Yoga to Ease Anxiety
  • Home
  • Books
  • Class Plans, Essays
  • About Me
  • Blog

Stages of Mysticism: a Synopsis of Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism (Part One)

1/18/2017

2 Comments

 
PictureEvelyn Underhill (1875-1941) Photo credit: William Edward Downey. Public Domain
Evelyn Underhill was born a mystic. She experienced spontaneous unitive states of consciousness from an early age. As an adult, she studied and wrote about mysticism both to deepen her own understanding and to advocate the practices that nurture what she saw as one of the most important experiences a person can have.

She wrote the short, dense book, Practical Mysticism: a Little Book for Normal People, in 1915 as a guide for the “everyman” of her era.  (As she used the masculine normative throughout, I’ve decided not to mark each instance with a [sic] for ease of reading. Please forgive me this lenience.) Underhill firmly believed that mystical experiences are available to all who truly pursue them.

She admits that the topic is usually reserved for those cloistered away, and then goes on to say: “Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this message so needed by your time—or rather, by your want of time—is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf.”

In other words, it was written for people going about their workaday lives with little or no comprehension of what she calls Reality, with a capital "R," which different people call the Ultimate, the Absolute, God, Allah, Brahman, the Sacred, and so on.

I believe that her message is just as important to us today, if not more so as the stakes are raised in our time concerning the future of humankind. But her writing style is challenging, to say the least. What I propose to write here is a series of posts that will provide a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of that already little book. I am doing this mostly, if I’m candid, to help myself and maybe others parse its compressed and nearly antiquated early 20th century prose into something more manageable for the early 21st century mind. That said, I find many of her florid turns of phrase to be both spot on and delightful, and at times, like in the above quotation, to show important consistencies between our times. Therefore, I will use her words liberally throughout.
​
Let’s get started.

​Chapter One: What is Mysticism?

​“Mysticism,” as Underhill defines it, “is the act of union with Reality.”

Setting aside, until chapter two, the question of what exactly Reality is, we are asked instead to consider the word “union.” Union, she says, is happening all the time. It is not some “rare and unimaginable operation” but instead something we are always doing. We are uniting with something, “in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every moment,” and “with intensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments” of our lives.

So, the question isn’t whether we will experience union, but “what, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon—with what aspects of the universe shall it ‘unite’?”

The problem is that most of us spend our time uniting with things that are superficial and impermanent, less than Reality. At the root of this problem, according to Underhill, is the question of labels.

 “Because mystery is horrible to us,” she says, “we have agreed . . . to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

To put this another way, we are separated from Reality because we automatically categorize sensations and perceptions. We spontaneously label everything. But labels misrepresent reality because words and the mental categories they create are necessarily less than the experiences they represent. It is this veil of words, of superimposed mental categories, that prevents us from experiencing, “uniting,” with Reality directly.

​But we can overcome this separation by learning to experience our sensations directly, through “contemplative consciousness,” which is a faculty we all have. That will be the focus of chapter three. But before we get there, we need to talk about Reality.

​Chapter 2: The World of Reality

In her second chapter, Underhill takes on the question she set aside at the beginning of chapter one: how to describe the experience of Reality.

When we “reach out and unite with the fact, instead of our notion of it,” she says, we experience “direct communion.” When we achieve “an ideal state of receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence of things,” then there is an experience of “absolute sensation.”

“It is,” she goes on, “a pure feeling-state, in which the fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness of communion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way which the reason can never understand, that Totality of which fragments are known by the lover, the musician, the artist.”

OK, let’s back up a bit and recap. To begin with, we are always uniting with some aspect of Reality, however shallow that encounter might be. And sometimes the encounter takes on greater depth—in love and in creative acts. (And I wonder if we should consider adding here reverie and all of those events which these days we might call “peak experiences” à la Maslow and “flow experiences” à la Csíkszentmihályi.) Then, in the mystical experience, the encounter is no longer with only a piece of Reality: it is complete immersion.

Moving forward again, Underhill begins to explain how to cultivate this experience when she says, “Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too arrogant to still our thoughts, and let divine sensation have its way.”

