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.”

Communications III: People with Paranormal Talents

When we hear about people with paranormal gifts, can we say that they “communicate with the beyond”? I’ve had a few (fewer than five) unambiguous experiences of telepathy. In these experiences communications reached me, but invariably from living people, thus persons alive and well in the ordinary physical order. I’ve had one unambiguous dream of the future, reported here. Its content dealt with a future event in my ordinary life. Nevertheless—but stretching the concepts quite a bit—I include the experiences of people with paranormal talents as pointing at the beyond, not necessarily in the sense of communicating with it but in the sense of entering it temporarily in some way in order to recover information useful in this dimension.

What do I mean by such people? I include psychics and saints of a certain type, specifically those (of the latter) who’re able to heal, see the future, and read minds. In this category I also put people in whose vicinity strange things happen beyond healings: they can find lost things; they appear somehow to arrange things so that problems are solved; etc. The powers of these people range from relatively low to rather spectacular; some few are able to control them better; these individuals can also hide them at will. Saints with gifts are most certainly functionally psychics; they are called saints because they stem from intensely religious cultures or subcultures; they also tend to assign their gifts to supernatural agencies. As do some psychics, of course. I’m sure that we are dealing here with a clustering of experiences that arise everywhere. The interpretation of these experiences—by those who have them and by society—are culturally determined. Cultures in which concepts like “psychic” or “saint” have no currency have their own labels. But descriptions of these people match those found in the West.

Are these people real—or are they faking? I’ve no doubt that they are real. The only reason some few charlatans pretend to have powers is because such powers exist in others and collective knowledge and memory testifies to their deeds. You’ve got to have the real before the imitators make their appearance. Of course they are present—and a good thing too. What would the skeptics do without them?

Problems surround this field. Psychic powers are rarely if ever under the full control of people who have them. The weaker the power the more stochastic it is. In the exercise of these powers, the counterparties involved also need some kind of talent. Even the great healers cannot heal everyone. “Faith” must be present. But faith in this sense is itself a paranormal power, not just a strong thought that willfully asserts: “I believe. I do!” These matters unfold beneath the level of rational mentation. For these reasons psychic detectives, to use an example, do not invariably solve every crime. If they did, such detectives would be in very great demand and pull down very high salaries. But that some psychic detectives, in some instances, do solve hopelessly deadlocked cases is also true.

The presence of such people in the population and the exercise of these powers, when they do work, do seem to me to substantiate the hypothesis that it is possible temporarily to step out of the physical order, temporarily to gain visions from another perspective, and (and especially in the case of healings) bring energies to bear that can produce “miraculous” effects. If you assume, as I do, that two orders are involved, one placed above the other but each one governed by real laws of the universe, then the term “miraculous” loses its sense of “arbitrary intervention by agencies” out of this world. My own interest in these matters is strictly limited to understanding. I don’t seek such powers and all that is imagined to go with them. Most of the people who have such powers in much greater measure than the ordinary human could probably tell you all the hardships that go with a talent that “bloweth where it listeth” as John’s Gospel speaks of the spirit, as of the wind, in 3:8. What I conclude from the presence of these people with paranormal talents is that we are living on the edges of another order; we are generally shielded from it (understood either positively or negatively), but certain arrangements in our make-up permit us sometimes to act from or with the aid of phenomena accessible there.

Now a comment or two about the specific concept of “communications.” In the case of psychics generally, one does not encounter the claim of communications with spirits. Whatever range of the beyond the psychics reach, it is not evidently populated by spirits. The saints, to be sure, experience visions and communications with transcendental figures, but the content of these messages is almost always of a moral or theological portent. There is one famed exception. It is the case of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth century scientist-seer who claimed to have visited heaven and hell, to have held converse with the angels, indeed to have communicated with the departed. Swedenborg, however, is a very special case and requires separate consideration.

Strange Evidence: The Stigmatics

Sometimes I find it difficult even to approach certain kinds of evidence. I’m thinking here of phenomena that humanity tends to walk around. The entire subject of the miraculous belongs into this category. When treated at a high level of abstraction, it is easier to handle: modernists can readily dismiss it, traditionalists can accept it without fear of being strangely eyed by modern colleagues. The more detail we add, the more difficult the evidence becomes. A particularly unusual and delicate subject is that of people who have the stigmata, thus wounds on hands, feet, and in the chest in imitation of the crucifixion of Jesus. Stigmatics arise in small but persistent numbers, and have done so since the thirteenth century, as assumed by the Catholic Encyclopedia based on a study, but I’ve been aware of only two such cases in my own time. One was the Capuchin priest Padre Pio (1887-1968); another was a Bavarian peasant woman, Therese Neumann (1898-1962). Padre Pio has been made a saint; Therese Neumann is being considered for that status by Vatican at present.

