Will this be a good new year? I am encouraged by news (courtesy of Heartfulness meditations) that, in Asia, sports stadiums have been booked for the benefit of those who wish to spend today in meditation. Wow!
I can't imagine such a thing in this country, where money, noise, and football dominate the sports culture. Of course, many people today pray, I hope for world peace and (I hope) for the inner peace that makes interaction with each other peaceable. We have to work hard, day by day, for a less violent world.
How can we do less hating? A message from Richard Rohr at the end of the old year reminds us that cognitive science shows that the brain holds on to negative thoughts (like Velcro) whereas positive thoughts slip off (like Teflon). To retain a positive experience, he says, you have to intentionally hold on to it for fifteen seconds to allow it to imprint your brain.
This means we have to deliberately, consciously choose to love rather than to hate. The fear that leads to anger and hate comes easily, just as the memories of being wounded cling to the brain; but to re-wire ourselves to be positive, caring, and compassionate requires an effort. It takes work to remain each day in the present moment rather than recalling old hurts and hatreds.
As Rohr says, many decent people in our society, in churches as well as in politics, are much more at home with hate than with love; and they don't know this. They have not been taught to focus on the good.
So, to live in a loving way and thus to make an individual contribution to the greater good, requires great spiritual work. No one ever said that peace came easily.
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Sunday, January 1, 2017
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Fast and Furious: A reflection on time
Has any period in history felt that it has less time than ours? That is one of the many significant questions raised in an article by the editors of the journal n+1. It's called "Too Fast, Too Furious."
The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society." Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?
The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.
At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.
In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?
Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.
Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life. We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.
The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."
There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.
The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society." Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?
The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.
At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.
In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?
Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.
Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life. We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.
The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."
There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Yearning for Silence
Tim Parks, an Englishman living in Italy, is an interesting writer whose books about Italian culture I have enjoyed. A recent piece of his in Aeon magazine, however, struck me as missing the mark a bit, although, being about his personal spiritual quest, Who am I to judge? (as someone else recently asked)
His topic is the yearning for silence, a topic of great importance to me. He says we fear silence and long for it at the same time because it involves the end of the self. Huh?
Well, Parks, having no religious experience with prayer and with only a 10-day Buddhist retreat under his belt, finds that a discussion of silence involves consciousness and selfhood, with which I agree; but it also involves, he says, "the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self." But it's more than Self!
His Vipassana experience taught him that "our excessive interest in our own wordy thoughts" can dissolve as language melts away during the meditative breathing but that meditative "techniques" return us to the noisy self, the busy mind, something most people understandably long to escape from. And he learned what most beginners know: that silence and stillness are related.
Parks does not seem aware that he is on the edge of the ancient mystical tradition of contemplative prayer, the practice of the presence of God in silence. Whether or not this is a technique or not, it is lifelong pursuit (for monastics and laypeople alike) of the union of the self with God in which the self falls away; but this is not a loss but a fullness of experience.
The experience of God-with-us-now in the present moment is a loss of the self-conscious self but also a discovery, according to Thomas Merton, of the true self, the one known by God, who dwells within at the center of our being.
I hope Parks looks more deeply into silence and practices it regularly, that he reads Merton and Thomas Keating, John Main, and others like him in the Christian tradition. Their work is richer than the essentially secular and limited approach he has outlined in which the fear of death and the loss of the self becomes the result of silent meditation.
I want to tell him: What seems to be lost in the darkness of silence is the self, but that is only the first step on the mystical path that can't be clearly explained, even by great poets like John of the Cross or T. S. Eliot, except to say it involves finding the true self in the love of God.
That may not make any sense to some readers, and I am not sure I understand it myself. That's why we call it a mystery, the kind without a solution or answer.
His topic is the yearning for silence, a topic of great importance to me. He says we fear silence and long for it at the same time because it involves the end of the self. Huh?
Well, Parks, having no religious experience with prayer and with only a 10-day Buddhist retreat under his belt, finds that a discussion of silence involves consciousness and selfhood, with which I agree; but it also involves, he says, "the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self." But it's more than Self!
His Vipassana experience taught him that "our excessive interest in our own wordy thoughts" can dissolve as language melts away during the meditative breathing but that meditative "techniques" return us to the noisy self, the busy mind, something most people understandably long to escape from. And he learned what most beginners know: that silence and stillness are related.
Parks does not seem aware that he is on the edge of the ancient mystical tradition of contemplative prayer, the practice of the presence of God in silence. Whether or not this is a technique or not, it is lifelong pursuit (for monastics and laypeople alike) of the union of the self with God in which the self falls away; but this is not a loss but a fullness of experience.
The experience of God-with-us-now in the present moment is a loss of the self-conscious self but also a discovery, according to Thomas Merton, of the true self, the one known by God, who dwells within at the center of our being.
I hope Parks looks more deeply into silence and practices it regularly, that he reads Merton and Thomas Keating, John Main, and others like him in the Christian tradition. Their work is richer than the essentially secular and limited approach he has outlined in which the fear of death and the loss of the self becomes the result of silent meditation.
I want to tell him: What seems to be lost in the darkness of silence is the self, but that is only the first step on the mystical path that can't be clearly explained, even by great poets like John of the Cross or T. S. Eliot, except to say it involves finding the true self in the love of God.
That may not make any sense to some readers, and I am not sure I understand it myself. That's why we call it a mystery, the kind without a solution or answer.
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