The Eightfold Noble Path | Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Meditation

Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Mediation/Concentration make up the meditative portion of the Eightfold Noble Path.

Right Effort
 

Bodhi defines Right Effort as "the energy in wholesome states of consciousness directed to liberation from suffering."  

He elaborates more fully:
 

"Time and again the Buddha has stressed the need for effort, for diligence, exertion, and unflagging perseverance. The reason why effort is so crucial is that each person has to work out his or her own deliverance. The Buddha does what he can by pointing out the path to liberation; the rest involves putting the path into practice, a task that demands energy. This energy is to be applied to the cultivation of the mind, which forms the focus of the entire path. The starting point is the defiled mind, afflicted and deluded; the goal is the liberated mind, purified and illuminated by wisdom. What comes in between is the unremitting effort to transform the defiled mind into the liberated mind."

Specifically, effort is supposed to be directed:

1. to prevent the arising of unarisen unwholesome states
2. to abandon unwholesome states that have already arisen
3. to arouse wholesome states that have not yet arisen
4. to maintain and perfect wholesome states already arisen

Right Effort is the energy, drive, and perseverance expended toward these ends. 
 

Right Mindfulness
 

Right Mindfulness is the cultivation of a specific faculty of mind referred to as sati in Buddhist texts.  This faculty is our ability to be fully aware of the "pure data" of the present moment, without getting lost in our mental constructs and interpretation of the present moment.  Bodhi calls this state of mind "bare awareness":
 

"What brings the field of experience into focus and makes it accessible to insight is a mental faculty called in Pāli sati, usually translated as 'mindfulness.' Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness. Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness. All consciousness involves awareness in the sense of a knowing or experiencing of an object. But with the practice of mindfulness awareness is applied at a special pitch. The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. All judgements and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped. The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea. The whole process is a way of coming back into the present, of standing in the here and now without slipping away, without getting swept away by the tides of distracting thoughts.

It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage. Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness. In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it. Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum. The cognitive process is generally interpretative. The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions. To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs—sets of mutually corroborative concepts—then weaves the constructs together into complex interpretative schemes. In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds."

Traditionally Vipassana, Insight, or "Mindfulness" meditation, which helps a practitioner become aware of this bare data, is also seen as leading to the direct experience of the three "marks of existence":

1. Dukkha: Suffering, unsatisfactoriness
2. Anicca: Impermanence
3. Anatta: "No-self," egolessness, the non-personal nature of reality

Bodhi also discusses the four foundations of mindfulness: awareness of the body, feelings, states of mind, and phenomena.  The practice of mindfulness is most fully addressed in the Satipatthana Sutta.

Right Concentration
 

Right Concentration or Right Meditation involves focusing the mind on a suitable object until one achieves "one-pointedness," or unification of mind.  Through Jhana meditation, a practitioner becomes one-pointed on an object and moves through the jhanas, or "meditative absorptions."  According to the Pali texts, the Buddha taught eight jhana stages, each stage having its own mix of "jhana factors," or states of mind.  Jhana meditation culminates in the four immaterial jhanas where a meditator changes the object of concentration to:
 

Fifth Jhana: The base of boundless space.
Sixth Jhana: The base of boundless consciousness.
Seventh Jhana: The base of nothingness.
Eighth Jhana: The base of neither perception nor non-perception. 
 

Of these stages, Bodhi remarks:
 

"These states represent levels of concentration so subtle and remote as to elude clear verbal explanation. The last of the four stands at the apex of mental concentration; it is the absolute, maximum degree of unification possible for consciousness."

According to Bodhi, achieving the final jhana is not equivalent to Enlightenment, the end of the path.  Instead, if all eight parts of the Path are perfected, when an aspirant directs their mind toward "the development of wisdom," they can "see Reality as it is," or experientially know the Four Noble Truths.  It is through the attainment of this experiential knowledge that one may become an Arahat, an Enlightened One, a Buddha.  

The Eightfold Noble Path | Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood

The second grouping of the Eightfold Noble Path includes what Bodhi and others refer to as the moral practices – Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood.  

Moral discipline is seen as a core prerequisite to obtaining Nibbana.  Just as a Christian mystic would say that one cannot make progress towards Union with God while being uncharitable towards their neighbor, practicing deceit, or regularly stealing goods, so too a Buddhist monk would see moral purity as a non-negotiable part of the Path.  Success in meditative practice is, in fact, dependent on one's moral state:
 

"Though the principles laid down in this section restrain immoral actions and promote good conduct, their ultimate purpose is not so much ethical as spiritual. They are not prescribed merely as guides to action, but primarily as aids to mental purification."

While aiding toward one's progress in spiritual practice, moral discipline – Sila – also leads to harmony – Samadhana – within one's own inner being and in human community.  
 

Right Speech
 

The moral disciplines are often presented in Buddhist texts as abstentions – things one should abstain from doing.  Right Speech is thus presented as:
 

1. Abstaining from false speech
2. Abstaining from slanderous speech
3. Abstaining from harsh speech
4. Abstaining from idle chatter

Bodhi quotes the Buddha as recorded in the Angutara Nikaya to explain each of the abstentions.
 

"Herein someone avoids false speech and abstains from it. He speaks the truth, is devoted to truth, reliable, worthy of confidence, not a deceiver of people. Being at a meeting, or amongst people, or in the midst of his relatives, or in a society, or in the king’s court, and called upon and asked as witness to tell what he knows, he answers, if he knows nothing: 'I know nothing,' and if he knows, he answers: 'I know'; if he has seen nothing, he answers: 'I have seen nothing,' and if he has seen, he answers: 'I have seen.' Thus he never knowingly speaks a lie, either for the sake of his own advantage, or for the sake of another person’s advantage, or for the sake of any advantage whatsoever."

"He avoids slanderous speech and abstains from it. What he has heard here he does not repeat there, so as to cause dissension there; and what he has heard there he does not repeat here, so as to cause dissension here. Thus he unites those that are divided; and those that are united he encourages. Concord gladdens him, he delights and rejoices in concord; and it is concord that he spreads by his words."

"He avoids harsh language and abstains from it. He speaks such words as are gentle, soothing to the ear, loving, such words as go to the heart, and are courteous, friendly, and agreeable to many."

"He avoids idle chatter and abstains from it. He speaks at the right time, in accordance with facts, speaks what is useful, speaks of the Dhamma and the discipline; his speech is like a treasure, uttered at the right moment, accompanied by reason, moderate and full of sense."

An interesting note that Bodhi discusses under idle chatter is the difference between monastic and lay practice, acknowledging that "small talk," is more necessary, and even good, in the lay life.  Monastic communities from a variety of traditions discourage talk that is frivolous, or merely "idle chatter." 

Right Action
 

As with Right Speech, Right Action is presented in terms of abstentions, specifically:
 

1. Abstaining from taking of life
2. Abstaining from taking what is not given
3. Abstaining from sexual misconduct

Again, Bodhi quotes the Buddha's words for each.
 

"Herein someone avoids the taking of life and abstains from it. Without stick or sword, conscientious, full of sympathy, he is desirous of the welfare of all sentient beings."

"He avoids taking what is not given and abstains from it; what another person possesses of goods and chattel in the village or in the wood, that he does not take away with thievish intent."

"He avoids sexual misconduct and abstains from it. He has no intercourse with such persons as are still under the protection of father, mother, brother, sister or relatives, nor with married women, nor with female convicts, nor lastly, with betrothed girls."

Avoiding the taking of life includes all sentient beings, making strict Buddhists vegetarians and perhaps vegans.  The distinction between monastic and lay practice again comes up in sexual misconduct as monks and nuns take vows of celibacy while lay practitioners restrict sexual activity to specific partners.  

