Category: Spiritual Exercises

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.

Related articles
Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration

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.

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:


Brain PrayerA 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.

Realms of Experience Beyond the Natural

This from a reader:

I was reading your post on Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It and was struck by a statement you made at the end regarding "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences."  By this you seem to confirm a developing series of thoughts I have had for a few years.  As a benefit of my modernist education my categories of thought roughly corresponded to natural and supernatural.  It seems to me that this type of thinking is wrong and there have been a lot of things crammed into the "supernatural" category by moderns just because they are not "natural."  It would be interesting to see how you break these things out and why they are different.  Specifically as someone who has the religious inclination.

The reader is right: a lot of rather different things have been lumped together under the rubric 'supernatural' just because they are beyond the natural.  But distinctions need to be made.  Now this is a huge topic, and I am not up to doing it justice. 

Corresponding to the phrase the reader quoted, "mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences,"  I will say a little about mysticism, religion, and occultism.  Some of this is excerpted from a much longer post that discusses the relations among philosophy, mysticism, religion, and wisdom.

Mysticism 

Turning now to mysticism, we may define it as the activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need for direct contact with the Absolute, disgusted with verbiage and abstraction as well as with mere belief and empty rites and rituals, seeks to know the Absolute immediately, which is to say, neither philosophically through the mediation of concepts, judgments and arguments, nor religiously through the mediation of faith, trust, devotion, and adherence to tradition. The mystic does not want to know about the Absolute, that it exists, what its properties are, how it is related to the relative plane, etc.; nor does he want merely to believe or trust in it. He does not want knowledge by description, but knowledge by acquaintance. Nor is he willing, like the religionist, to postpone
his enjoyment of it. He wants it, he wants it whole, and he wants it now. He wants to verify its existence for himself here and now in the most direct way possible: by intuiting it. ‘Intuition’ is a terminus technicus: it refers to direct cognitive access to an object or state of affairs.  The intuition in question is of course not sensible but intellectual. Thus the mystical ‘faculty’ is that of intellectual intuition.

Religion

Religion (from L. religere, to bind) is not fundamentally a collection of rites, rituals, and dogmas, but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to live in the truth, as opposed to know it objectively in propositional guise, seeks to establish a personal bond with the Absolute. Whereas philosophy operates with concepts, judgments, arguments and theories, religion proceeds by way of faith, trust, devotion, and love. It is bhaktic rather than jnanic, devotional rather than discriminative.  The philosophical project, predicated on the autonomy of reason, is one of relentless and thus endless inquiry in which nothing is immune from examination before reason’s bench. But the engine of inquiry is doubt, which sets philosophy at odds with religion with its appeal to revealed truth.  If the occupational hazard of the philospher is a life-inhibiting scepticism, the corresponding hazard for the religionist is a dogmatic certainty that can easily turn murderous. For a relatively recent example, consider the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. (This is why such zealots of the New Atheism as Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Grayling, et al. are not completely mistaken.)

The philosopher objects to the religionist: "You believe things for which you have no proof!" The religionist replies to the philosopher: "You sew without a knot in your thread!" I am not engaging in Zen mondo, but alluding to Kierkegaard’s point that to philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot in one’s thread. The philosopher will of course reply that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Here we glimpse one form of the conflict beween philosophy and religion as routes to the Absolute. If the philosopher fails to attain the Absolute because discursive reason dissolves in scepticism, the religionist often attains what can only be called a pseudo-Absolute, an
idol.

