Spiritual Exercises – Page 10 – Maverick Philosopher

Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After

Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert? Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over? You missed the party and with it the ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk. Are you now troubled by your spiritual continence?

As for idle talk, here is something good from Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything important in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’ An expression of boredom, it does little to alleviate it.

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk? That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme. It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation? One corresondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation. So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation. A hard saying!

What are the possible views on this topic?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble. But he didn't say that in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem. Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation. Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted. The view of the ordinary cave-dweller.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy. But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time. The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6. More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)? Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. II, The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences . . . .
. . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

Re-collection

Recollection is a flight from the diaspora of animal inclinations and social suggestions. One collects oneself. Life is one long battle against the centrifugal pull of these two. Time too flees and flies not just by passing unaccountably but also by losing itself in the diaspora of its own modes, past, present, and future. What is, is not, because its element, time, is not, but is past, or future, or fleeting.

Lot, Loot, and Light

It is in keeping with our lot that we should seek, not the loot of the lottery, but the light of the Lord.

A Limit to Self-Reliance

Among our fellows we ought to be as self-reliant as possible. But in matters moral and spiritual we ought freely to confess our exigency and ultimate inability to help ourselves. Honesty demands it. But to appreciate properly the need for outside help, one ought first to try to go it alone. When the self-therapeutics of Buddhism and Stoicism and cognate systems fail, then one will have a concrete motive for the confession of impotence.

Meditation: How Long and What to Expect

A student from Northern Ireland writes,

I've recently been contemplating practising meditation. I decided to look up what you had to say on the subject, and I was happy to discover the "how to meditate" post. I was just wondering though, how long should a person meditate, and what should a first timer like myself expect to think or feel during the first few meditations?

How long? Between 15 and 30 minutes at first, working up gradually to an hour or more. What to expect? Not much at first. Mind control is extremely difficult and our minds are mostly out of control serving up an endless parade of pointless memories, useless worries, and negative thoughts of all sorts. In the beginning meditation is mostly hard work. So you can expect to work hard at first for meager results.

At a deeper level, expectation and striving to accomplish something are out of place. Meditation is an interior listening that can occur only when the discursive mind with its thoughts, judgements, intentions, expectations, and the like has been silenced. Meditation is not an inner discourse but an inner listening.

Of course, there is a bit of a paradox here: at first one must intend resolutely to take up this practice, one must work at it every morning with no exceptions, one must strive to quiet the mind — but all in quest of an effortless abiding in mental quiet wherein there is no intending, working, or striving.

Logic greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined thinking. Meditation greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined non-thinking.

Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that some have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Arrival at that hidden source is the ultimate goal of meditation.

Swimming upstream against a powerful current is not easy and for some impossible. So this is a good metaphor of the difficulty of meditation. The more extroverted you are, the more difficult it will be. Why engage in this hard work? Either you sense that your surface self has a depth dimension that calls to you or you don't. If you do, then this is the way to explore it.

Meditation reduced to three steps:

First, drive out all useless thoughts. Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts. Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones. Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper. Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps. You may not even make it to the threshhold. But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.

The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises. Not easy!

Meditation won't bear fruits unless one lives in a way that is compatible with it and its goals. So a certain amount of withdrawal from the world is needed. One needs to 'unplug.'

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.

Useless Rehearsals

Rehearsals are for a future performance. Why then are you 'rehearsing' that altercation with so-and-so from twenty years ago? Do you plan to bring it back to the stage?

De Magistro

Seek the Teacher deep within.

Letting Go of the Past

Since the past is no longer, to let go of the past is to let go of thoughts of the past. But these thoughts, like all thoughts, are in the present. So we are brought back again to the importance of cultivating the ability to let go of thoughts here and now. Mind control in the present automatically takes care of the two nonpresent temporal modes.

Ego, Sin, and Logic

Ego is at the root of sin, but also at the root of obsessive preoccupation with one's sinfulness. If the goal is to weaken the ego, then too much fretting over one's sins in the manner of a Wittgenstein is contraindicated.

There is such a thing as excessive moral scrupulosity.

