One positive upshot of these times that try our souls is that more and more of us will come to appreciate the hopelessness of this world and the people in it. Self-satisfied worldlings will find it difficult to retain their worldliness and self-satisfaction as civil order collapses and the tide of irrationality rises. Their naive faith in humanity will experience a serious rebuke. They will come to realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from our dire predicament by human, all-too-human, means. Some will despair unto anti-natalism or even suicide. But others will enter upon the Quest for a saving Reality beyond this passing scene of ignorance and evil. They will tread the paths of prayer and meditation. Feeling for the first time the pangs of spiritual hunger, they will turn in the right spirit to the great scriptures and the writings and practices of the sages. Their smug complacency will be a thing of the past.
Category: Spiritual Exercises
The Lazy, the Ambitious, and the Wise
The lazy do not work. The ambitious work hard — but for their own enhancement and advancement. The sage works, but without ambition, with detachment from the fruits of action.
A Part-Time Monk’s Solution to Suggestibility
We are too open to social suggestions. We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment. They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say. 'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people. This is the way of the world. We are too suggestible.
Thus nowadays people cannot see that lust and gluttony are deadly vices. The weight of suggestion is too onerous. The counter-suggestions from a religious upbringing are no match for the relentless stuff emanating from the mass media of a sex-saturated, hedonistic society. For spiritual health a partial withdrawal from society is advisable. It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it.
A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck. Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort. Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles. No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual reading and writing, in silence, and alone.
So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.
But society and technology are in conspiracy against you. Have you noticed that the newer modems are not equipped with on/off switches? A bad omen for the life of the soul and the care thereof. I cannot abide a wi-fi signal during my sleeping and monkish hours. So I bought an extra power strip and put it in series with the modem and the main power strip. Wife is instructed to turn it off before she goes to bed. And of course all computers and cell phones are off during the night and during the hours of monkishness.
Let it Go!
You allow mental clutter to collect in memory, and then you repeatedly sift through it, keeping it alive and present. What good is the memorial rehearsal of failures, foibles, and fatuities, of missed opportunities, and unpleasant encounters?
Let it go, not quite forgetting the details, but relaxing one's grip on them, while preserving the lessons.
A Philosopher’s Sign of the Cross
In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.*
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.
In the Principle was the Exemplary Expression, and the Exemplary Expression was with the Principle, and the Exemplary Expression was the Principle.
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*That unity-in-difference, and difference-in-unity, is a dialectical difference. It is an affront to the discursive intellect with its abrupt and frozen diremptions, but approximates the fluidity of life.
Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate
If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes. Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance. It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible. There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.
Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship as body builders with muscular hypertrophy. Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty. He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):
The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.
Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):
For prayer is the rejection of concepts.
Benjamin Jowett on Grace
A stunning formulation for your delectation from the translator of Plato and the don of Balliol College:
Grace is an energy; not a mere sentiment; not a mere thought of the Almighty; not even a word of the Almighty. It is as real an energy as the energy of electricity. It is a divine energy; it is the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need.
An observation magisterial on all counts, combining as it does truth, economy of expression, and literary beauty: "the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need." Could it do with a bit of paring? How about this:
. . . the energy of God's plenary affection rolling shoreward toward human need.
Companion posts:
Knocking and Waiting
You can knock, knock, knock on heaven's door, or you can wait for God like Simone Weil. But if man is on his own, to allude to a title by Ernst Bloch, then knocking and waiting are futile gestures.
This Morning’s Meditation: Notes with the Help of Poulain
Today's sitting ran from 3-3:45 am. It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued. I was hard by the boundary that separates what Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet. But I remained this side of the border, and this side of the first stage of the mystical properly speaking.
Poulain's definition is excellent: "We apply the word mystic to those supernatural acts or states which our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily." (Fr. Augustin Poulain, S.J., The Graces of Interior Prayer: a Treatise on Mystical Theology, Caritas Publishing, 2016, viii + 680 pp. A translation of the French original first published in 1901. Emphasis in original.) Poulain's tome may well be the greatest secondary source on mystical theology ever written. It is in the same league as The Three Ages [sic] of the Interior Life by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.
The main point here is that one cannot enter the mystical by one's own power. Grace is needed. Herewith, a crucial difference between Christian and Buddhist meditation. 'Crucial' from L. crux, crucis, meaning 'cross,' has a special resonance in this context.
A New Testament analogy occurs to me: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you." (Matthew 7: 7-8, KJV.) If a door is locked from the inside, I cannot pass though it by my own power: I must knock. The knocking is within my power, but the entry is due to the initiative of another who is not in my power. The prayer of simplicity, the fourth degree of ordinary prayer, is within my power and is like the knocking; the first degree of mystical prayer is not in my power and is like the allowance of entry.
About the prayer of simplicity, Poulain says that "there is a thought or a sentiment that returns incessantly and easily (although with little or no development) among many other thoughts, whether useful or no." (8) Here are three examples of my own that are either Christian or proto-Christian.
The Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
A favorite line of mine from Plotinus' Enneads: "It is by the One that all beings are beings."
