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On Not Having a Definite MetaNarrative

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Individuals growing up in traditional religious structures find themselves within a MetaNarrative. They are given a way of understanding the world which has been life-giving, or at least functional, for millions of people for thousands of years. A MetaNarrative gives one a structure of values and a structure of meaning within which to understand their life.

Some version of the traditional Christian MetaNarrative was my working understanding of the world for many years. I was made in the image of God, but fallen and sinful. I needed redemption by the work of Christ. When I accepted Christ’s sacrifice, my mission was to spread the Gospel and live for God to the best of my abilities through the power of the Holy Spirit. Life had eternal meaning, because, in the end, I (and others) would attain everlasting life. My values were rooted in Scripture and my action in the world had felt meaning.

I no longer find myself within that Narrative and losing it was a complete upending of my entire understanding of life.

Many young people today, especially those growing up in multi-cultural communities, are either never given a religious MetaNarrative, or find their tradition unconvincing in an absolute sense. We live in cities and rub elbows with people from an astounding variety of cultural and religious backgrounds, each with their own understandings of the world. If any one of these traditions is correct in some absolute sense, it’s hard to know which one. Scientific materialism, mixed with religious and cultural relativism, seems to underly much of modern thought.

And so we float. We do the best we can, because life keeps coming whether you have it all figured out or not. Many adopt some form of agnosticism about questions of Ultimate Meaning.

One can adopt a meditative path without strictly committing to a MetaNarrative or framework of thought. One can “taste and see” – by their direct experience – whether a spiritual path they have chosen is life-giving. One can make ethical decisions, live in a certain way, adopt a meditative practice, and see if it leads to greater real happiness for themselves and others.

For me, it helps to have a tentative understanding of what I am trying to achieve. A tentative understanding of the world and how I understand my practice. I still think in Theistic terms. I think about things like forming my soul toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful and then handing it back to God. I think about developing Purity of Heart. I think about seeking and opening myself to a transformation that comes from God, the Source, the Absolute.

But I don’t know. Other metaphors and other images, perhaps from completely different systems of thought, might also strike me as helpful along the way.

A plant grows toward the sun because it has to or it will wither and die. Maybe we can just be plants growing toward the Sun, even if we don’t understand it all.

Reflections on the Theravada Tradition | Personal Takeaways

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I don’t consider myself a Theravada Buddhist. Of the eastern traditions, I tend to resonate more with what might be considered “freer-flowing” frames of thought such as Vedanta or even other forms of Buddhist practice such as Zen/Zazen and Dzogchen. Specifically, in regards to meditative practice and seeking a direct experience of the Absolute, I believe that there is something which must be done in us, something which we can open ourselves to, but are not in control of. In the terms of Vedanta, “In the still mind, in the depths of meditation, the Self reveals itself” (Bhagavad Gita 6:20). Most spiritual traditions tend to emphasize this passivity or dependence, while the Theravada tradition, at least explicitly, does not. I also continue to resonate more with traditions which have a more balanced view of the world in contrast to Theravada’s emphasis on Experience as Dukkha.

But there is much from the Theravda tradition which has stuck with me. And what I consider to be a weakness (extreme emphasis on our own ability to develop ourselves toward Nibbana), in some respects can also be seen as a strength. The following are some elements of Theravada which have been helpful for me on my own journey.


The Noble Eightfold Path as a helpful grid through which to think about the spiritual life and the development of the self. I don’t see the Noble Eightfold Path as some kind of absolute system of spirituality. I just don’t think you can systematize the spiritual life (however one thinks about that concept) or meditative experience as much as the Theravada tradition seems to try to do. Nevertheless, it is helpful to have a grid. It is helpful to have categories through which to think about our own personal development. Specifically regarding ethics, even just having the broad categories of Right Speech and Right Action in one’s head feels beneficial as one navigates life. Is my piece of this conversation Right Speech? Is this activity I’m engaging in Right Action? Is it leading to greater contentment, happiness, and peace for myself and those around me? It seems to me that the presence of the categories themselves is a strength of the Theravada path. At a minimum, the Noble Eightfold Path has been a useful tool for millions of spiritual seekers since the time of Siddhartha. I find myself spontaneously thinking about various categories from the Path as I live my life and it has been edifying to have been exposed to this broad grid. There is a sense that it has sunk into me and I am thankful for that.

