We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.
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For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."
This has happened often. I go to the black mat to begin my session. I go there and assume the cross-legged posture. My purpose is to enter mental quiet and elevate my mind to the highest. But a petty thought obtrudes. I begin to enact or realize this 'centrifugal' thought by attending to it. But then I receive a 'summons' in the form of a light, sometimes blue, sometimes white, sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes pulsating, sometimes not, usually subtle but phenomenologically unmistakable. Nothing so dramatic as to throw me off my horse were I riding a horse. Just a light, but one that calls me to the topic and into focus, and away from the diaspora of the petty. And then it goes out.
I know that the source of the light is not something physical external to my body. Perhaps the cause is in my brain. But that is pure speculation, and easily doubted. The phenomenon is what it is and cannot be gainsaid: I can doubt the cause but I cannot doubt the datum in its pure phenomenality. It is indubitable as a pure givenness. Perhaps the 'summons' is a call from the Unseen Order which lies beyond all sensible 'visibility.' But that too is speculation. Perhaps there is no Unseen Order. In that case the 'summons' would not be a summons. I cannot be sure that it is and I cannot be sure that it isn't.
Neither underbelief nor overbelief is justified by the experience itself. But the facts are the facts. The phenomenological facts are that I and other dedicated meditators have this 'summons' experience and it is followed by mental focus or onepointedness which is some cases takes the more dramatic form of a 'glomming onto' the theme of the meditation.
So am I not within my epistemic rights — assuming that it even makes sense to speak of rights and duties with respect to matters doxastic — in treading the path of overbelief?
Related:
Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief
Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20
Lent is a good time for a plenary news fast, or, if you can't quite manage that, a time to moderate your intake of media dreck. It suffices to be aware of the overall drift of events as the Left pursues its pernicious purposes; there is no necessity of recording every particular outrage. And this for two reasons. First, there is little we can do about it; second, it's a passing scene soon to pass away entirely, and we with it.
Precious peace of mind ought not be sacrificed on the altar of activism. Just keep an eye on what is coming down the pike so as to be ready before it arrives.
When Henry David Thoreau was asked whether he had read the news about the fire at so-and-so's farm, he replied that he didn't need to: he understood the principle of the thing.
Every day should include some time for the cultivation of one's higher nature. Unlike the lower nature, it needs cultivating.
From time to time, however, we should devote special time to be still and listen beyond the human horizon. Modern man, crazed little hustler and self-absorbed chatterbox that he is, needs to enter his depths and listen.
"Be still, and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10)
"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) This beautifully crafted observation sets us a task: Swim upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.
Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi; in interiore homine habitat veritas. "The truth dwells in the inner man; don't go outside yourself: return within." (St. Augustine)
Georges Bernanos has the protagonist of his The Diary of a Country Priest (Image Books, 1954, pp. 81-82, tr. P. Morris, orig. publ. 1937) write the following into his journal:
The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!
This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.
But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?”
The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.
Related: "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"
Because we are spiritual beings, we pray. Because we cannot be lamps unto ourselves, we need to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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)
