Category: Spiritual Exercises

Grades of Prayer

1. 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 intercessionary 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, and this amounts to idolatry, the worshipping of a false god.

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Control Your Mind!

A thought arises. Interrogate it: Whither? To what purpose? The climber tests each foothold before putting his weight on it. So should we test each thought before living in it and losing ourselves in it. Why? Because the seed of word and deed is in the thought. To control thought is to control the seed of word and deed. Meditation, if nothing else, is a training in thought control. Daily meditation releases the mind's wonderful power of self-regulation.

Dis-tracted

We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph — in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course' and 'it comes with the terrain.' There's no turning back now. We must advance.

Great Minds and Small Matters

A great mind is not upset by a small matter. But it is only with difficulty that we avoid the vexation of the petty. The inference that our minds are paltry seems inescapable. Those who have had a glimpse of the mind's depth-dimension know that there is something wrong with remaining on the plane of the paltry. What is to be done?

Daily meditation helps. An hour of meditating on 'A great mind is not upset by a small matter,' as upon a mantram, has its effect if the meditation is repeated daily. The trick, of course, is to take the thought with you when you quit the meditation chamber. It is easy to be a monk in a monastery; the challenge lies in comporting oneself like one outside it. Just as one does not venture onto the Internet without one's cybershields up to date and at the ready, one ought not go abroad into society without the equivalent mental prophylaxis. Unless, of course, you like mental disturbance.

But you won't learn about any of this in graduate school, not even in the Sage School of Philosophy. An academic inquiry into the logic, ethics, and physics of the Stoics is not the same as a practicing of their precepts. One needs both of course: theoretical inquiry and the exercitium spirituale.

Where does one find the time for meditation in our hyperkinetic age? Better question: How can one fail to perceive the need for meditation, re-collection, contemplatio, Versenkung, Besinnung, in an age as scattered and frenetic as ours has become?

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.

Faith and Prayer: The Case of Ron Franz

One of the minor characters of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild  is the old man to whom Krakauer gave the name 'Ron Franz.' He was 80 years old when his and Christopher McCandless's paths crossed. McCandless made indelible impressions on the people he met, but he affected Franz more than anyone else, so much so that the old man with no surviving next of kin wanted to adopt the 24 year old as his grandson. The story of their encounter is recounted in the chapter entitled 'Anza-Borrego' and is also well told in the movie version of Krakauer's book. Franz came to pin his hopes on the remarkable young man and longed for his return from Alaska. When he heard from a hitchhiker that McCandless had died, he and his faith were shattered:

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Milton Munitz on Boundless Existence, Cosmic Spirituality, and the Meaning of Life

MKM_ForWebsite The last book Milton K Munitz published before his death in 1995 is entitled Does Life Have a Meaning? (Prometheus, 1993).  It is a fitting capstone to his distinguished career and exemplifies the traits for which I admire him: he is clear and precise like a good analytic philosopher, but he evinces the spiritual depth conspicuous by its absence in most analysts.  Philosophy for him was not a mere academic game: he grappled with ultimates.  Herewith, some notes toward a summary and critique of Munitz's position on the meaning-of-life question.  I will also draw upon his penultimate book, The Question of Reality (Princeton 1990), as well as Existence and Logic (NYU Press, 1974)  and The Mystery of Existence (NYU Press, 1974).  These titles will be abbreviated by 'LM,' ' QR,'  'EL,' and 'ME,'  respectively.  Words and phrases enclosed in double quotation marks are quotations from Munitz; otherwise I use single 'quotation' marks.

 

 


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On Repetition

Anyone can see the need for repetition in physical training. One push-up is as good as none. But one hundred per day, every day, will do your upper body a world of good. People are less likely to appreciate the necessity of repetition in mental and spiritual training. Thus liberals often foolishly rail against 'rote memorization.'

So complaints about the repetitiveness of my more protreptic aphorisms and observations are out of place. The latter are spiritual exercises for the writer's and the reader's sake. Multiple 'reps' are as necessary for mental and spiritual development as they are for physical development.