Right Speech. I probably think about Right Speech more than any other element of the Path. I want my speech to be helpful and edifying. I want my speech to lead to unity within my communities. I want my speech to serve a purpose. I often think about my work context. At work, daily chit chat among colleagues is edifying. It connects people. It helps us share life. But sometimes there also comes a point where it feels like we are just talking to talk. Talking to fill the silence. At that point I think it’s best to stop. Maybe if our speech is natural and comfortable, then our silence will be natural and comfortable as well. I feel the same way about engaging with the radio, tv, and podcasts. Sometimes I’m listening or watching to actually learn something. Sometimes it’s edifying. And sometimes, we really do just need to relax and be entertained. But there is also a time to cut all the noise. It’s endless. At some point it just becomes infinite undigested clutter in our head. I guess maybe you could call that Right Listening, Right Watching, or Right Silence.

Right Intention | Metta. The concept of Right Intention, specifically the intention of Good-Will toward all life, has also been helpful for me, especially when dealing with anger. If I am angry with someone, and I am in the right mindset, I will try to “pray a Metta” for them. It helps me let go of my anger and continue to attempt the cultivation of an honest wish for the well-being of all people and all life. I was a vegetarian before studying Theravada and thinking about Right Intention has led me further down that path. It seems to me that there is something about meditative practice which naturally leads one to see themselves in the other, both human and non-human. We all have the same light on. It feels like part of my own development to respect that light in all things.

Right Effort. Right Effort for me represents the ethos of the Theravada meditation tradition and the Theravada Path in general. It has the vibe of an As a Man Thinketh. It is about willfully forming oneself toward the Good. In the practice of Right Effort, one, in the midst of daily living, strives to: 1. prevent the arising of unwholesome states, 2. abandon unwholesome states which have arisen, 3. arouse wholesome states which have not yet arisen, and 4. maintain and perfect wholesome states which have already arisen. Broadly, Right Effort entails being aware of your thoughts and cultivating wholesome or skillful thoughts while abandoning unwholesome or unskillful thoughts. I need to hear this. I need to hear that I am in charge of developing my own character. I am in charge of letting anger go. I am in charge of abandoning unhealthy selfishness. I am in charge of being present in the moment to serve people. I need to take personal responsibility for my own mental state. Right Effort helps me by reminding me of this responsibility. Even if I think the Theravada meditative tradition could be more balanced by interpreting Arising along the lines of how Grace is understood in other traditions, and placing at least some emphasis on our dependence on something outside of ourselves, it is still a strength of the tradition that is reminds us we must form ourselves. For me, it’s “Both/And.” I need to consciously form myself, and I feel the need or dependence to open myself to a formation which comes from beyond myself.

The Middle Way. Not too much asceticism, not too much comfort. Not too little food, not too much food. Not too little sleep, not too much sleep. Not too little social involvement, not too much social involvement. The concept of the Middle Way brings to mind a passage from The Cloud of Unknowing:

“Now if you ask me what sort of moderation you should observe in the contemplative work, I will tell you: none at all. In everything else, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping, moderation is the rule. Avoid extremes of heat and cold; guard against too much and too little in reading, prayer, or social involvement. In all these things, I say again, keep to the middle path. But in love [the contemplative work] take no measure. Indeed, I wish that you had never to cease from the work of love… Perhaps by now you are wondering how to determine the proper mean in eating, drinking, sleeping, and the rest. I will answer you briefly: be content with what comes along. If you give yourself generously to the work of love, I feel sure you will know when to begin and end every other activity. I cannot believe that a person wholeheartedly given to contemplation will err by excess or default in these external matters…”


Maybe, if we are consistent with our practice, all of life – including how to engage with tools such as the Eightfold Path – will be natural.

Beauty 2

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There’s an extra kind of Beauty in old people – in the grandmother who has spent her entire life serving her family and community, even in spite of pain and loss.

It’s like Beauty+.

That’s the kind of beauty we should be striving for – to become.

Identities

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Part of life is letting go of old identities. Old categories we have thought about ourselves in. Categories which we have gained life from and thus have continued to adapt ourselves to. We cling tightly because we don’t know what will be left if we are no longer seen, or see ourselves, in certain ways.