Though Wittgenstein's ego drove him to scruple inordinately, he was a better man than Russell. Russell worried about logic. Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

The Mind’s Centrifugal Tendency

Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that many have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Could there be a stream without a source? A wind blowing towards objects (Sartre) that blew from no direction and for no cause?

Changing metaphors once again: you say you like riding the wild horse of the mind into dispersal and diremption? Then do so, and see where it gets you. If self-loss in the manifold proves to be unsatisfactory, you may be a candidate for re-collection.

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.

No Fool Like an Old Fool

It is a foolish old man who fails to make use of his waning libido to achieve the spiritual and moral progress that he couldn't make when it was in full flood.

Asceticism

A reader writes,

I am a philosopher and a conservative (in many ways) and I enjoy your blog very much. One thing I find rather puzzling (and interesting), though, is your extreme asceticism. Recently, you said:

"Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere. But it is at least possible that thinking and trancing will."

I guess I wonder just _where_ it is that you are trying to get and what is so great about being there such that it is better than enjoying some drinking and dancing (in moderation, of course).

Well, if I am an extreme ascetic, then what was Simeon Stylites? I am not now, and never have been, a pillar-dweller exposed to the elements.

'Asceticism' is from the Greek askesis meaning 'self-denial.' On a spectrum from extreme self-indulgence on the left to extreme self-denial on the right, I would place myself somewhere in the middle, moving on my better days right-ward and on the others left-ward. So you could say that I am a mild-to-moderate ascetic. I believe in the value of self-denial and self-control in thought, word, and deed. That self-control with respect to words and deeds are essential to human flourishing I take to be well-nigh self-evident. Control of thought, however, is also essential to happiness which is why one ought so spend some time each day in formal meditation. (More on this in Meditation and Spiritual Exercises categories.)

But not only is control of thought conducive to, and indeed a necessary condition of, happiness, it is morally obligatory to control and in some cases eliminate some thoughts. I argue that out in Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? and Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis.

Moderate asceticism is good and is enjoined by all the major religions and wisdom traditions. It is perfectly obvious that many of the problems we face today result from the lack of self-control. Obesity, for example. Debt, both at the personal level and at the level of government, is fundamentally a moral problem with at least one of its roots sunk deep in lack of self-control.

If you are running credit card debt, you are doing something very foolish. Why do you buy what you can't afford with money you don't have? You must know that you are wasting huge amounts of money on interest. Why doesn't this knowledge cause you to be prudent in your expenditures? Because you never learned how to control yourself. Perhaps you were brought up by liberals who think the summum bonum is self-indulgence and 'getting in touch with your feelings.' By the way, this in another powerful argument against liberalism. There is no wisdom on the Left. The last thing you will learn from liberals are the virtues and the vices and the seven deadly sins. For liberals, these are topics to joke about.

No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of
the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation.

Back to drinking and dancing and the reader's question. Everything depends on what one considers to be the purpose of life. To me it is clear that we are not here to have a 'good time.' For me philosophy is not an academic game but a spiritual quest for the ultimate truth. The quest involves rigorous, technical philosophy, but it also involves non-discursive spiritual exercises. These are impossible without a certain amount of moral purification and ascesis. They are also best pursued in the early hours before dawn. So right here is an excellent reason not to waste the evening hours in idle talk, drinking and dancing. These activities are not conducive to spiritual progress. That is why some of us avoid them.

Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations. If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer:

A test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study brain activity while the subject is deep in prayer/meditation. The red in the language center and frontal lobe areas indicates greater brain activity when the subject is praying or meditating as compared to the baseline when he is not. But when atheists "contemplate God" — which presumably means when they think about the concept of God, a concept that they, as atheists, consider to be uninstantiated — "Dr. Newberg did not observe any of the brain activity in the frontal lobe that he observed in religious people."

The upshot?

Dr. Newberg concludes that all religions create neurological experiences, and while God is unimaginable for atheists, for religious people, God is as real as the physical world. "So it helps us to understand that at least when they [religious people] are describing it to us, they are really having this kind of experience… This experience is at least neurologically real."

