Un-elaborated (or gradually elaborated - and probably fairly un-informed) sketches on parallels between different "systems of seeking"; i.e. Seeing the perinealism of mystically-practical Buddhist psychology and practically-mystical Christian theology:Kenosis ("In prayer come empty, do nothing." -St John of the Cross); Hesychia (stillness; emptying the "cup" of awareness of its sensory/worldly/created contents); Logos (Jesus accepted the Logos (Will/Way of God) and became the Christ) --- Wuwei (empty of resistance; giving way to the Way); Tao; Wei Wu Wei said that humility is the absence of any one to be proud; "A Buddha is the embodiment of the Dharma, the law; he is not apart from the workings of it. Having taken birth, decay and death must inevitably follow. Whether you are enlightened or unenlightened, this is part of the natural unfolding. But the truth itself is timeless, and having been shown the path to understanding, we need not rely on anyone outside of ourselves." (Goldstein)Emptiness ("unfindability" of...; includes non-self, dereification of subject-object distinction, etc);• Difference between "emptiness" and "mere nothingness"• Unborn consciousness/un-manifested knowingNepsis: St John ("loving awareness"); St Hesychios: “awareness” is a spiritual method (“nēpsis can be translated as “awareness” including different types of awareness such as alertness, sobriety, watchfulness, attentiveness, mindfulness) --- SatiParadoxical teachings of Jesus (parables; when the disciples asked for explanation) --- "noble silence" of the Buddha (koans; "I will not allow this poison-tipped dart to be removed from my body until I have learned whether the man who shot me was..."The camel through th eye of a needle (the narrow path that camels had to walk through) --- Mumonkan: passing through the barrier-gate (like a toll) and the "mu" ("no"; "not"; "have not"; "nothing")Theosis (deification aimed toward likeness/union with God; via catharsis: purification of mind/body; and theoria: illumination) --- Nirvana3 stages of theosis (describes process and aim): purgative way (purification - katharsis), illuminative way (illumination - theoria: 'Contemplatio' is the Latin translation of Greek 'theoria'), and the unitive way (sainthood - theosis) --- 3 kinds of nirvana happiness: path consciousness, fruition consciousness, and parinirvana (when an "enlightened being" dies); also: rebirth in the realms of hell, animal, peta, etcChrist's Divine-human perfection/Second coming of Christ --- Mahamudra (character and practice)/MaitreyaProvocation-Conjunction-Joining-Habit-Captivity (Philokalia Vol 1 p171; Heiromonk Damascence p312) --- Dependent Origination (chain of causation)Christ (Logos) "In the beginning..." --- Buddha (Tathagata) "The Tathagata who was perfectly enlightened so long ago has no limit to the duration of his life, being ever-lasting. Never extinct, he makes a show of extinction for the sake of those he leads to salvation." (The Lotus Sutra ch 15-16)Trinity: Father (YHWH) Son (Logos/the Way), and Holy Spirit (Ultimate, Particular, presence and action all of which are one in the same) --- 3 Jewels: Dharma(-nature), Buddha(-nature), and Sangha (Ultimate, Particular, presence and action all of which are one in the same); Tantric metaphor: sky (ground/base - gzhi), sun (sky's vast capacity for perfect clarity of awareness - rigpa), and the sun's rays (descending light/energy/motion that penetrates and illuminates the dark clouds of ignorance/aggregates of clinging - 'od gsal)Gnosis (insight; translation of Hebrew "ha'ath") --- PannaSalvation; Habitus; Judgement ("judge not lest...") and Cloud ch 4 (holy and worldly desire) --- KarmaSin (hamartia; missing the mark; to fail - as a result of unconscious motivations; "springs from a state of moral darkness brought on by a lack of awareness" - John Sanford Kingdom... p111); lust, anger, and confusion (what St John calls spirits of fornication, blasphemy, and vertigo) --- 3 roots of suffering (3 poisons?); attachment/clingingRepentance ('turning around'; 'changing the mind') --- satori ('turning about' of the mind)Heart --- Will/Volition/Formations (?); "There is a third