to come in that state, focusing on the up-boil of emotion-laced mental contents, until I see them objectively—that is the real value of journal-keeping of this kind.
These practices, to be sure, demand that we already have an effective cosmology. We must see ourselves as capable of worth. We must see ourselves as intended by something higher than ourselves; we must know, even if temporarily we don’t feel it, that we are empowered to be self-governing souls by our creator. If we seek our own worth in the very turbulence that we are fighting, we will merely (to change the metaphor) stir the pot. Nothing will change. We may just work ourselves into a greater fury or depression. We must become aware of hard rock beneath or steel within our own spine. In the Unity movement (but it is just one example), negation and affirmation are recommended. We must deny every lower manifestation of the mind, every associational stream attempting to suck us back into the problem; we must affirm our transcending origin and destiny. With practice and with time, the stable of Augias will be cleared of manure, even if we have to reroute a river to get the job done. Thereafter, things will improve if we keep returning to the inner silence that we can produce by the right application of attention—in this practice expressed as words on paper.
Public journals—blogs are today’s best example—do not serve this function. They are means of communication in which an audience is always at least potentially present. Journal-keeping is not communication. It is more akin to housecleaning or taking inventory. In many traditions mirrors are used as a symbol. Cleaning the mirror is the object—so that it is capable of reflecting the higher light. Windows work as a good symbol too. Life’s dust and grime obscure them. But the sun shines beyond the pane if we attack the surface with Windex, that favorite of mine.
A contemplative journal is not a record of what I did yesterday. To-do lists are much more efficient for tracking. The point of an inner journal is to help me become aware. Its subject matter, in my case, is often something that troubles, irritates, or exercises me. I look at that and examine why I’m agitated. In due time—usually about a page of handwritten material later—the problem begins to sort. Another half-page later, calm begins to manifest. The irritation has receded. I see it clearly now. My various internal constituencies have calmed down. I am aware of the sources of my anxiety. These are almost always reflexive and therefore unexamined reactions. They combine and produce a collective shouting. I examine the matter with awareness, like an Inspector General, uninvolved. Then I see why I was reacting, see the point or pointlessness of it. If there is a point, I can jot it on a to-do list. In nine cases of ten, the root of irritation is something minor or unimportant—as seen under the species of eternity.
I don’t use the valuable time of journal writing—best done first thing in the morning—for tackling intellectual, analytical problems. Those are best done when I’m already “present.” Intellectualizing has no effect on inner states unless the activity is difficult enough so that it really deepens concentration. The process of journal-keeping serves me to clear away useless or energy-consuming “states”; states, in this context, are moods, preoccupations, emotionally-toned anticipations, anxieties—but also feelings of triumphalism (“Just wait till I tell him that! I can hardly wait to see the confusion on the bastard’s face.”). Upcoming events have a way of throwing a shadow backward from the future—even relatively minor events, e.g., having to go to the dentist for a cleaning or a checkup. These shadows disturb my equilibrium. Big meetings, trips, presentations—indeed any and all occurrences that in some way involve the self, disturb routine, or offer opportunities for momentary failure or success. These shadows are like strings—and I’m the puppet. But I want that feeling of sovereignty. From within that feeling, I am not at all concerned with the outcome. I am above it. I’m in a state of readiness. Que sera, sera. And I feel that without any kind of accompanying resignation or reservations. That is sovereignty, and looking at the day to come in that state, focusing on the up-boil of emotion-laced mental contents, until I see them objectively—that is the real value of journal-keeping of this kind.
These practices, to be sure, demand that we already have an effective cosmology. We must see ourselves as capable of worth. We must see ourselves as intended by something higher than ourselves; we must know, even if temporarily we don’t feel it, that we are empowered to be self-governing souls by our creator. If we seek our own worth in the very turbulence that we are fighting, we will merely (to change the metaphor) stir the pot. Nothing will change. We may just work ourselves into a greater fury or depression. We must become aware of hard rock beneath or steel within our own spine. In the Unity movement (but it is just one example), negation and affirmation are recommended. We must deny every lower manifestation of the mind, every associational stream attempting to suck us back into the problem; we must affirm our transcending origin and destiny. With practice and with time, the stable of Augias will be cleared of manure, even if we have to reroute a river to get the job done. Thereafter, things will improve if we keep returning to the inner silence that we can produce by the right application of attention—in this practice expressed as words on paper.
Public journals—blogs are today’s best example—do not serve this function. They are means of communication in which an audience is always at least potentially present. Journal-keeping is not communication. It is more akin to housecleaning or taking inventory. In many traditions mirrors are used as a symbol. Cleaning the mirror is the object—so that it is capable of reflecting the higher light. Windows work as a good symbol too. Life’s dust and grime obscure them. But the sun shines beyond the pane if we attack the surface with Windex, that favorite of mine.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Contemplative Life
The last three weeks in my own life illustrate the reason why, in every culture, contemplative orders or aggregations have come into being and still persist despite the violent churn of Modernity around the globe. A sudden up-surge of work caused me to turn my head away from blogging—and the blog that I neglected most was Borderzone. We live in a layered environment in which the most demanding is the lowest level, the physical; the social is next; we will neglect it when we are ill or injured; and we neglect the one above that, the mental and the spiritual, when turbulence draws our attention downward.
I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.
The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.
This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.
Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”
I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.
The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.
This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.
Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”
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