The Difference Between Mysticism and Religion

Roughly, mysticism is monistic while religion is dualistic, presupposing the ineliminability of  what Martin Buber calls the 'I-Thou relation.' Here is a passage from his I and Thou:


Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself — the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man – between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including
Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude
that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation
internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives — and the man
who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality
that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether
accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a
worldly religion, a religion for this life — which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now,
and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

Occultism

Stay away from this stuff!  Everything reputable that I have read warns against it. The occult region is a sort of borderland between the natural and the properly supernatural which is the sphere of religion and mysticism.  One who meditates deeply and long enough will probably encounter 'items' from this region such as photisms and unearthly voices.  Certain paranormal powers may be released, the siddhis of the Hindus, such as pre-cognition. Don't get hung up on this and maintain a skeptical attitude. What's real will be able to withstand skepsis & scrutiny.  If you are trying to plumb the depths of the self, these are just more objects of consciousness, not consciousness itself in its innermost essence.  Hearing a sound, or seeing a light, inquire: who hears this sound, who sees this light?  Who is the subject for whom these strange appearances are objects?  That being said, photisms and such are signs that you are attaining meditative depth.  There may also be, for all you know, Horatio, angels and demons and disembodied souls hanging around  in this border region, and some of these 'entities' you don't want to mess with.  Some of them are stronger than you are.  So you might begin your session on the black mat by asking for the assistance of any guardians you think there might be. 

In any case, meditation is not a hunt for weird experiences or for paranormal powers.  The pursuit of the latter is a corruption of meditation just as crass petitionary prayer is a corruption of genuine prayer.  Grades of Prayer fills this out a bit. 

Hitchens: No Understanding of Religion

Reading Christopher Hitchens' Mortality I was struck once again by how people like him have no understanding of religion at all.   Lacking as they do any religious sense, they can only (mis)understand it from the outside as if it were just a set of strange doctrines. They don't seem to understand that the doctrines are "necessary makeshifts," to borrow a fine phrase from F. H. Bradley,  whereby we undertake to understand the Transcendent.  Failing to appreciate the provisional character of doctrines and dogmatic formulations, people like Hitchens seize upon them as if they were the reality represented and then look for contradictions and absurdities. And of course they find them.  For example, Hitchens sees an absurdity in prayer:

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.  Half-buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-cancelling. (Mortality, pp. 21-22)

The context makes this this little 'chemo-brain' outburst even less clear, if that is possible.  Prayer, we are told, is the attempt to instruct God on how to set right what he has has got "all wrong."  Now that has nothing to do with what anyone who actually prays means by 'prayer.' Take Plotinus (205-270):

The only way truly to pray is to approach alone the One who is Alone [All-One]. To contemplate that One, we must withdraw into the inner soul, as into a temple, and be still. (Enneads)

Did chatterbox Hitchens ever withdraw into his inner soul and be still?  No?  Then what right does he have to speak of these matters?  This from the Talmud:

He who rises from prayer a  better man, his prayer is answered.

The point here, I take it, is that we don't pray to change God so much as to change and improve ourselves. If we succeed in this, if we succeed in stilling our thoughts, mastering our desires, strengthening our resolutions, and re-directing our aspirations from the base to the noble, then we have succeeded in improving ourselves and our prayer has been answered.  Here, in a similar vein, is Ralph Waldo Emerson from his great essay "Self-Reliance":

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

Hitchens has no understanding of religion or of prayer.  The two are closely linked as William James observed:

Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. (Varieties of Religious Experience, 464)

In his profound incomprehension, Hitchens takes prayer in its crassest petitionary sense, oblivious of the iceberg submerged beneath that paltry tip.

Lacking as he does the religious sensibility, Hitchens is devoid of all sympathy for it, and can't see anything good in it.  His understanding of it is the misundertanding of the outsider.  To understand religion from the outside is  like trying to understand music from the outside as a peculiar sort of acoustic disturbance.  But religion, like music, chess, love, poetry, mathematics, running, science . . . can only be understood from the inside by those who engage in these activities and have the inner predisposition and talent to engage in them.

Escapism



Escapism_by_raun

Escapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from the only reality there is into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it.

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament (one dripping with dukkha as it were) to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, he reconnoitres the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save his cats.  A little cute, a little crude, but it makes the point.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

Image credit. 

Gratitude

Every day find something to be grateful for. 