Right Livelihood
 

Right Livelihood deals with how one makes his or her living.  This applies mostly to lay members as monks and nuns typically rely on financial support from the community to survive.  The lay Buddhist following the Path should make their living legally, peacefully, honestly, and in ways that do not harm other beings.  Specifically five kinds of occupations are mentioned as needing to be avoided: dealing in weapons, dealing in living beings (prostitution, slave trade, cattle for slaughter), dealing in meat production, dealing in poisons, and dealing in intoxicants.  

Thus the moral group of the Eightfold Path regards how we speak, how we act, and how we make a living.  
 

The Eightfold Noble Path | Right View, Right Intention

The last of the Noble Truths directly leads to the Eightfold Noble Path.  Following the Eightfold Path is, according to the Buddha, the way to reach Nibbana – the end of suffering.  

For this series, I will be drawing from the work of Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist monk.  Bodhi was born in New York, but ordained in Sri Lanka.  He then spent over twenty years in Sri Lanka, serving as the president of the Buddhist Publication Society, before returning to the States, living in a rural monastic community.  He has also translated and provided commentary on various divisions of the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali Canon.

At the outset, it is important to note that systematizing the Buddha's teaching on each individual part of the Eightfold Path involves drawing from a wide array of texts.  There do seem to be some "summary texts," in which each part of the Path is briefly addressed, but other portions of the Canon add to the teaching in different ways.  This can lead to a diversity of thought when modern Buddhist teachers explain these concepts.  Lineage (i.e. this is the teaching according to ____, who learned from ____, who learned from the Most Venerable teacher _____) thus becomes an important piece to keep in mind when studying any Buddhist teaching.

According to Bodhi, the Eightfold Path can be broken into three divisions:

Wisdom – Right View, Right Intention
Morality – Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood
Concentration/Meditation – Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration

Each group will be addressed in a different post.

Right View


In its fullness, Right View includes the entire Dhamma – all the teaching of the Buddha.  But for practical purposes, Bodhi presents two primary types – Mundane Right View and Superior Right View.

Mundane Right View simply entails accepting the law of kamma, a fundamental concept in both Hinduism and many forms of Buddhism.  Kamma (/Karma) refers to the idea that our actions, whether wholesome or unwholesome, will eventually produce the corresponding fruit in our lives.  Wholesome action will lead to our ultimate good; unwholesome action will lead to our ruin.  Bodhi explains the concept as follows:
 

“Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they shall be heirs."

Kamma is seen as a universal law.  Although we may not see the fruit of wholesome action in the short term, ultimately good action will always produce good fruit.  This is not always understood in physical terms, but often as a positive transformation in the soul.  Physically, positive kammic action is often seen as leading to a better circumstance in future births.  Accepting the law of kamma is Mundane Right View.

Superior Right View entails accepting the Four Noble Truths, first intellectually, and finally, after following the entire Path, experientially.  At the start of the journey, one can contemplate the Noble Truths and accept them as logically true, but it takes years of following the Path to come to an experiential realization:
 

"This right view that penetrates the Four Noble Truths comes at the end of the path, not at the beginning. We have to start with the right view conforming to the truths, acquired through learning and fortified through reflection. This view inspires us to take up the practice, to embark on the threefold training in moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom. When the training matures, the eye of wisdom opens by itself, penetrating the truths and freeing the mind from bondage."

Right Intention


Right Intention is defined by Bodhi as "the application of mind needed" to achieve the ultimate goal of the Path – the Cessation of Suffering.  Intention is essentially the will of the mind to move toward its goal.  Bodhi identifies three "intentions" in the Buddha's teaching: the intention of renunciation, the intention of good will, and the intention of harmlessness.

The Intention of Renunciation is the intention to turn away from the pull of our desires and attachments.  If one accepts the Four Noble Truths, the root cause of our suffering is our desire for and attachment to things.  Renunciation is simply turning away from our craving for those things.  In the Catholic tradition, this is spoken of as "mortifying the passions," and entails abstaining from the things we want, especially sense experience (i.e. sex, material comforts, etc.).  It is not that the things themselves are bad, but that our attachment to them, our need for them, traps us and ultimately leads to suffering. 

The Intention of Good Will is the intention to act in a way that leads to the ultimate good of all living things.  Metta – lovingkindness – must be developed for all sentient creatures.  This is sometimes achieved through a form of meditation called Metta meditation, and extends to the animal kingdom, often manifesting in vegetarianism, etc.  

The Intention of Harmlessness is the intention to act in a way that leads to freedom from suffering for all living things.  

When practicing Right Intention, the mind is willed, over and over again, towards wholesome thoughts and actions which ultimately lead to the cessation of suffering.
 

"The unwholesome thought is like a rotten peg lodged in the mind; the wholesome thought is like a new peg suitable to replace it. The actual contemplation functions as the hammer used to drive out the old peg with the new one. The work of driving in the new peg is practice—practicing again and again, as often as is necessary to reach success. The Buddha gives us his assurance that the victory can be achieved. He says that whatever one reflects upon frequently becomes the inclination of the mind. If one frequently thinks sensual, hostile, or harmful thoughts, desire, ill will, and harmfulness become the inclination of the mind. If one frequently thinks in the opposite way, renunciation, good will, and harmlessness become the inclination of the mind (MN 19). The direction we take always comes back to ourselves, to the intentions we generate moment by moment in the course of our lives."

Thus the wisdom group of the Eightfold Noble Path includes Right View and Right Intention.

The Four Noble Truths

I am going to begin a short series on The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Noble Path of Buddhism.  It's not uncommon to hear that "the teaching of the Buddha surrounds the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path," and Western Buddhist teaching is often introduced in this way.  

I'm not convinced that it's as straightforward as that.  In fact, browsing through the texts of the massive Pali Canon, it sometimes seems that these concepts are just a very small subset of an extremely large and diverse body of teaching.  I agree with Eknath Easwaran when he makes the following remarks about the Pali Canon and its relation to the Eightfold Path:
 

"...not even a fraction of this literature directly deals with the steps of the Buddha's Eightfold Path. Instead there is much discussion of insights attained on that path, and the philosophical doctrines derived from those insights – so much, in fact, that the reader of Buddhist scriptures might tend to forget that the actual practice of the Eightfold Path was the Buddha's central teaching."

In my opinion, these comments apply to the Four Noble Truths as well.  Because "the Dhamma" (the full body of Buddhist teaching) is so large and diverse, it's hard to say what is and is not an essential piece.  Even in the Dhammapada, which, in the minds of some, boils down Buddhist teaching to the basics, the Noble Truths and Eightfold Path are only mentioned twice, and are never defined, simply alluded to.

That said, almost all Buddhist teachers do see these concepts as essential to Buddhist philosophy and practice, and there are texts which make these concepts primary.  

One such text is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (found in the Samyutta Nikaya, a division of the Sutta Pitaka – the division of the Pali Canon which contains the Buddha's discourses), in which the Buddha is recorded as briefly introducing both the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path.
 

"And what, monks, is that middle way awakened to by the Tathagata? It is this Noble Eightfold Path; this is right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. This, monks, is that middle way awakened to by the Tathagata, which gives rise to vision, which gives rise to knowledge, and leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering,; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving that leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonattachment.

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path..."

Thus, the Four Noble Truths, according to this text, are:
 

1. Suffering
2. The Origin of Suffering
3. The Cessation of Suffering
4. The Path to The Cessation of Suffering

Suffering
 

The First Noble Truth paints a frustrating picture of life.  Although we experience periods of happiness and peace, in Buddhist thought, life is ultimately marked by suffering.  We are born into the world crying, confused, and immediately dependent on our parents to save us from starvation and death.  As we develop, we experience bodily injury as well as mental anxieties.  We find things in life that promise to please us; we strive for them, and yet often can't have them.  Even when we do attain what we desire, the enjoyment seems to only last a moment before we are attracted to something new, with its own promise.  "It never seems to be enough."  If we find something that does seem to give lasting happiness, we immediately develop anxiety around the need to keep it, lest we lose the object that completes us.  Over it all looms old age, sickness, and death.  All this is duhkha – suffering, unsatisfactoriness.  