kind of love, higher even than universal lovingkindness. This love is the natural harmony which comes from the breaking down of barriers arising out of the concept of self. No “I,” no “other.” It is love born of wisdom and at this level, “love” and “emptiness” are the same experience. There is no concept at all of “I am loving.” It’s free of the concept of I, of self." (Goldstein)Hesychios ("On Watchfulness and Holiness"): "continuity of attention produces inner stability; inner stability produces a natural intensification of watchfulness and in due measure gives Contemplative insight into spiritual warfare." --- Samadhi -> Jhana -> InsightConcentration (prayer word with breath - word falls away at a point of absorption) --- samatha (breath instead of word-matched-with-breath) anapanasati-jhana (applied and sustained thought fall away at a point, and concentration moves from an eagle flapping to soaring)“There is within us a sort of mental craving that is fragmented and frayed (pathos was the Greek word he often used) [split; knot; papanca], with the result that we are nearly always either grasping at something or pushing it away and find it very difficult to receive with open palms of simple gratitude.” (Laird; "Sunlit..." p35) --- tanhā (craving); upādāna (attachment; clinging; grasping)(Evagrius) Passions (good or bad: thoughts that lead us away from contemplation); there are areas of life in which obsessive patterns tend to occur --- PapancaMetanoia (to change one's mind or convert; meta- to go beyond or change + noein to have mental perception - from noos: mind, thought) (St Hesychios) Vigilant watchfulness provides an antidote to chasing thoughts and deriving a sense of self from them by “closely scrutinizing every mental image or provocation” - instead of chasing thoughts, “turn around” (metanoia) to stop the chase; OR “turn around” to look them in the face (with stillness and silence - seeing through/past them) and stop the flow of being carried away by them; move from agitated victim to silent witness ---7 mortal/deadly sins (originating with Evagrius and taken to Europe by his student, John Cassian - evil spirits; excessive versions of the passions: anger, envy (contempt/spiteful hatred?), pride, sloth, covetousness, lust, and... gluttony) (vs. venial sins that can take root in the soul if treated with carelessness) --- 5 hindrancesSatan (one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as an adversary; one who plots against); Devil (one who throws (something) across the path of another: diabolos from diaballein "to slander, attack," literally "throw across," from dia- "across, through" + ballein "to throw") --- MaraHoly Spirit (Paraclete: advocate; helper; counselor) --- Buddha-nature (or Buddha Principle refers to several related terms, most notably tathāgatagarbha and buddhadhātu. Tathāgatagarbha means "the womb" or "embryo" (garbha) of the "thus-gone" (tathagata), or "containing a tathagata"); "The Buddha is within. It is the experience of the truth. Always bringing it back to the present moment, to the experience in the now." (Goldstein) Qi (ch'i: "breath", "air", or "gas", and figuratively as "material energy", "life force", or "energy flow"); anima mundi - or world soul - of the Stoics"God has a sense of humor" --- the "cosmic joke" (Michael Taft)Lose yourself and you will find yourself --- when you disappear, you are most fully hereHumility; selflessness (as the way to purification) --- freedom from Sakkaya-ditthi (wrong view of self with regard to nama and rupa)Etc...
Bishop Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on the Jesus Prayer
Pray by simply standing before a God (listening to God listen to me; gazing at God gaze at me; rest in God rest in me; James 4:8 - "Draw near to God and He will draw near to you"; etc)Pray with the mind in the heart (with the whole being; prayer of the lips, prayer of the mind, prayer of the heart; this is where we find Christ and the Spirit within us - “it is not I but Christ lives in me”)Pray without ceasing (Paul to Thessalonians)4 Essential Elements of the Jesus Prayer (from instructions included in the Philokalia - ~12th-14th cent.)