First of all, why do we need a complicated and expensive study to learn this? It is well-known that serious and sincere practioners of religions will typically have various experiences as a result of prayer and meditation. (Of course most prayer and meditation time is 'dry' — but experiences eventually come.) The reality of these experiences as experiences cannot be doubted from the first-person point of view of the person who has them. There is no need to find a neural correlate in the brain to establish the reality of the experience qua experience. The experiences are real whether or not neural correlates can be isolated, and indeed whether or not there are any.

Suppose no difference in brain activity is found as between the religionists and the atheists when the former do their thing and the latter merely think about the God concept. (To call the latter "contemplating God" is an absurd misuse of terminology.) What would that show? Would it show that there is no difference between the religionists' experiences and the atheists'? Of course not. The difference is phenomenologically manifest, and, as I said, there is no need to establish the "neurological reality" of the experiences to show that they really occur.

Now I list some possible confusions into which one might fall when discussing a topic like this.

Confusion #1: Conflating the phenomenological reality of a religious experience as experienced with its so-called "neurological reality." They are obviously different as I've already explained.

Confusion #2: Conflating the religious experience with its neural correlate, the process in the brain or CNS on which the experience causally depends. Epistemically, they cannot be the same since they are known in different ways. The experience qua experience is known with certainty from the first-person point of view. The neural correlate is not. One cannot experience, from the first-person point of view, one's own brain states as brain states. Ontically, they cannot be the same either, and this for two sorts of reasons. First, the qualitative features of the experiences cannot be denied, but they also cannot be identified with anything physical. This is the qualia problem. Second, religious/mystical experiences typically exhibit that of-ness or aboutness, that directedness-to-an-object, that philosophers call intentionality. No physical states have this property.

Confusion #3: Conflating a religious entity with its concept, e.g., confusing God with the concept of God. This is why it is slovenly and confused to speak of "contemplating God" when one is merely thinking about the concept of God. The journalist and/or the neuroscientist seem to be succumbing to this confusion.

Confusion #4: Conflating an experience (an episode or act of experiencing) with its intentional object. Suppose one feels the presence of God. Then the object is God. But God is not identical to the experience. For one thing, numerically different experiences can be of the same object. The object is distinct from the act, and the act from the object. The holds even if the intentional object does not exist. Suppose St Theresa has an experience of the third person of the Trinity, but there is no such person. That doesn't affect the act-object structure of the experience. After all, the act does not lose its intentional directedness because the object does not exist.

Confusion #5: Conflating the question whether an experience 'takes an object' with the question whether the object exists.

Confusion #6: Conflating reality with reality-for. There is no harm is saying that God is real for theists, but not real for atheists if all one means is that theists believe that God is real while atheists do not. Now if one believes that p, it does not follow that p is true. Likewise, if God is real for a person it doesn't follow that God is real, period. One falls into confusion if one thinks that the reality of God for a person shows that God is real, period.

We find this confusion at the end of the video clip. "And if God only exists in our brains, that does not mean that God is not real. Our brains are where reality crystallizes for us."

This is confused nonsense. First of all God cannot exist in our brains. Could the creator of the universe be inside my skull? Second, it would also be nonsense to say that the experience of God is in our brains for the reasons give in #2 above. Third, if "God exists only in our brains" means that the experience of God is phenomenologically real for those who have it, but that the intentional object of this experience does not exist, then it DOES mean that God is not real.

Confusion #7: Conflating the real with the imaginable. We are told that "God is unimaginable for atheists." But that is true of theists as well: God, as a purely spiritual being, can be conceived but not imagined. To say that God is not real is not to say that God is unimaginable, and to say that something (a flying horse, e.g.) is imaginable is not to say that it is real.

What I am objecting to is not neuroscience, which is a wonderful subject worth pursuing to the hilt. What I am objecting is scientism, in the present case neuroscientism, the silly notion that learning more and more about a hunk of meat is going to give us real insight into the mind and is operations and is going to solve the philosophical problems in the vicinity.

What did we learn from the article cited? Nothing. We don't need complicated empirical studies to know that religious experiences are real. What the article does is sow seeds of confusion. One of the confusions the article sows is that the question of the veridicality of religious experiences can be settled by showing their "neurological reality." Neither the phenomenological nor the neurological reality of the experience qua experience entails the reality of the object of the experience.

Genuine science cannot rest on conceptual foundations that are thoroughly confused.