The Origin of Suffering
 

The origin of suffering lies in our natural way of approaching life.  Various authors (and I believe various texts in the Pail Canon, although I am not sure on this point) present the Origin of Suffering in different ways.  I have seen the root cause of suffering referred to as craving/desire (as it is in this text), attachment, and ignorance.    

Craving/Desire and Attachment: The most common way the Origin of Suffering is presented is in terms of desire and attachment.  These seem to be two ways of saying virtually the same thing, desire referring to our inner disposition and attachment usually referring more to the actual things we desire (i.e. What are we "attached to"?).  In this particular sutta, the phrase "seeking delight here and there" stands out as an appropriate image.  We seek delight for ourselves here and there.  I want physical comfort.  I want money.  I want sex.  I want to be seen as attractive.  I want to be seen as intelligent and successful.  I want a nice house in a good part of town.  We desire many exterior things in the world and become attached to them because we believe they will bring us happiness.  Attachment can be to physical things, to people, and often to ideas about ourselves.  The attractive young woman worries about wrinkles.  The wealthy man worries about having more money or status than his neighbor.  Any threat to losing something which we are attached to brings ongoing anxiety.  Thomas Keating, speaking from a Christian contemplative perspective, refers to this state of being (a state of being we naturally inherit as human beings) as "The False Self."  Our craving is never quite satisfied and leads to ongoing unrest and suffering.

Ignorance: Some authors present the Origin of Suffering in terms of ignorance.  From this point of view, suffering arises because we do not experientially know the truth about reality (i.e. the Four Noble Truths and the entire Dhamma).  Ignorance leads to seeking happiness in places it cannot be found. 

Although these ideas are complimentary, I find it confusing that different authors present the Second Noble truth in different ways.  Correct translation of this concept seems to be an ongoing debate within Buddhism as a whole.  

The Cessation of Suffering
 

The Third Noble Truth essentially states that there is a way to end suffering.  To do so, personal craving needs to be extinguished and one must become "unattached" to all things.  

The Path to The Cessation of Suffering
 

The way to the Cessation of Suffering is to follow the Eightfold Noble Path.  

The Four Noble Truths lead directly to the Eightfold Noble Path.  The Truths are the philosophical underpinning, the Path is the concrete and pragmatic Way.  

Here is also a short take on the Four Noble Truths from Alan Watts:

Non-Attachment vs. Stoicism

I was listening to a podcast this week about Pascal's Pensées.  In the discussion, one of the participants made a passing comment lumping the Buddhist idea of non-attachment and Stoicism together.  

I've heard this before, and I think it is a misunderstanding of the idea of non-attachment.

Stoicism has the connotation of moderating emotion.  Not getting too high.  Not getting too low.  It has the connotation of disengaging from the exterior world, because getting too caught up in things will always disappoint.  

When the mystics tell us that we must become unattached to the things of the world, the ultimate goal is not to disengage from them entirely (although this may be needed for a time), but to engage with them fully without finding our life in them, without needing them for our happiness.  

Take the situation of a wedding day.  The Stoic is going to say: "Don't get too excited.  This day is only a temporary high.  The feeling of joy will soon pass, so don't let yourself get carried away."  The Stoic will tell you to moderate your emotion.  The mystic encouraging non-attachment will say: "Enjoy this day.  Fully enter into it.  It is one of the most meaningful and joyous days of your life.  The immediate emotion of this day will pass, yes, but your ultimate well-being does not lie in temporary events or emotions, but in Something deeper within you."

The goal of non-attachment is to fully enter in to life, but without clinging, without looking to the things of the world for our ultimate well-being.  

The Contemplative Life and Working Out

I used to be an athlete.  I pretty much had a sport for every season and I was good at most of them.  Football, in particular, was a big part of my life and I had the opportunity to play through college.  

Football is the kind of sport that you're always training for.  In the offseason, even though I was playing other sports, I was always training for football.  Squats, power cleans, bench press, rows, cardio, plyos, sprints.  It was hardcore.  My goal was to have the fastest, strongest body I could in order to be the best football player I could be.

After college, I stopped lifting and working out so much.  Part of it was that I no longer had as much of a reason to.  If I wasn't training to excel in a sport, what was my motivation?  It seemed to me that my motivation to work out, and especially lift weights, was to look better.  Pure vanity.  So I stopped.  I was okay that that season of my life had passed.

Fast forward to my early 30's.  I'm getting old.   Not old old.  But old.  Not working out in your 30's is a different thing than not working out in your 20's.  In your 20's you can get away with it.   You can still be generally healthy without training too much. In your 30's the pounds come real quick.  

So I'm starting to train again.  

Any action can be performed for self and any action can be performed for something beyond self.  In my spiritual life, I've come to the conclusion that, while it isn't necessarily wrong to do things for self, it's just empty.  I think training so that I can have a good looking body is an empty and unfulfilling goal.  It simply leads to more ego – more "I," "me," "mine" – which leads to more unrest.  Training to have more energy, a positive mood, and a healthier body so that I can better serve the world?  That's different.  According to Soren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.  A pure heart wills only "the good."  The saint lives purely to complete the will of God as she understands it.  From this point of view, if an action is directed toward "doing the most good," or "completing the will of God in the world," it comes from a pure motive.  

I can work out for self, or I can work out for something beyond self. 

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, when speaking about the work of contemplative practice, has this to say about physical training:
 

"I am serious when I say that this work demands a relaxed, healthy, and vigorous disposition of both body and spirit. For the love of God, discipline yourself in body and spirit so that you preserve your health as long as you can."

– The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 41

So I'm going to start discipling my body again.  And, as with just about every action I perform in life, I'll probably have mixed motives in doing so.  The less it's about self and the more it's about something beyond self, the better.
 

A Great Tragedy

A Great Tragedy was recently released and is now available for sale.  For a description, check out the My Books page.  

Expressing a set of ideas through fiction is a different kind of project for me, but it was a good way to explore some ideas surrounding self-will and ego.  I hope to do some more along these lines, perhaps a collection of short stories based on themes from the contemplative writers, in the future. 

And with that I'll be taking a break from blogging for a while.  I'm starting some grad classes so I'll be busy writing other things.  In the meantime, hopefully some of the previous blog posts/pages are helpful for you on the journey.  I've also continued to enjoy interacting with readers, so feel free to contact me with any questions/comments on site content at anthony@thecontemplativelife.org.  

Anthony

Viktor Frankl on Reductionism

This is an extended quote from Viktor Frankl on the limitations of "reductionism" – what might be called the tendency to reduce human behavior to "nothing but ___" (insert whatever lens you want, biology, physics, evolutionary psychology, etc.).  I love his analogy in the figures below.  This is kind of a wordy quote from this book, but overall I find Frankl to be a very clear writer.  If you want to go a little beyond his famous Man's Search for Meaning, this would be a great next book to read.  To me, Frankl still the most clear and straightforward psychologist who works from a generally spiritual worldview.

"Reducing conscience to the mere result of conditioning processes is but one instance of reductionism. I would define reductionism as a pseudoscientific approach which disregards and ignores the humanness of phenomena by making them into mere epiphenomena, more specifically, by reducing them to subhuman phenomena. In fact, one could define reductionism as sub-humanism...