- Sit (chair or low bench - some say to lower the head to the chest)
- Control the breath (slow it down; calm the breath)
- Match the Jesus Prayer to the breath (various forms and lengths)
- Concentrate on certain psycho-somatic centers (allowing the intellect, or "nous", to lower into the heart - the heart was seen as the hollow organ full of space in medieval understanding)
Ware on baptism (after St. Gregory Panamas and St Mark[?] of Sinai): "The final end of every activity that conforms to God's will is to return, through the keeping of the commandments, to that perfect spiritual recreation and renewal by Grace which was given to us freely from on high at the beginning in the sacred fount [the womb]. In the beginning is our end. The whole purpose in the ascetic mystical life is nothing else but the recovery and activation of the Grace of the Spirit that was conferred to us initially in the sacrament of baptism."
Receiving-Releasing
When the Point of Reference is Lost (a vantage that is usually taken by the thinking "self")... everything becomes the center; everything becomes the singular point from which all things are intuitively known;...the husk that protects the fruit falls away to reveal that which is sought and is seeking: Silent, Loving Awareness - a now-ness of knowing that contains and is beyond and pierces through all thinking and experience the way a mountain cuts through clouds as they pass.Attempts to......grasp this Silence; taste Stillness; own self-forgetting; cling to Peace; see the Darkness; hold the Undivided; contain the Infinite; embody the Spiritual; traverse the Eternal......all limit the life of fully being-in-Being; efforts to achieve bind us to our own "will" the way a chain binds an animal to a stake.How, then, is prayer to progress?Observations of "riverbed awareness" (Laird) allow the emptied container to be that which is contained: receptive acceptance and equanimous letting go occur as one movement.Rest in the "Unknowing" of simultaneously taking in and setting aside all that there is (including the seeing self... and this hurts...) until there is nothing left except That which "Is" (Exodus 3).
The Drawbacks of "Success" and the "Non-Achievement" of Contemplative Practice
Success can be detrimental.When we feel blissfully awake, and that is seen as a success, prayer can evaporate and any spiritual consolations we thought we had "earned" in that moment will be lost. Success in prayer is not experiencing wonder and bliss; it is not experiencing peace and oneness; it is not even experiencing God's love and union... we are lost in the wonder, bliss, peace, oneness, love, and union of God when success emerges in prayer practice - but there is no "experiencing" of these things (or anything else as "things" to experience).Success in prayer is something like a pure praise and participation through self-forgetting... success in prayer is constituted in part by the loss of an experiencing "me" to even notice anything aside from maybe the knowing of awareness itself - and yes, that awareness is wonderful, blissful, etc. but there is no longer any"one" there to experience it: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me."In my "experience" (haha...), the Grace of Christ's resurrection within me is accessed through a falling away from what I call "me"... that selfish, naive, loving, desirous, kind, wretched, and egoic swirling of mind-and-body (spirit-and-matter) that is so familiar to us all - the perfection of which we typically (and, in my mind, erroneously) believe to be the path to salvation.Awakening to this mystery comes (or can come) in small moments of gradual renewal of our "Selves-in-Christ" - the "still small voice" of the Spirit - and may only occur once in our lives... or twice, or every week, or never!Awakening is not success... is it a gift.The purpose of prayer is self-emptying; self-forgetting; egoic-death; crucifixion... Any "success" is purely the result of the fullness of emptying; remembering of the act of forgetting; rebirth; redemption... the space between these nodes of experience (between the experiences of prayer and success) is the point of prayer practice: a falling away of the experiencing self.At this point, there is no "me", there is only God... which is all there ever is anyway ("Christ is all and in all").The beginners mind; the spirit of non-attainment; doing "nothing"; resting in choicelessness; simply "being"; a receptive attitude of non-achievement...These are some ways to describe a beneficial intentional starting point in the practice of Contemplative prayer. They aren't necessarily possible to maintain, but they are part of what it means to put on the "Mind of Christ".Adopting what Martin Laird calls "riverbed awareness" - simultaneously receiving and releasing all phenomena within conscious experience - is a great illustration of this type of attitude "in action".Thinking also of the waves of an ocean arising and falling above the infinite depths of stillness can be a helpful way to settle in to an observational stance of openness and receptivity: holding all that one is with an open-palmed grasp. The silent source of these waves constitutes the waves themselves and is also their ultimate destination - each wave shares a common center. The waves are not searching for the ocean, they are already full of ocean.We too are already full of God. We are the branches of the vine: we do not need to strain to "search" for the vine, we are already a part of the vine. We exist as rays of light do: not constantly and frantically chasing the sun, but eternally carrying its warmth and radiance. These images are always True, but only ever manifested, however, if we fully step out of the way and into the Way ("the Truth and the Life")......the simplest thing... the most difficult thing... the only thing (Luke 10:38-42).