I’m trying to let go. To lose attachment to old ways I have thought about who I am and who I want to be.

Beauty

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Once I had the thought, “Everybody is ugly.” What a terrible way to see the world.

Our culture conditions us to see our flaws, especially our physical flaws. It’s sick. I obsess over it sometimes.

I want to learn to see Beauty in all people.

Keeping Reality Fresh

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One effect of my meditative practice that has stood out recently is the effect of keeping reality fresh. Every day is its own thing. Every portion of the day is its own thing. If I go through long stretches without practicing, that effect seems to go away. Moments, stretches, days lose their sense of newness to me. It’s time to get back to monk days.

The Task is the Same

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The task is the same every day. Live selflessly in the present, giving yourself fully to the people you are with and the tasks you are called to. It doesn’t matter if you get the thing you think will make you happy or not. Changing life circumstances are just new contexts to live out the same call. The task is the same every new day.

Small Steps

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Keep on taking small steps each day, doing the good that is in front of you to do.

Live perfectly. And when you fall off the horse, you climb back on.

Dreams

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Anecdotally, my dream life is much more vivid and powerful during periods when I am consistent with my meditation. I remember much more from them and they sometimes seem to signify something of weight to me.

Carl Jung – a proponent of dream analysis – was well aware that analysis was subjective, open to an almost infinite number of interpretations. Nevertheless, he thought, when probed, the dream often meant something significant to the dreamer. The meaning lies between the dreamer and his dream.

I’ve never cared much for dream analysis, and I still don’t. Still, the vividness of my dreams has stood out to me as very correlated with how disciplined I have been with my meditation practice.

I’ve recently been studying Sufism. As a tradition, Sufism is far more open to visionary experience than, say, the Christian Tradition as a whole. The only difference between a “vision” and a very strong or vivid dream seems to be whether the subject was “awake” or “asleep” – just different forms of conscious experience – at the time.

Creativity; dreams; perhaps visions; all associated with contemplative practice in one form or another.

Spiritual Goals

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It seems really hard to have spiritual goals.

A lot of how I think about the spiritual life is in terms of moral and personal development. Am I more patient? Am I more present, accepting, loving, intentional, etc. than I was a year ago?

Those are really hard questions to answer. They don’t seem to be truly measurable except for a hunch or a feeling that I might be moving in the right direction. How do you measure how present you were in the last week?

Add to this the fact that my spiritual practice – Centering Prayer – is, at its core, a passive practice. I conceive of it as an opening of the self to God – to a transformation that can only happen by grace.

So the only real tangible spiritual goal I can think of is “time on the mat.” How much time do I actually spend in meditation, opening myself to the possibility of transformation, each day?

That’s pretty much all I can come up with for a true spiritual goal. Time on the mat.

Siddhis

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The blog tends to be slightly or sometimes well behind where I am currently reading. I have several more series to do from within the Christian tradition, but am mainly reading in Vedanta and Yoga right now. As I have been reading more in the Vedanta and Yoga traditions, the concept of Siddhis (“miraculous powers” attained through meditation – see link for previous post) has been more on my mind.

Various teachers in the Yoga tradition put more or less weight on siddhis, with Patanjali himself seeming to view them as superfluous to the yogi’s true goal (see Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras 3:37). In general, I lean toward the belief that a fascination with siddhis and the like is a distraction from the contemplative quest. Nevertheless, reports of these types of things do surround the contemplative traditions as a whole.

The purpose of this post is to briefly document my own modest experience in this area:

When I first began seminary, I took a Spiritual Development class. One of my assignments was to spend multiple periods of two hours in prayer. There were no further instructions than simply to be in prayer for two hours.

During these periods I would pray for people I knew. Sometimes, I would inexplicably be presented with a powerful image while I was praying for an individual. In one case, as I was praying for a particular friend, I was presented with an image of the state of Washington. As far as I know, there was no prior link in my mind between this person and the state of Washington. The experience of the image itself could best be described as a “vivid stamp in the mind’s eye.” Hard to describe, but clear and unmistakable to me at the time.

As it happened, this friend (a former college roommate) called me soon after one of these prayer periods. He was in the military and at a point in his training when they were determining where he was going to be stationed next. He told me a few of the options: I remember New York being on the list along with several other states. He did not mention Washington as a possibility.