...Let us ask what may have caused reductionism. To answer this question we must consider the effects of scientific specialization. We are living in an age of specialists, and this takes its toll. I would define a specialist as a man who no longer sees the forest of truth for the trees of facts. To choose one example, in the field of schizophrenia, we are confronted with a lot of findings furnished by biochemistry. We are also facing a vast literature on the hypothetical psychodynamics underlying schizophrenia. And another literature is concerned with the uniquely schizophrenic mode of being in the world. However, I deem that he who contends that he knows what schizophrenia really is is deceiving you, or at best himself.

The pictures by which the individual sciences depict reality have become so disparate, so different from each other, that it has become more and more difficult to obtain a fusion of the different pictures. The difference between pictures need not constitute a loss, but may well form a gain in knowledge. In the case of stereoscopic vision, it is the very difference between the right and the left picture that makes for the acquisition of a whole dimension, that is, the three-dimensional space over against the two-dimensional plane. To be sure, there is a precondition. The retinas must be capable of arriving at a fusion of the different pictures!

What holds for vision is also true of cognition. The challenge is how to attain, how to maintain, and how to restore a unified concept of man in the face of the scattered data, facts, and findings supplied by a compartmentalized science of man.

But we cannot draw back the wheel of history. Society cannot do without specialists. Too much of the style of research has become characterized by teamwork, and in the framework of teamwork the specialist is indispensable.

But does the danger really lie in the lack of universality? Doesn’t it rather lurk in the pretense of totality? What is dangerous is the attempt of a man who is an expert, say, in the field of biology, to understand and explain human beings exclusively in terms of biology. The same is true of psychology and sociology as well. At the moment at which totality is claimed, biology becomes biologism, psychology becomes psychologism, and sociology becomes sociologism. In other words, at that moment science is turned into ideology. What we have to deplore, I would say, is not that scientists are specializing but that the specialists are generalizing. We are familiar with that type called terrible simplificateurs. Now we become acquainted with a type I would like to call terrible généralisateurs. I mean those who cannot resist the temptation to make overgeneralized statements on the grounds of limited findings.

I once came across a quotation defining man as “nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energizes computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information.” Now, as a neurologist, I stand for the justification of using the computer as a model, say, for the activity of the central nervous system. It is perfectly legitimate to use such an analogy. Thus, in a certain sense the statement is valid: man is a computer. However, at the same time he also is infinitely more than a computer. The statement is erroneous only insofar as man is defined as “nothing but” a computer.

Today nihilism no longer unmasks itself by speaking of “nothingness.” Today nihilism is masked by speaking of the “nothing-but-ness” of man. Reductionism has become the mask of nihilism.

How should we cope with this state of affairs? How is it possible to preserve the humanness of man in the face of reductionism? In the final analysis, how is it possible to preserve the oneness of man in the face of the pluralism of sciences, when the pluralism of sciences is the nourishing soil on which reductionism is flourishing?

Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler, perhaps more than anyone else, have tried to solve the problem confronting us. Hartmann’s ontology and Scheler’s anthropology are attempts to allot to each science a province of limited validity. Hartmann distinguished various strata such as the bodily and mental ones plus a spiritual apex. Here again spiritual is meant without a religious connotation, but rather in the sense of noological. Hartmann sees the stratification of human existence as a hierarchical structure. By contrast, Scheler’s anthropology uses the image of layers (Schichten) rather than strata (Stufen), thereby distinguishing the more or less peripheral biological and psychological layers from the central personal one—the spiritual axis.

Certainly both Hartmann and Scheler have done justice to the ontological differences between body, mind, and spirit by conceiving of them in terms of qualitative rather than merely quantitative differences. However, they do not take into sufficient account what is opposed to the ontological differences, namely, what I would like to call the anthropological unity on the other hand. Or, as Thomas Aquinas put it, man is a “unitas multiplex.” Art has been defined as unity in diversity. I would define man as unity in spite of multiplicity!

Conceiving of man in terms of bodily, mental, and spiritual strata or layers means dealing with him as if his somatic, psychic, and noetic modes of being could be separated from each other.

I myself have tried simultaneously to do justice to the ontological differences and the anthropological unity by what I have called dimensional anthropology and ontology. This approach makes use of the geometrical concept of dimensions as an analogy for qualitative differences which do not destroy the unity of a structure.

Dimensional ontology as I have propounded it, rests on two laws. The first law of dimensional ontology reads: One and the same phenomenon projected out of its own dimension into different dimensions lower than its own is depicted in such a way that the individual pictures contradict one another.

Imagine a cylinder, say, a cup. Projected out of its three-dimensional space into the horizontal and vertical two-dimensional planes, it yields in the first case a circle and in the second one a rectangle. These pictures contradict one another. What is even more important, the cup is an open vessel in contrast to the circle and the rectangle which are closed figures. Another contradiction!

Now let us proceed to the second law of dimensional ontology which reads: Different phenomena projected out of their own dimension into one dimension lower than their own are depicted in such a manner that the pictures are ambiguous.

Imagine a cylinder, a cone, and a sphere. The shadows they cast upon the horizontal plane depict them as three circles which are interchangeable. We cannot infer from a shadow what casts it, what is above it, whether a cylinder, a cone, or a sphere.

According to the first law of dimensional ontology, the projection of a phenomenon into different lower dimensions results in inconsistencies, and according to the second law of dimensional ontology, the projection of different phenomena into a lower dimension results in isomorphies.

Now how should we apply these images to anthropology and ontology? Once we have projected man into the biological and psychological dimensions we also obtain contradictory results. For in the one case a biological organism is the result; in the other one, a psychological mechanism. But, however the bodily and mental aspects of human existence might contradict one another, seen in the light of dimensional anthropology this contradiction no longer contradicts the oneness of man. Or does the contradiction between a circle and a rectangle contradict the fact that both result from a projection of the same cylinder?

Dimensional ontology is far from solving the mind-body problem. But it does explain why the mind-body problem cannot be solved. Of necessity the unity of man—a unity in spite of the multiplicity of body and mind—cannot be found in the biological or psychological but must be sought in that noological dimension out of which man is projected in the first place.

However, alongside the problem of mind versus body, there is the problem of determinism, the problem of freedom of choice. But this problem, too, may well be approached along the lines of dimensional anthropology. The openness of a cup necessarily disappears in the horizontal and vertical dimensions. Well, man, too, projected into a dimension lower than his own seems to be a closed system, be it of physiological reflexes or psychological reactions and responses to stimuli. Those motivational theories, e.g., which still adhere to the homeostasis principle, deal with man as with a closed system. This, however, means disregarding and neglecting that essential openness of human existence which has been evidenced by Max Scheler, Adolf Portmann, and Arnold Gehlen. Particularly the biologist Portmann and the sociologist Gehlen have shown us that man is open to the world. Because of the self-transcendent quality of human existence, I would say, being human always means being directed and pointing to something or someone other than itself.

All this disappears in the biological and psychological dimensions. But in the light of dimensional anthropology we can at least understand why this must happen. Now the apparent closedness of man in the biological and psychological dimensions no longer contradicts the humanness of man. Closedness in the lower dimensions is very compatible with openness in a higher one, be it the openness of a cylindrical cup, or that of a human being."

– Victor Frank, The Will to Meaning

The Mystics are Boring

"Nevertheless, insofar as they are saints, insofar as they possess the unitive knowledge that makes them 'perfect as their Father which is in heaven is perfect,' they are all astonishingly alike. Their actions are uniformly selfless and they are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is their true relation to the universe and its spiritual Ground. Of even plain average people it may be said that their name is Legion— much more so of exceptionally complex personalities, who identify themselves with a wide diversity of moods, cravings and opinions. Saints, on the contrary, are neither double-minded nor half-hearted, but single and, however great their intellectual gifts, profoundly simple. The multiplicity of Legion has given place to one-pointedness— not to any of those evil one-pointednesses of ambition or covetousness, or lust for power and fame, not even to any of the nobler, but still all too human one-pointednesses of art, scholarship and science, regarded as ends in themselves, but to the supreme, more than human one-pointedness that is the very being of those souls who consciously and consistently pursue man’s final end, the knowledge of eternal Reality...