An invention of mine with a Thomist flavor: "The Lord is Being itself."
In each case, one runs through a short sentence. The run-through is discursive (from L. currere, to run) in that it constitutes an interior discourse. One does not develop these thoughts, but repeats them to oneself incessantly in a condition in which other thoughts obtrude either as distractions or further developments. There is nothing mystical going on; one remains on the discursive plane even if one whittles longer phrases down to shorter ones. One has not yet achieved inner quiet. One is merely knocking on the door. To use the Jesus mantram as an example:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner –> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner –> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me –> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy –> Lord have mercy –> Lord, Lord, Lord.
The whittling process may lead to one-pointed concentration on one word. This brings one to the edge of the discursive plane. Whether one goes over the edge into the mystic is not up to one. It is a matter of grace or divine initiative.
Poulain, following The Interior Castle of the great Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila, calls the first degree or stage of mystical union the prayer of quiet or "the incomplete mystic union." (48) In this state, "the divine action is not strong enough to hinder distractions," and "the imagination still preserves its liberty." (49).
The claim that God's action brings about the first degree of mystical union is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation. The same is true of the claim that the mystical state is one of union with God. If we put God between the Husserlian brackets, and attend solely to the phenomenology, we can still ground a distinction between the fourth state of ordinary prayer, the prayer of simplicity, which remains on the discursive plane, and the first mystical state.
During the session of 25 July 2019 I experienced a sudden, unanticipated, unwilled, shut-down of all thoughts. Mental silence supervened all of a sudden, on its own. It subsided soon enough, and the philosopher's attempt at analysis only speeded its departure. If one is granted a taste of this blissful quiet one must simply receive it, without analysis, and with gratitude. The experience of inner quiet, whether or it it is the effect of a transcendent Source, is undeniable and unmistakable.
On 7 December 2109 I sat from 3:30-4:22 am. From my notes:
Very good session. A touch of grace, hard to describe: a pacifying presence of something beyond my mental operations. Subtle, but unmistakable.
On 18 February 2020, the experience was as of a subtle summons, a summoning away from mental chatter and the useless rehearsals of stale thoughts, toward silence, waiting, patient attention, interior listening and hearkening. Hearken, horchen, gehorsam, Gehorsamkeit.
The Lure of the Good
Some of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience. The love of truth and the love of beauty do the same. One is free to ignore these intimations of an Order Unseen, but this mysterious freedom is itself a pointer beyond. For the one who seeks a way out from behind the veil of Ignorance, the Good cannot be on a par with Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
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"Was für eine Philosophie man wähle, hängt sonach davon ab, was für ein Mensch man ist." Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, 1794 §5
"The kind of philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is."
In Mitte der Ewigkeit
Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Lebenauf Erden hier.Wie Schatten auf den Wegen schwebenund schwinden wir.Und messen unsre trägen Trittenach Raum und Zeit;und sind (und wissen’s nicht) in Mitteder Ewigkeit …
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803)
Practice the ‘Step Back’
Keep the obtrusions of memory and perception and anticipation at mental arm's length. Practice the 'step back.' Rather than 'go with the flow' of centrifugal mind, examine whither it tends. To a place worth visiting? Harder still, well-nigh impossible, is to examine whence it comes. Swimming upstream to the hidden Source of the stream is much harder than impeding the outward flow. Content yourself for now with mental continence, an analog of, and probably impossible without, sexual continence. The practice of non-attachment is recommended by the major wisdom schools in the East and the West.
Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati
Vito Caiati writes,
. . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?
What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor. (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.
But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up. And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it. It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.
I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.
The same problem does not arise for Christianity. In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance. Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization. There is no need for special experiences. Perhaps we can say that the soteriology of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic. But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.
As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had. They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.
But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA. This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat. And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.
Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation
There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique. You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now. You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes,
Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.
The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority. For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience. Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center. This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere. Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing. The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise. A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov. The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.
Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process. The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind. One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)
My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra. (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.) He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this. He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.
I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.
I conjecture that what Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side. Christians not so much. But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation. The unity of a sentence without which it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.
The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.
Double Cultural Appropriation!
Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.
My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong.
To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form. If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong. Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on.
One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns. I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take. I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?
Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day. Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major?
Who owns truth?
Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.
There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen. Their appropriation cannot be illicit.
My appropriation of Asian wisdom — which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern — is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation. Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good.
ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:
Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.
Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?
Virile Ascesis
Julius Evola (Doctrine of Awakening, 233) preaches a virile ascesis which is neither renunciation, nor worldflight, nor inaction, nor quietism, nor mortification.
Ascesis requires detachment, but one can be both detached and active in the world. The vita activa is possible without contemptus mundi. One can even be a warrior like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita whom Lord Krishna commands to do his duty and slay the enemy but with detachment from the fruits of action. Imagine slaughtering a fellow human being with equanimity! An impossible ideal? (An ideal impossible of realization is of course no ideal at all.)
In the world but not of it. In the thick of it, but without anything sticking to you, like the lotus flower that floats on the water without getting wet.