She tells us, “It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition: for the process involves a veritable spring cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramophone within.”

​This spring cleaning of our inner lives is a necessary step in learning how to refrain from subjecting our immediate experience of sensations “to the cooking, filtering process of the brain.” Continuing on this theme, in chapter three we will learn “to put the emphasis upon the message from without, rather than on (our) own reaction to and rearrangement of it.”

​Chapter 3: The Preparation of the Mystic

According to Underhill, there are “two great phases in the education of every contemplative . . . the purification of the senses and the purification of the will,” also known as Recollection and Purgation." And both are achieved through "self-simplification.”

“What is it that smears the windows of the senses?” Underhills asks. And she answers, “thought, convention, self-interest.” Later she adds, “Religion, priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes.”

To make this clearer, she says, “To ‘purify’ the senses is to release them . . . from the tyranny of egocentric judgments . . . to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondence; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, ‘What does it mean to me?’”

Ok, you may be saying, I get it. I’m supposed to stop filtering sensations through my preconceived, enculturated categories. But how do I do that? I believe that Underhill would have us find inner stillness.

“At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm of bees. The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears to be a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not as hopeless for you as it seems. All this is only happening upon the periphery of the mind, where it touches and reacts to the world of appearance. At the centre there is a stillness which even you are not able to break. There, the rhythm of your duration is one with the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists: the permanent being which persist through and behind the flow and change of your conscious states.”

Finding this stillness, she says, is comparable to the “Eastern visionary” beckoning us to “Take your seat within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus,” or the Christian mystic urging us to “Hold thou to thy Centre.”

“This is a practical recipe,” she says, “not a pious exhortation. The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if you will: stand back, as it were, from the vague and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain detachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it.”

Through this “deliberate withdrawal of attention from the bewildering multiplicity of things” we begin to simplify and purify the will until it can “retreat to the unity of its spirit.” And there we unite not just with our own eternal spirit but successively with the “three levels of existence: which we may call the Natural, the Spiritual, and the Divine.” She also calls these levels the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and the Absolute or God.

Finally, Underhill sets out the path in toto:

“We begin, therefore, to see that the task of union with Reality will involve certain stages of preparation as well as stages of attainment; and these stages of preparation . . . may be grouped under two heads. First, the disciplining and simplifying of the attention. . . . Next the disciplining and simplifying of the affections and will, the orientation of the heart. . . . So the practical mysticism of the plain man will best be grasped by him as a five-fold scheme of training and growth: in which the first two stages prepare the self for union with Reality, and the last three unite it successively with the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and finally with that Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absolute and the religious mystic calls God.”

The next couple chapters go further into the practices of Recollection and Purgation, which we might also call meditation and detachment.

​To be continued . . .
2 Comments

Humility, Detachment, and Mindfulness: Connections in The Eagle’s Gift

12/1/2016

1 Comment

 
“Relax, abandon yourself, fear nothing. Only then will the powers that guide us open the road and aid us. Only then.”
Treading with caution, I returned to my notes from Carlos Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift to see what time and a clearer head might reveal. What I found was an interesting set of statements that show the connection between humility, detachment, and being present to this moment, or, as some people call it, mindfulness.

​​Humility

Let me jump right in with our first term: humility. Castaneda repeatedly refers to the necessity of humility, but never does he get to the heart of the matter so clearly as when he is explaining the “rule of stalkers,” which he assures us “applies to everyone.”
  • “The first precept of the rule is that everything that surrounds us is an unfathomable mystery."
  • “The second precept of the rule is that we must try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish this."
  • “The third, that a warrior, aware of the unfathomable mystery that surrounds him and aware of his duty to try to unravel it, takes his rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one. Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a warrior’s humbleness. One is equal to everything.”
OK so, we know absolutely nothing because it is all mystery. Plus, we are no more or less special, and no more or less mysterious, than a pebble. If everything is equally part of the unfathomable whole, then no part takes precedence. Living this realization induces utter humility, and humility is necessary to gaining detachment: "[O]ne has to be utterly humble and carry nothing to defend . . . ."