...Among the cultivated and mentally active, hagiography is now a very unpopular form of literature. The fact is not at all surprising. The cultivated and the mentally active have an insatiable appetite for novelty, diversity and distraction. But the saints, however commanding their talents and whatever the nature of their professional activities, are all incessantly preoccupied with only one subject— spiritual Reality and the means by which they and their fellows can come to the unitive knowledge of that Reality. And as for their actions— these are as monotonously uniform as their thoughts; for in all circumstances they behave selflessly, patiently and with indefatigable charity. No wonder, then, if the biographies of such men and women remain unread. For one well educated person who knows anything about William Law there are two or three hundred who have read Boswell’s life of his younger contemporary. Why? Because, until he actually lay dying, Johnson indulged himself in the most fascinating of multiple personalities; whereas Law, for all the superiority of his talents was almost absurdly simple and single-minded. Legion prefers to read about Legion. It is for this reason that, in the whole repertory of epic, drama and the novel there are hardly any representations of true theocentric saints."

                                               
                                                                                      – Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

Real Simplicity

"In the world, when people call anyone simple, they generally mean a foolish, ignorant, credulous person. But real simplicity, so far from being foolish, is almost sublime. All good men like and admire it, are conscious of sinning against it, observe it in others and know what it involves; and yet they could not precisely define it. I should say that simplicity is an uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness. It is not the same as sincerity, which is a much humbler virtue. Many people are sincere who are not simple. They say nothing but what they believe to be true, and do not aim at appearing anything but what they are. But they are forever thinking about themselves, weighing their every word and thought, and dwelling upon themselves in apprehension of having done too much or too little. These people are sincere but they are not simple. They are not at their ease with others, nor others with them. There is nothing easy, frank, unrestrained or natural about them. One feels that one would like less admirable people better, who were not so stiff.

To be absorbed in the world around and never turn a thought within, as in the blind condition of some who are carried away by what is pleasant and tangible, is one extreme as opposed to simplicity. And to be self-absorbed in all matters, whether it be duty to God or man, is the other extreme, which makes a person wise in his own conceit – reserved, self-conscious, uneasy at the least thing which disturbs his inward self-complacency. Such false wisdom, in spite of its solemnity, is hardly less vain and foolish than the folly of those who plunge headlong into worldly pleasures. The one is intoxicated by his outward surroundings, the other by what he believes himself to be doing inwardly; but both are in a state of intoxication, and the last is a worse state than the first, because it seems to be wise, though it is not really, and so people do not try to be cured. Real simplicity lies in a just milieu equally free from thoughtlessness and affectation, in which the soul is not overwhelmed by externals, so as to be unable to reflect, nor yet given up to the endless refinements, which self-consciousness induces. The soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity. Such simplicity is indeed a great treasure. How shall we attain to it? I would give all I possess for it; it is the costly pearl of Holy Scripture.

The first step, then, is for the soul to put away outward things and look within so as to know its own real interest; so far all is right and natural; thus much is only wise self-love, which seeks to avoid the intoxication of the world.

In the next step the soul must add the contemplation of God, whom it fears, to that of self. This is a faint approach to the real wisdom, but the soul is still greatly self-absorbed; it is not satisfied with fearing God; it wants to be certain that it does fear him and fears lest it fears him not, going round in a perpetual circle of self-consciousness. All this restless dwelling on self is very far from the peace and freedom of real love; but that is yet in the distance; the soul needs to go through a season of trial, and were it suddenly plunged into a state of rest, it would not know how to use it.

The third step is that, ceasing from a restless self-contemplation, the soul begins to dwell upon God instead, and by degrees forgets itself in Him. It becomes full of Him and ceases to feed upon self. Such a soul is not blinded to its own faults or indifferent to its own errors; it is more conscious of them than ever, and increased light shows them in plainer form, but this self-knowledge comes from God, and therefore it is not restless or uneasy."

– Francois Fenelon, quoted in The Perennial Philosophy

Doubled Awareness

Not ready to start my Eightfold Noble Path series yet, so we're going to do a series of quotes and posts that I've had in my back pocket.  I wrote this two weeks ago after an experience at Target.  The concept of "Doubled Awareness" or having an "Inner Observer," is talked about both by those who practice Mindfulness and those who practice Centering Prayer.  It's an odd experience, and if you've never had it, it is hard to describe.  Nevertheless, after having it, I tried to...
 

I was walking through Target today and I became aware that I was experiencing doubled awareness, or the phenomenon of the inner observer. 

This state of mind happens to me, rarely, and usually comes out of nowhere.  As I wrote in my tract on Centering Prayer, sometimes I do feel like I can induce it, but more often than not, when I have the experience, it just happens.

I am writing this about an hour later and want to describe it because it's fresh.

When I am in this state of mind, it's as if I am watching my experience happen.  I am not my thoughts, my actions, or my emotions, but I observe them.  It is as if my whole life is a movie and I am aware that I am watching it.  Reality just kind of flows, and it struck me that 'I'm not coming to my experience with clinging or want.'  Reality is just happening, and I am part of it.  

I feel like I am in control of what I am doing.  In that sense, I'm not 'just observing.'  I still have will.  But it is coming from a different place.  A deeper place inside of me than my mind.  

It isn't an ecstatic state of mind.  I'm not overcome with joy.  But when I am experiencing it, it is clearly preferable to how I normally perceive life.  

I am watching through my eyes, but it's another 'me.'  

The Pali Canon

I'm about to start a short series on the Buddhist Eightfold Noble Path, but before that, I'd like to do a post on the Pali Canon. 

As I've mentioned before, Buddhism has always seemed incredibly diverse to me.  Every time I read a new Buddhist author, it almost seems like I have to pick up a whole new vocabulary, and engage in a whole new set of concepts.  Sure, there seem to be some constants – the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Noble Path stand out here – but I find myself wondering if even those "basics" are as core to the tradition as some authors make it seem.  My hunch is that even saying that "the Buddha's teaching surrounds the Four Truths and Eightfold Path" may be a gross oversimplification.  That's just my hunch.   

Part of why I believe Buddhist teaching seems to be so diverse is that the primary set of Scriptures (at least for Theravada and what may be called "Western" Buddhism), the Pali Canon, is absolutely massive.  

Estimates vary, and page counts depend on the translation (and page size), but you are talking about a group of writings that is probably more than 10 times the length of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, perhaps 15,000 - 20,000 pages of printed text.  To get a feel, look at this translation of the Samyutta Nikaya, which is one of the five subdivisions of the Sutta Pitaka – itself only one of the three divisions of the entire Pali Canon.  The translation of the Samyutta Nikaya itself is almost 2,000 pages.  

That is a ton of text to draw from.  On top of that, it doesn't seem the each individual sutra is necessarily connected to what surrounds it.   It's more just a list of sayings/discourses, mostly grouped simply by the length of the discourse (i.e. "the long discourses," "the middle length discourses," "the short discourses"), than a connected narrative.  

The Canon is separated into three "baskets" (sometimes referred to as the Tipitaka): the Vinaya Pitaka consisting mainly of rules for monks; the Sutta Pitaka consisting of basic teachings of the Buddha in discourse form; and the Abhidhamma Pitaka which contains systematic Buddhist philosophy and is sometimes referred to as the "higher dhamma" (i.e. it is more esoteric, philosophical, and specialized teaching).  Each basket is also further separated into smaller subdivisions.   