It might be the regularity of nature.  Without it, how would you make coffee?  And then there is coffee itself and its wonderful taste.  What a marvellous, yet harmless, drug!  And then there are the  thoughts that percolate up under its agency.  There are so many of them swarming and demanding attention.   Some are even worth writing down. Your notebooks lay ready: they weren't destroyed during the night.  And the pens too.  Your fingers are supple and free of arthritis.  And there is your library of  books, thousands of them, to supply you with thought- and blog-fodder . . . .

But if you want to be miserable you should be able to find something to kvetch about.

True Detachment

True detachment requires a certain indifference to, and thus a certain detachment from, one's success or failure at achieving detachment.  There is a  paradox here inasmuch as one cannot be detached entirely from the project of attaining detachment.  Otherwise there would be no difference between the seeker of wisdom and the worldling who is quite satisfied with his current moral condition and does not seek to better himself.   The trick is to pursue detachment detachedly.  I try to succeed, but if I fail it's no big deal and if I succeed it's also no big deal and certainly nothing to crow about or feed my ego on. One has to be aware of one's various moral failings and work to overcome them, all the while not worrying too much about the outcome.  One has to avoid the mistake of thinking that one can rely entirely upon oneself while also avoiding the equal but opposite mistake of just letting oneself go.

Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration

Sardonicus here explains why he left Facebook.  Briefly, 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

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread: What Sort of Petition?

One question that arises in connection with an attempt to distinguish superstition from genuine religion is the question whether petitionary prayer is superstitious.  The answer will depend not only on what we take superstition to be but also on the type of petitionary prayer.

In an earlier installment I suggested that there are three grades of prayer:

Grade I: The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is the one who prays for the death of a business rival.  Such prayer involves both  idolatry, the worshipping of a false god, and superstition.  A god reduced to the status of a cosmic sugardaddy is an idol.  It is the sort of god that atheists say does not exist.  I am pleased to agree with them.

Grade II: The next grade up is petitionary prayer for spiritual benefits. At this level one is not asking for one's daily physical bread, but for acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like  in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive  others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.

Grade III: Higher still, I should think, is prayer that is wholly non-petitionary. At this level one asks neither for material nor for  spiritual benefits. One form of this wholly non-petitionary  prayer is sheer gratitude for  what one has. Prayer as thanskgiving. Beyond this there is prayer as  pure aspiration, as a straining of the soul upwards. A pure spiritual  seeking, ascending, soaring. One seeks to elevate oneself above one's  perceived infirmity and wretchedness. One seeks to rise above the paltriness, crudity, baseness of one's usual thoughts and emotions.   Not a petitioning, but a self-elevating and a leaving of oneself   behind. Prayer as aspiration may then lead on to forms of meditation proper and perhaps infused contemplation. At the stage of meditation the soul enters mental silence and rests there having abandoned all  petitioning and aspiring. A"Waiting for God" to borrow a Simone Weil title.One is no longer working but resting in mental silence, listening. Within this silence one perhaps receives mystical grace which comes from without the mind.

Grade I, I would argue, has nothing to do with religion properly understood. But if I were to make this argument, I would run smack into the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse Grade I, petitionary prayer for material  benefits. The other five petitions are either clearly or arguably Grade II. The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural. To ask for   this bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive. For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

The Greek word translated as quotidianum in the Luke passage and as supersubstantialem in the Matthew passage is epiousios. I am not competent to discuss the philology of this Greek word, which may be a hapax legomenon. (Nor am I competent to assess the correctness of the two Wikipedia entries to which I have just linked; so Caveat lector!) But if any philologist or Biblical exegete were to tell me that epiousios cannot be understood in terms of 'supersubstantial,' (with the latter implying 'supernatural'), then I would say that that person is either wrong, or the text is corrupt, or the original sources do not record what Jesus actually said.

Philosophically, the fourth petition, if it is to fit with the others, and is not to represent a crass and infantile and quite absurd demand, must be interpreted spiritually, not physically. Otherwise, you play into the hands of the 'Dawkins Gang.' If it is physical bread you want, go to the store and buy some, or learn the art of the baker.