Weakness, Identity, the Bifurcating Mind, and Prayer
[originally posted 6/19/17]
Romans 8:26- The Spirit helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered.
The Spirit grants each of us the experience of a flowing mind. The Spirit can be viewed as being "strong" or "entering us" (and that's just fine), but rather than seeing this as a description of material "spirit stuff" moving into the physical space of our bodies or "spiritual space" of our souls, we might best see this as a great way to illustrate the unimaginable or to outline the formless through the words that can actually be spoken.The unutterable encounter with the Spirit is an event that is not attained by effort or even earned through devout asceticism: the Spirit is the discoverable movement of our spirit toward union with God through Christ — it is already interwoven with our experience as children of God.The intercession that is gifted to us is the relief of knowing that failure is inevitable (and even invaluable)... The pain of humility (i.e. authentic self-knowledge of limitation) is recast as virtue through surrender to the indwelling presence and action of the Spirit (which is the eternal birth of Christ within us, as Eckhart might say).Sin, temptation, failure, wickedness, trials, weakness... these can all be seeds of faith. Faith is consent to the emergence of the presence and action of the Spirit (consent to the birth of Christ within us), and the awakening to the presence and action of the Spirit is the unfolding of Christ's resurrection in-and-as a perspectival shift in our identity [see Thomas Keating]. The resulting gift of contemplation is itself the Grace of God.We cannot attain this shift, but we can receive it by allowing the Spirit to speak wordless prayer through our being — all we have to do is move out of the way, and die ("it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me").
James 4:8- Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
We love to parse apart and analyze in order to make sense of things. It is our way of conceptually "owning" as much as possible, and this is a self-protective maneuver against the uncontrollable reality of existence - this is how we take care of ourselves.This is great for most things...God, however, is not to be owned. God - like a "circle with a circumference that is nowhere and a center that is everywhere" - does not always (or arguably ever) become clearer upon analysis.Discursive exercises in divine exploration of the Diety are purifying spiritual practices that will promote growth and happiness (and, believe it or not, they can be fun!)... but they are not the primary way to union with God.Drawing yourself nearer to God is not the same as trying to lasso God and pull that "Eternal Who" toward you in order to possess or contain God. The phrase "drawing yourself" anywhere doesn't sound like it even necessarity implies a manipulation of anything but one's conditional state in relation to something else. But, since we are all in God as Christ is ("I am in the Father and you are in Me and I in you"), we don't even have to do that.Drawing yourself closer to something that already constitutes your very being is a matter not of "getting there", but "being here" [see Richard Rohr].
So, cleanse your hands by repentance: turn away (not in shame, but in self-Love... through Self-Love) from that which is unskillful and unwholesome; and purify your hearts by practice ["askēsis": training] — work through what you can and meet what you can't with stillness and silence (or do what Jesus did in the desert and have "Yourself" speak to "yourself" with words of divine guidance until you again tread the Path with sturdiness and stability).
This stillness and silence will requite the mind's attempts to parse apart; to split and categorize; to list-and-label; to contain and own; or to "understand" God - the "Luminous Darkness" of infinite mystery; the "form-and-formless" of Being and Existence.
Martin Laird- "The very attention that gazes into this vastness is itself this vastness, luminous depth gazing into luminous depth. You are the vastness into which you gaze."
"Christ is all and in all" - I think it was Richard Rohr who once wrote "you are what you seek"...I think I'll leave it at that.