What the nature of the Pali Canon leads to, it seems to me, is the potential to choose a select group of sutras, and form a "Buddhist teaching" based on them.  Teacher A's analysis of what is "core" to all these texts may be vastly different than the view of Teacher B.  Hence the emphasis on lineage within Buddhism (i.e. I follow the Dhamma as taught by Teacher X who is of the ____lineage.).

This dynamic is true of all religion.  People read the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Scriptures and come up with different theologies.  But it seems to me that Buddhism is more open to a huge diversity of teaching due to the nature of its Scriptures.  In Christianity, the recorded teaching of Jesus is contained in the four Gospels – maybe 100 pages of text.  In Buddhism, the recorded teaching of Siddhartha Guatama is contained in 20,000.  

David Frenette on The Path of Centering Prayer

This is David Frenette, a disciple of Thomas Keating, talking about his experience of Centering Prayer on the Buddhist Geeks podcast.
 

Frenette, along with Bourgeault, is what you might call a "second generation" Centering Prayer teacher as he has studied under Keating.  Frenette has also published a book on the topic, called The Path of Centering Prayer.  

Cynthia Bourgeault on The Heart of Centering Prayer

Alright, following the St. John series, I'd like to post two talks about Centering Prayer, one from Cynthia Bourgeault and one from David Frenette.  In The Dark Night, St. John talks about a stage of spiritual development in which the soul must be exclusively passive.   He calls this moving from meditation (i.e. the use of discursive excercises including images, words, and "form") to contempletion, or "infused contemplation."  Thomas Keating sometimes talks about Centering Prayer as a way to prepare oneself for the gift of contemplation.  This is one way to understand Centering Prayer, but, as seen below, different authors have different ways of understading the practice.  

This is Cynthia Bourgeault giving a series of talks about "The Heart of Centering Prayer" (the title of her latest book) at Boston College School of Theology.  In Part 1, she tells the story of the beginning of the Centering Prayer movement (0:30), talks about her own experience of the prayer (9:30), and explains her primary paradigm – what she calls "developing non-dual consciousness" – for understanding what is happening during Centering Prayer (18:00).  Bourgeault is the first author to interpret Centering Prayer through this lens.  These are new ideas, and she adds a new set of vocabulary, to the movement. 

In Part 2, Cynthia discusses The Cloud of Unknowing, and its relation to Centering Prayer, in detail. 

Part 3 consists of discussions of apophatic vs. cataphatic practice (2:30), and the active vs. contemplative life (23:00) as seen in The Cloud of Unknowing. 

In Part 4, Cynthia talks briefly about the Divine Therapy and then does a Q & A.  

When I first read Cynthia Bourgeault's new book, The Heart of Centering Prayer, I thought she was distancing herself from the Christian tradition.  The way in which she speaks of Centering Prayer as a means of forming non-dual consciousness seemed to me to relativize the role of God, however you want to describe that term.  It seemed to me that, by emphasizing simply the practice of releasing thoughts, and how this discipline can affect our "operating system," she was turning Centering Prayer into an almost secular practice.  

After watching these lectures I think otherwise.  There are still pieces of her book that give me pause.  For instance, in the following quote she talks about "God being the sideshow":
 

"I was several years into the practice of Centering Prayer before I came to appreciate the cumulative effect of this patterning.  Like most beginners, I thought that the aim in Centering Prayer was to let go of my thoughts so that God could 'fill' me with his presence.  One day I suddenly realized that the God story was the sideshow and the letting go was the main event.  That was when the practice flipped for me, as I recognized that thoughts were not the obstacle; they were the raw material, as every opportunity to practice releasing that focal point for attention deepened the reservoir of 'free attention' within me and strengthened the signal of the homing beacon of my heart."

– Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer

These statements seem to me to edge the practice away from being "God-centered."  And I do think that her book tends towards the esoteric.  But the way she carefully describes objectless awareness (a meditative state associated with Centering Prayer) as a place where "Divine awareness and our own awareness co-mingle as one diffuse field of inter-abiding" (Part 1 41:40) makes me think that she is still faithful to The Cloud of Unknowing and rooted in the Christian contemplative tradition.  

Overall, I think Bourgeault is brilliant, but re-framing the practice in terms of non-dual consciousness seems obscure and confusing.  Take, for instance, how she defines the term in her book:
 

"Imagine that there might be a different way of structuring the field of perception, an alternative way of wiring the brain that did not depend on that initial bifurcation of the perceptual field into inside and outside, subject and object.  Instead, one would grasp the entire pattern as a whole – holographically – through a perceptual modality quantitatively more immediate and sensate, working on vibrational resonance rather than mental abstraction.  Then one would indeed experience that signature sense of oneness – not, however, because one had broken into a whole new realm of spiritual experience, but because that tedious, 'translator' mechanism of the self-reflective brain has finally been superseded.  You see oneness because you see from oneness."

I feel like she is essentially describing what a Buddhist would call the experience of "no-self" which can be achieved through vipassana meditation.  On top of this, I feel like this is a slightly different state than what she elsewhere describes as "attention of the heart":
 

"Perhaps the subtlest fruit of the practice is a gradually deepening capacity to abide in the state of 'attention of the heart,' as it's known in the Christianity of the East.  You might describe this as a stable state of mindfulness or 'witnessing presence,' but emanating from the heart, not the head, and thus free of intrusion from that heavy-handed mental 'inner observer' who seems to separate us from the immediacy of our lives.  The essence of this kind of attentiveness is perhaps best summed up in those words from the Song of Songs: 'I sleep, but my heart is awake.'  Once you get the hang of it, attention of the heart allows you to be fully present to God, but at the same time fully present to the situation at hand, giving and taking from the spontaneity of your own authentic, surrendered presence."

This, it seems to me, is equivalent not to "no-self" but to what a Zen Buddhist would call "Neither man nor circumstances are deprived."

Oh boy, this is quite confusing. 

This is why I prefer to simply think of Centering Prayer as opening yourself completely to the presence and action of God.  Transformation will happen in that process, and the way, or categories through which, you see that transformation may change over time.

When we start talking about how consciousness is changed when off the mat, maybe we can just let what happens happen.  

The Dark Night | Book 2, The Passive Night of the Spirit

So far, in St. John's progression, the soul has actively tried to mortify its attachments to the things of the world and also the pleasures that come from various spiritual exercises.  It has also allowed itself to be passively purged of its attachments to these spiritual delights in the Passive Night of the Senses.  

Through the aridity of Passive Night of the Senses, God has led the soul away from and beyond discursive meditation (i.e. the use of words, concepts, images, or any "content" in prayer), towards what St. John will call contemplation.  
 

"At the time of the aridities of this sensory night, God makes the exchange we mentioned by withdrawing the soul from the life of the senses and placing it in that of the spirit – that is, he brings it from meditation to contemplation – where the soul no longer has the power to work or meditate with its faculties on the things of God."

Now, absorbed in the work of contemplation, the soul is completely passive, and can do nothing but be acted upon by God:
 

"When this house of the senses was stilled (that is, mortified), its passions quenched, and its appetites calmed and put to sleep through this happy night of the purgation of the senses, the soul went out in order to begin its journey along the road of the spirit, which is that of proficients and which by another terminology is referred to as the illuminative way of infused contemplation. On this road God himself pastures and refreshes the soul without any of its own discursive meditation or active help."

Passing through the Passive Night of the Senses and entering into the contemplative work is a great joy and the soul is again at peace in God, although this time no longer attached to specific discursive exercises.  The soul is content to rest in loving awareness of God:
 

"The soul readily finds in its spirit, without the work of meditation, a very serene, loving contemplation and spiritual delight."