During our conversation, I told him “You are going to be stationed in Washington.” I then told him about the image I received while in prayer. He told me that Washington wasn’t an option, and the choice wasn’t up to him anyway, so we just left it at that.

A few months later my friend called me to tell me that, contrary to the options that had initially been presented to him, he was going to be stationed in Washington. He spent the next several years of his life there. At the time, both coming from an Evangelical perspective, we took it as a confirmation from God that this was where he was supposed to be.

I also had a similar experience around this time where an image was presented to me while praying for a friend which later seemed to be meaningful to the individual.

I don’t know what to make of these things, and of course coincidences happen and sometimes we interpret things in hindsight, drawing meaning where perhaps there was none to begin with.

But it’s also possible that we are connected in ways that we don’t understand. People, matter, time. We still really don’t know the first thing about how Reality works. And the deeper we go, the stranger and stranger things get.

So that’s my brief experience with Siddhis.

Retreats

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I recently went on a 48 hour silent retreat. This Catholic facility provides unstructured retreats, simply giving you a hermitage (a heated one bedroom cabin in the woods with a chair, a bed, a basket of bread, and some fruit) and a chance to be silent.

My experience on these types of retreats is that I tend to get “clear” on things I need to get clear on. Regardless of how one interprets it, in silence and solitude there is often a conscious experience of what many describe as a deeper, more authoritative, or clarifying voice. Maybe that’s the voice of God; maybe it is your own deepest self. Maybe it’s “the part of me that is in tune with The Ultimate.” I don’t know. But it heals and it directs. At least that has been my experience when I go off to be alone.

In Praise of Suffering

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Suffering drives us to spirituality. To the search for something, some meaning, beyond our own little world, our own concerns, our own ego. Sometimes when the suffering is taken away we just go back to that little world.

On Not Turning Back

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In the Catholic Tradition, there is a distinction made between “the active life” and “the contemplative life.” The active life primarily involves a focus on engaging in works of charity in the world. It is a “busy” life full of fruitful work, performed in service to God.

In contrast, the contemplative life involves a focus on spiritual practice and development. It is less “busy” in the exterior sense.

Actives sometimes don’t understand contemplatives, believing that they aren’t “doing anything.” Contemplatives typically see actives as only on the first step of their journey, believing that they will understand the contemplative way in time, when they are ready. In Catholicism, the figures of Mary and Martha are often used to contrast these two ways of life. And of course there are shades in between the two poles.

Although I probably wouldn’t have made the distinction at the time, I spent many years of my life as an “active.” I taught and coached in inner city schools, volunteered in various capacities at night, and completed several graduate programs at the same time. I was busy, and I felt (and still do feel) that the work I was doing in the world was important.

Over the past several years I have taken a step back from many of these activities. I still work, but in a different capacity. Instead of engaging in all the demands of teaching, I work as an educational aide. I don’t volunteer as much. I’m not involved in formal academic studies. I am attempting to spend much more time engaging in contemplative practice. It’s what I feel called to do. It feels like a new vocation.

Sometimes I want to go back. Sometimes I feel like I need the busyness. I need to be distracted from myself. Contemplative practice, and in general a slower pace of life, can tear me apart. I’m face to face with myself.

But this is the path I am on.

Monk Days

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I am a former teacher and still work in education, which means I get summers off. Long periods of unstructured time tend to drive me crazy. So, counterintuitively, summers end up being somewhat of a struggle for me.

This year I have been experimenting with “monk days.” On these days, I essentially wander around town with periodic breaks to practice meditation. Hospitals often have quiet meditation/prayer rooms as do many universities. So my day ends up looking like this:

Meditation at home
Walk to hospital/coffee shop, read, study, write
Meditate at hospital
Bus across town, walk to university, read, study, write
Meditate at university
Bus to shopping center/book store, read, study, write, talk to people
Meditate in quiet area
Walk/bus to new location (another university, quiet place, etc.)…

Basically these are days of alternating meditation with simple activities. These simple activities range from walking, to reading/writing, to talking with strangers, to cleaning the house.

I really like these monk days. Although I will have to modify my places of meditation because of the current pandemic (perhaps making my locations outside), I’m hoping to do them more often this summer.