It is personal... one way or another
The interpersonal (between us) is accessed through the intra-personal (within us).This seems to be an a priori statement... (if this is fallacious, I am not presently aware of the problem with it).Why does this matter?...We get to others through ourselves. I feel that this means that God gets to us through God and we get to God through ourselves. We find ourselves-in-God in the depths of being - the clear, empty, and silent land - as we rest in God resting in us. This is the state of striving for Christhood: "being" for the simple sake of embodying (the best we can) the Spirit of God.
"May I be the embodiment of Christ and the temple of the Spirit praising God unceasingly by my mere existence."
Deep calls to deep in this land of silence, and the sound of God's waterfall is the (miraculous and wonderful) flowing persistence of experience. We see our reflection in the face of this waterfall, but it is a distorted image.To see our real face ("God, show me my true face before I was born"), we must surrender to the terror of falling with the water. Not the water of the world ("Whoever drinks this water will thirst again"), but the water of the Consciousness of Christ ("the water that becomes within us a fountain of water springing up into eternal life"): the still stream of being; the empty fullness between, beneath, and beyond all things; the uncreated Grace of Great Compassion; the Indwelling Presence and Inner Breath; the inwardly watchful and self-emptying Silence; the Holy Spirit.This is not something to attain, but something that is gifted. We should sit waiting patiently in receptive love for the Divine - resting in the "peace that passes all understanding"...We should sit waiting *not* "until _______________ happens"; but forever.
Sin and Self-Loathing
Big title...I am reading Martin Laird's "Into the Silent Land" and he (along with several other ancient contemplative authors) makes a wonderful distinction between sin (transgression, failure, etc.) and the often-resulting self-loathing (shame, condemnation, etc.).To some, this separation may seem obvious, but the mind is so good at sliding in judgement as one is experiencing life. Seeing the ways in which we fall off the path with respect to our own chosen and/or dispositional values is a truly important introspective skill, but the moral self-lacerations that can follow are poisonous and should themselves be examined.The objects of mental and emotional life can be seen as separate from the act of observing them. Once we develop a habit of "seeing the seeing", those objects are less reified, less identified as "me", and can be held more lightly - then the experience of "oops, I am not thinking, saying, or doing what I feel I should" can be recognized, accepted as having happened, and then observed as the flow of oncoming experience presses that moment through the mind to make way for another (often almost-identical-but-distinct) moment of awareness.Objects of the mind arise out of awareness like plants from the soil: there is little we can know about the soil unless we dig some up and take a look. For this, we might need to "change clothes" and kneel down to be still and silent for a while.I am beginning to feel like all self-loathing, shame, and condemnation do is breed more discontent and hatred rather than skillfully recognizing where some part of this wonderful creation could be more well cared for.We each have the responsibility of care, but should we really bring blame into the situation when (not if) something goes wrong?...When Christ is seen in ourselves, we begin seeing Christ in others, then seeing Christ in all, then knowing Christ in-and-as ourselves and in-and-as all - Christ is already shining out of our own eyes and revealing itself to reality through the blessings of virtue... and of mishap...I heard Richard Rohr say that St. Teresa of Calcutta once told the nuns she was guiding not to try to "sell" Christ to others, but to "be" Christ to others...We already are (due to the fact that we are breathed expressions of the Logos: the Living "Word" of God) all One-in-Christ.Our wounds are God's wounds."In the Crucified and Risen One, grace and disgrace have been joined." (Laird)
New effort
the more I write out my thoughts with the (even slight) possibility of it being read will lead to more clarity of thought and meaning of experience... that's the idea anyway. ive been practicing Christian meditation/contemplative prayer for 20 minutes twice a day for a while, reading more of contemplative christian/mystic authors, and finding some profound meaning in shifting certain thoughts, words, and actions to fit my experiences as authentically as possible. i plan to treat this informally, honestly, openly, briefly, and even almost haphazardly... not much extra research or stress about "if this is the right thing to say", so forgive the unreferenced and inaccurate quotes ...so, here goes..."I have been crucified with Christ. It is not I who live, but Christ lives in me"