This state, according to St. John, may last for years and this is, in fact, where the journey ends for some, maybe even most, contemplatives.  But for others there is one final purgation to undergo – the Passive Night of the Spirit.  

This is the deepest, longest, and darkest night.  Just when the soul feels that it has abandoned all that is not God for God's sake, it then, in this night, feels rejected by the very God it has given all for.  St. John describes this Night in several ways.
 

"Since the divine extreme strikes in order to renew the soul and divinize it, it so disentangles and dissolved the spiritual substance – absorbing it in a profound darkness – that the soul at the sight of its miseries feels that it is melting away and being undone by a cruel spiritual death. It feels as if it were swallowed by a beast and being digested in the dark belly, and it suffers and anguish comparable to Jonah's in the belly of the whale."

"But what the sorrowing soul feels most is the conviction that God has rejected it, and with abhorrence cast it into darkness."

"The afflictions and straights of the will are also immense. Sometimes these afflictions pierce the soul when it suddenly remembers the evils in which it sees itself immersed, and it becomes uncertain of any remedy. To this pain is added the remembrance of past prosperity, because usually persons who enter this night have previously had many consolations in God and rendered him many services. They are now sorrowful in knowing that they are far from such good and can no longer enjoy it."

"They resemble one who is imprisoned in a dark dungeon, bound hands and feet, and able neither to move nor see nor feel any favor from heaven or earth."

Bellies of whales, dungeons, spiritual death, anguish, abhorrence, darkness.  Not a happy place.

But at the end of this long and dark night lies the unitive state, one in which the soul proclaims:
 

"I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased;
I went out from myself,
leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies."

The blessedness of final Union allows the soul to look back on the various Nights and say, with St. John, "Ah, the sheer grace!"

The Dark Night ends abruptly and unexpectedly, as we may come to expect with St. John.

Final Thoughts on St. John of the Cross

This will end the series on St. John of the Cross' Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night.  One major takeaway for me after reading St. John is the tentative nature of any structured, sequential spiritual path.  Not only does St. John not stick to one scheme to describe the spiritual journey, he himself believes that some experience these stages in different ways than others.  He also sometimes speaks of the stages being simultaneous or overlapping.  Everyone's experience is going to be unique.  It is insightful to read about the paths of others, for instance the one St. John presents in these works, but to make any one sequence normative is probably a mistake.  

Another, related, takeaway is the continued understanding from the Christian contemplative tradition that the path is winding.  There are times of aridity, of doubt, of pain, of the feeling of absence, and these are normal, even necessary for progression.  Meditation teachers from any tradition that don't speak about this reality set practitioners up for disappointment.  I continue to believe that this is a relative strength of the Christian tradition as compared to others which speak only of peak experiences or a road that leads straight to the top without major trials along the way.  

St. John is one of the harshest of the Catholic mystics.  He insists on nothing less than complete mortification and non-attachment.  An interesting contrast would be reading him next to The Cloud of Unknowing, whose author is gentler and, perhaps, more suited to modern, non-monastic audiences.  

As an additional resource about the life of St. John, here is a introductory lecture from the Boston College School of Theology:

The Dark Night | Aside – God as a Transforming Fire

"For the sake of further clarity in this matter, we ought to note that this purgative and loving knowledge, or divine light we are speaking of, has the same effect on a soul that fire has on a log of wood.  The soul is purged and prepared for union with the divine light just as the wood is prepared for transformation into the fire.  Fire, when applied to wood, first dehumidifies it, dispelling all moisture and making it give off any water it contains.  Then it gradually turns the wood black, makes it dark and ugly, and even causes it to emit a bad odor  By drying out the wood, the fire brings to light and expels all those ugly and dark accidents that are contrary to fire.  Finally, by heating and enkindling it from without, the fire transforms the wood into itself and makes it beautiful as it is itself."

– The Dark Night, Book 2, Chapter 10

The Dark Night | Book One, The Passive Night of the Senses

It is an understatement to say that St. John is a frustrating writer to follow.  Not only does he outline his own work in several distinct and competing ways, he also often fails to follow through with his own writing plan!  On top of that, the images and vocabulary he uses are often interpreted in different ways even within the same work.  

I do believe there is a lot of value in St. John, but trying to read him in a systematic fashion is extremely difficult.  It is almost better to read small selections and take what you can from them.  The outline I gave in The Ascent of Mount Carmel Book 1 seems to me the most natural, but it is not the only possible outline of his thought.  If you really want to dig into St. John, be warned.  

Alright, that digression aside, The Dark Night is a natural sequel to The Ascent of Mount Caramel as it continues the train of thought from that work.  But it is not certain that St. John meant for them to be joined.  That said, they are very difficult to interpret apart from one another.  

Book 1 of The Dark Night concerns the Passive Night of the Senses, which John promised to address in The Ascent.  While in The Ascent, St. John talks about "the senses" as the pleasure we get from things in the world, in The Dark Night, "the senses" are spoken of as the pleasures we get from discursive spiritual exercises.  

The Passive Night of the Senses, then, is when God removes the consolations one gets through discursive spiritual exercises in order to bring the soul closer to the unitive state.  

Perhaps St. John's most straightforward description of the Passive Night of the Senses comes in Book 1, Chapter 8:
 

"Since the conduct of these beginners in the way of God is lowly and not too distant from love of pleasure and of self, as we explained, God desires to withdraw them from this base manner of loving and lead them on to a higher degree of divine live. And he desires to liberate them from the lowly exercise of the senses and of discursive meditation, by which they go in search of him so inadequately and with so many difficulties, and lead them into the exercise of spirit, in which they become capable of a communion with God that is more abundant and more free of imperfections. God does this after beginners have exercised themselves for a time in the way of virtue and have persevered in meditation and prayer. For it is through the delight and satisfaction they experience in prayer that they have become detached from worldly things and have gained some spiritual strength in God. This strength has helped them somewhat to restrain their appetites for creatures, and through it they will be able to suffer a little oppression and dryness without turning back. Consequently, it is at the time they are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favor is shining most brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and the spring of sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as they desired...

God now leaves them is such darkness that they do not know which way to turn in their discursive imaginings. They cannot advance a step in meditation, as they used to, now that the interior sense faculties are engulfed in this night. He leaves them in such dryness that they not only fail to receive satisfaction and pleasure from their spiritual exercises and works, as they formerly did, but also find these exercises distasteful and bitter. As I said, when God sees that they have grown a little, he weans them from the sweet breast so that they might be strengthened, lays aside their swaddling bands, and puts them down from his arms that they may grow accustomed to walking by themselves."

As we can see, on St. John's path, spiritual consolations (i.e. feelings of inner peace and joy in God, etc.) are necessary for beginners.  They are of great benefit to help the novice remain on the spiritual path.  But eventually, as with the things of the world, attachments to these feelings must also be rejected.  And the soul is not strong enough to do this on its own.  Ultimately, the soul must be passive, and allow God to do this work. 
 

"...until a soul is placed by God in the passive purgation of that dark night....it cannot purify itself completely of these imperfections or others. But people should insofar as possible strive to do their part in purifying and perfecting themselves and thereby merit God's divine cure. In this cure God will heal them of what through their own efforts they were unable to remedy. No matter how much individuals do through their own efforts, they cannot purify themselves enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge them in that fire that is dark for them..."

And yet the Passive Night of the Senses is not the end of the journey, nor the last struggle that the soul will encounter.  The final, most intense, night is still to come. 
 

The Ascent of Mount Carmel | Aside – St. John's Description of Union with God

In Book 2, Chapter 5 of The Ascent, St. John describes both the nature of union with God, and his overarching method for achieving it – depriving oneself of all that is not God.   
 