The turbulence of World War II moved our family from Hungary to Germany, landing us in the town of Tirschenreuth in Bavaria right as the war was ending. I was nine. Therese Neumann was then 47 and lived about 11 miles or so away in Konnersreuth just north of us. We heard about her fairly soon, as we settled down. By the time she died we were in America. I never saw her myself; this is not a personal account; I note this proximity by way of emphasizing that such phenomena are here with us, right here and now, not something in the dark past of another age. In the case of both of these people—and I do hope that Neumann will be made a saint—we have ample modern evidence (photographs, etc.) for their extraordinary lives and miraculous deeds. It is always thus with stigmatics: the physical manifestations are, you might almost say, minor compared to other very strange things they knew and did. Healings and knowledge of selective events in the future were reported about both.

My focus on this subject in the present context—the context being the possible interaction between soul and matter, the subject of the last several postings—is to suggest that there is striking evidence for it in these cases provided that the cause of the stigmata is assigned to the individuals who have them rather than to miraculous interventions by a higher order.

Now, to be sure, in one sense—and precisely the sense that I present in the last two postings—namely that life itself is the product of another spiritual order “invading” or “trespassing upon” the physical, then, indeed, stigmata are caused by a higher order. The saints who have them, under that assumption, are from another order. In that case stigmata are simply unique expressions of a power manifesting with more force in this dimension than it usually does. These individuals are able to concentrate another kind of energy, that which originates in the realm of soul, more effectively than the rest of us. Their intense devotion to a particular belief, their identification with Jesus and Jesus’ suffering on the cross, combined with their greater spiritual energies, produce mirroring effects. The stigmata are one expression of this concentrated spiritual power; their ability to heal others, to have visions of future events, to appear in two places simultaneous (reported of Padre Pio) are other expressions of the same intensified ability. This seems to be a reasonable explanation for these strange phenomena, but that is not what “miraculous intervention” normally means. By “miraculous” people usually mean that other agencies, not the saints themselves, are reaching across the border and temporarily lifting the laws of nature.

* * *

It is clearly not possible to reconcile these two different interpretation unless we attempt to see the phenomenon from a more sophisticated perspective perhaps. Let me, for starters, examine the subject of agency. The saints themselves neither think nor feel that they are causing their own experiences. Many of these experiences, not least the stigmata, are painful. The agents experience them passively. But in this regard they resemble genuine artists. Artists don’t claim that they produce their own inspiration. They don’t claim that their poetry, melodies, or visions are made. They are found, discovered. They arrive. They strike—like lightning. They also experience the inspiration of the Muse in a passive way. Ask the real artist: he or she will tell you. It’s a gift. I just write it down. Later I marvel… The artist frets because giving the inspiration its mundane expression is where the trouble begins; that’s where failure is possible. But to receive and then to transform such energy, which comes from another order, the instrument itself, it seems to me, must originate there as well. Thus the two cases are joined.

Thus we have here a two-fold situation: there is an agency capable of receiving—and an inflow that the agent then directs. Let’s call this inflow by the mundane name of “energy.” Energy is perhaps a very suitable concept because its expression may take all kinds of forms—and the forms it takes are modulated by the receiving instrument, in this case the personality. If the energy results in stigmata, it may well be because the receiving mind is fixed in certain rigid ways on a certain delimited pattern, a certain mind-set. The same energy, reaching another person of a more flexible and developed mentality, may produce quite another outcome.

Here Brigitte reminded me of my favorite saint, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). To put it in a single word, she was a genius. I enjoyed some proximity to her as well; in my Army days I used to drive through her town many times, being stationed to the south of her in Bad Kreuznach. This “great seeress and prophetess, called the Sibyl of the Rhine,” (as the Catholic Encyclopedia properly calls her, here) was also an abbess, a poet, a scientist, composer, author, visionary, and public figure of her time. In Hildegard of Bingen, a highly developed instrument, the energy that flowed expressed itself in a higher sphere than the merely physical. But the interaction between two orders is more concretely or obviously exemplified by the sufferings of the stigmatics.
-----------
A good introduction to Therese Neumann is provided by the eponymous book written by Albert Vogl, Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1987, and available here.