Moksha: Soteriological Riddles

Over lunch Friday the topic of moksha (release or liberation from samsara; enlightenment) came up in the context of Advaita Vedanta.  Moksha is attained when the identity of Atman and Brahman is realized.  My interlocutor wanted to know how such realization is possible.  If I realize my identity with the Absolute, then I cease to exist as something separate from the Absolute.  In that case, however, there is nothing left to realize anything.  How could the state of enlightenment be anything for me if there is no 'me' left after enlightenment?  How is moksha different from deep dreamless sleep or from utter nonexistence?  A form of salvation that amounts to personal annihilation seems not to be a salvation worth wanting. 

Any soteriology worth its salt must answer three questions:  Salvation of what? To what?  From what?  Brahman does not need salvation.  It is this indigent samsaric entity that I take myself to be that needs salvation.  But if what is saved is destroyed in being saved, by being merged into Brahman, then it is at best paradoxical to call this salvation.

Ramanuja is supposed to have said to Shankara, "I don't want to be sugar; I want to taste sugar."

If I were taking Shankara's side of the argument, I might say something like the following to Ramanuja and my friend:

If I am right and you really are sugar/Brahman in your innermost essence, and you merely taste it, then you are removed from it and haven't yet attained the goal.  It is just one more object over against you as subject. Your inquiry into the self, into who or what you really are, has not yet come to an end. The goal is to realize or become aware of your true self.  To do that you must ruthlessly disengage from everything  that is not-self.  If Brahman is your true self, and you realize your identity with it, then you haven't lost your self, but found your self.  You cannot be said to dissolve into the ocean of Brahman if Brahman is the true you.  To think that you you lose your self when you merge with Brahman presupposes a false identification of the self with something finite.  The self you lose is merely an object that you have wrongly identified as your true self; the self you gain is your true self.

This response is not quite satisfactory.  Consider the following aporetic triad:

1. Brahman does not need salvation.
2. I am Brahman.
3. My need for salvation is a real (not merely a samsaric, illusory) need.

The first two limbs are parts of the doctrine (Advaita Vedanta) that is the context of our soteriological discussion.  So they are nonnegotiable unless we shift out of this context.  But (3) also seems true.  The three propositions cannot, however, all be true: the conjunction of the first two limbs entails the negation of the third.

So it looks as if the advaitin has to bite the bullet and reject (3).  He has to say something like:  the very need for release from this hell of an existence itself belongs to maya, the realm of illusion.  So both the need for moksha and the one who seeks it  are illusory.   But this seems to conflict with the starting point of this whole soteriological scheme, namely, that the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of this life are  real. 

Here is another puzzle.

Using the method of Neti, Neti (not this, not this),  we end up with the result that the subject who is seeking is no object, no thing, nothing. Pursuing the question: Who or what am I? I come to the insight that I cannot be identical to any object, whether my car, my house, my clothes, my curriculum vitae, my body, any part of my body, my memories, thoughts, feelings, etc.  Any and all objects — inner, outer, concrete, abstract —  are to be disengaged from the subject for whom they are objects. The upshot seems to be that any self or subject so disengaged from every object is nothing at all.

On the other hand, I cannot be nothing at all since I am pursuing this investigation. Coming to realize that I am not this, that, or the other thing, I must be something, not nothing. So we bang into a logical contradiction: I am nothing and I am not nothing.

As long as we remain on the discursive/dualistic plane we will get tangled up like this. So one could take these insolubilia as pointing us beyond the discursive intellect.  This is what I suggested to my friend.  I want him to take up meditation so as to explore the non-dual source of duality.  But meditation is insanely hard, and the fruits are few and far between.  It can seem like an utter waste of time.  Pointless navel-gazing!  (But see my plea for omphaloscopy .)

Besides, one can take the insolubilia — if insolubilia they are — as referring us, not into the transdiscursive, but back into Plato's Cave, in particular, into that especially dark corner wherein the Wittgensteinian therapists ply their trade. 

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.