"To understand the nature of this union, one should first know that God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially, even though it may be that of the greatest sinner in the world.  This union between God and creatures always exists.  By it he conserves their being so that if the union should end they would immediately be annihilated and cease to exist.  Consequently, in discussing union with God we are not discussing the substantial union that always exists, but the soul's union with and transformation in God that does not always exist, except where there is likeness of love.  We call it the union of likeness; and the former, the essential or substantial union.  The union of likeness is supernatural; the other, natural.  The supernatural union exists when God's will and the soul's are in conformity, so that nothing in the one is repugnant to the other.  When the soul rids itself completely of what is repugnant and unconformed to the divine will, it rests transformed in God through love... a soul must strip itself of everything pertaining to creatures and of its actions and abilities (of its understanding, satisfaction, and feeling), so that when everything unlike and unconformed to God is cast out, it may receive the likeness of God.  And the soul will receive this likeness because nothing contrary to the will of God will be left in it.  Thus it will be transformed in God."

Especially in this second quotation, St. John describes what in the Eastern Orthodox tradition would be called theois, or divinization – the soul becoming like (or even becoming) God.  
 

"A soul makes room for God by wiping away all the smudges and smears of creatures, by uniting its will perfectly to God's; for to love is to labor to divest and deprive oneself for God of all that is not God.  When this is done the soul will be illumined by and transformed in God.  And God will so communicate his supernatural being to the soul that it will appear to be God himself and will posses what God himself possesses.  When God grants this supernatural favor to the soul, so great a union is caused that all the things of both God and the soul become one in participant transformation and the soul appears to be God more than a soul.  Indeed it is God by participation."

Appeal to God as a Solution to The Absurd

The Myth of Sisyphus has always stuck in my head. 

In the story, as punishment for a crime (apparently his crime differs in various versions of the story), Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to an eternity of labor.  His task is to push a boulder up to the top of a mountain, knowing that each time he reaches the top, the boulder will come tumbling down and he will have to start again.  This is his task for all eternity.  Heavy labor which serves no purpose; endless, exhausting, meaningless work.  Work he knows is meaningless.  

Albert Camus wrote a famous essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus in which he uses Sisyphus as an example of the Absurd Man – the person who accepts the absurdity of life and embraces it.  He concludes his essay with these thoughts:
 

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

For Camus, "the absurd" is "the divorce between the actor and his setting."  We find ourselves as beings who desire meaning and purpose, only to be put in a world in which meaning seems absent.  We live.  We die, and seemingly enter an eternity of non-being.  Anything beyond that is a hope, not knowledge.  All the things we create and accomplish seem to go for naught.  Our work, our lives, seem meaningless in light of our fate. 
 

"...in a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."

"The absurd is born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

"The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation."

Camus' essay is an exploration of whether intellectually accepting that life is absurd should logically lead to suicide or not.  In the end Camus rejects suicide as the logical conclusion of the absurd.

Part of the reason that Camus rejects suicide is that he doesn't think the absurd should be solved.  For Camus, to resolve the problem in any way doesn't do justice to the true nature of life.  We must look absurdity straight in the face and embrace it.  We must be happy Sisyphi.

In the course of his essay, Camus interacts with other philosophers who "solve" absurdity in some way.  One example is Soren Kierkegaard who, in the end, appeals to God as a solution to the absurd.
 

"For him...antinomy and paradox become criteria of the religious. Thus, the very thing that led to despair of the meaning and depth of this life now gives it its truth and clarity. Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: 'The sacrifice of the intellect.' This effect of the 'leap' is odd, but must not surprise us any longer. He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other world, whereas it is simply a residue of the experience of this world. 'In his failure,' says Kierkegaard, 'the believer finds his triumph.'

It is not for me to wonder to what stirring preaching this attitude is linked. I merely have to wonder if the spectacle of the absurd and its own character justifies it. On this point, I know that it is not so. Upon considering again the content of the absurd, one understands better the method that inspired Kierkegaard. Between the irrational of the world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd, he does not maintain the equilibrium. He does not respect the relationship that constitutes, properly speaking, the feeling of absurdity. Sure of being unable to escape the irrational, he wants at least to save himself from that desperate nostalgia that seems to him sterile and devoid of implication. But if he may be right on this point in his judgment, he could not be in his negation. If he substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic adherence, at once he is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him and to deify the only certainty he henceforth possesses, the irrational. The important things, as Abbe Galiani said to Mme d'Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments. Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied wish, and it runs throughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to escape the antinomy of the human condition."

For Kierkegaard, God solves the absurd, either simply because He willed our existence or because He makes possible a better future (i.e. Heaven) – a future which retrospectively makes sense of the present.  

In the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the writer of Ecclesiastes makes the same move.  He first spends chapter after chapter lamenting the seeming meaninglessness of life:
 

"Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever... There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after."

"I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This is also vanity. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun...What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity."

"But all this I laid to heart, examining it all, how the righteous and the wise and their deeds are in the hands of God. Whether it is love or hate, man does not know; both are before him. It is the same for all, since the same event (death) happens to the righteous and the wicked, the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to him who sacrifices and him who does not sacrifice. As the good one is, so is the sinner, and he who swears as he who shuns an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that same event happens to all. Also, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But he who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun."

But, like Kierkegaard, in the end The Preacher appeals to God:
 

"The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil."

Even though he doesn't have a firm eschatology to speak of (although he may be alluding to the hope of a final judgment), he solves the absurd by appealing to our duty to God.  For the writer, this is what gives our life meaning.  It is what we are here for. 

Camus sees this as a cop-out, a turning away from the true nature of life.  

I just don't.  I agree with Camus that, without appealing to some type of meaning giver, or some final eschatological solution, life remains absurd.  We hunger for meaning, we want the things we do to be important in some way, but, in the end, we return to dust.  On that view, it will not matter whether we were ever alive or not.  Ultimately nothing will have mattered.  

But I disagree with Camus in that I don't think it's a cop out to look for, and ultimately embrace, an intellectual solution to the absurd.  Accepting the absurd is depressing as hell.  

And so I appeal to God.  Along with Kierkegaard and The Preacher, I hope that this will all somehow all make sense in the end.  That there is something more to existence than a meaningless life and then an eternity of nothingness.  That God is somehow both the Creator and the Redeemer of life.  I don't know what that might look like, and the different religions all have different conceptions of how it will be in the end.  But living with that faith gives me hope, and it allows me to find meaning in life as it is.  
Victor Frankl once wrote:
 

"...ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man... What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic."

We don't know what the ultimate meaning of life is.  But the hope that there is one is a hope that can keep me going.  Maybe there are some out there who can be happy Sisyphi, but I can't keep pushing a rock up a hill without the hope that it's for some greater purpose.  

Opportunity to Support the Site

Hi all.  

This site has been a really good outlet for me.  It has helped me process my own faith journey, continue to explore contemplative practices and traditions, and keep on trying to understand how it all fits together.  I enjoy writing here as a way to process it all.  

Overall, I think the best thing this site has to offer is introducing people to the contemplative practices.  For me, that's Centering Prayer.  It's interesting to read the mystics and consider the theologies and philosophies that come out of their writings, but the practices are what it's all about.  These practices can change people.  I truly believe that.  

If you'd like to support the site, the best thing you can do is get a free copy of An Introduction to Centering Prayer and post a rating or review.  That's it.  Pretty easy, right?  Getting the tract and leaving a rating or review helps lead more people to the practice and introduces them to the material on this site.  

Reviews of my other books, The Evangelical Experience and A Great Tragedy, are also always appreciated and help make my content more visible.  I will always be willing to shoot you a free e-book copy in exchange for an honest review!  Just email anthony@thecontemplativelife.org to ask!

Thanks for considering, and I wish you the best wherever you are on your journey,

Anthony