​​Detachment and Mindfulness

Detachment, by which is meant the state of having overcome one's attachment to people, things, ideas, etc., is a fundamental aspect of Eastern spiritual paths but less prevalent, to my knowledge, in Western and tribal religions. (Though I’d love to be hear about examples from those traditions if they exist.)

Castaneda describes his capacity for detachment when he says, “I had learned to enter into a state of total quietness. I was able to turn off my internal dialogue and remain as if I were inside a cocoon, peeking out of a hole. In that state I could . . . remain passive, thoughtless, and without desires.”

In a further description of the state of detachment, he gives more detail and begins to tie it to mindfulness. “It was rather an alien feeling of aloofness, a capability of immersing myself in the moment and having no thoughts whatever about anything else. People’s actions no longer affected me, for I had no more expectations of any kind. A strange peace had become the ruling force in my life.”

What I appreciate most is Castaneda’s insight, as we see in the next quotation, that detachment is not in itself a sign of spiritual advancement. It is simply another state of consciousness we can train ourselves to hold. On its own it has benefits but it is not the goal. “[D]etachment,” he explains, “did not automatically mean wisdom, but . . . was nonetheless an advantage because it allowed the warrior to pause momentarily to reassess situations, to reconsider positions. In order to use that extra moment consistently and correctly, however, . . . a warrior had to struggle unyieldingly for a lifetime.”
To emphasize this point and the connection between detachment and mindfulness, here is another instance where Casteneda reiterates that the experience of detachment and being "immersed in the moment" is value-free: “An aspect of being detached, the capacity to become immersed in whatever one is doing, naturally extends to everything one does, including being inconsistent, and outright petty. The advantage . . . is that it allows us a moment’s pause, providing that we have the self-discipline and courage to utilize it.”

It is unclear from this book, at least to me, how we should use the pause to our best advantage.

​​Further Questions

Castaneda does not make it a point to delineate the connection I'm pointing out here: humility—detachment—present to the moment. It is just something that struck me as I read through my notes. What also struck me, again, was the absence of any mention of compassion. Yes, he talks about being “impeccable,” and having “a consistency of character.” But these are not the equal of what other traditions describe as ahimsa, compassion, altruism, or unconditional love.

Georg Feuerstein said detachment must be balanced by compassion. Compassion is the arrow on the moral compass that allows detachment and mindfulness to make us more human.

Perhaps that gets to the issue I have with Castaneda. His view of spiritual advancement, like so many others, is exclusively about transcendence, "losing the human form," and becoming pure energy. Maybe that is behind his literary and actual treatment of women, with our blood and birth and milk making us oh so very embodied. We represent everything that holds humanity in its animal form. 

I personally don’t want to overcome being human. I want to come to peace with it, to integrate the various aspects of this existence and experience that sacred wholeness. And this opens up the discussion about the difference between transcendent and integral forms of spiritual understanding, which will have to happen on another day.

In the end, there is indeed a useful reminder here. First we must be humble, see ourselves as equal to the dirt of the earth. When we can cease to see ourselves as special and realize we are just as mysterious and as ordinary as everyone and everything else, it becomes easier to relax our grip on the relationships and attachments that tether us to the past and to the future. When we release them and becoem detached, then we can completely inhabit the present moment. That is the order: humility, detachment, mindfulness.

​Further than that, Castaneda does not seem ready to go in this book. In fact, he appears to think it is enough in itself, if we gauge from this pivotal “incantation” he recites at a time when his inner world was in cataclysmic turmoil.

“I am already given to the power that rules my fate.
And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend.
I have no thoughts, so I will see.
I fear nothing, so I will remember myself.
Detached and at ease,
I will dart past the Eagle to be free.”


Do you think it is enough?
Picture
Blown Dandelion by John Liu. CC BY 2.0
1 Comment

Looking a Gift Eagle in the Mouth

11/25/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
This month (November 2016) we've been reading The Eagle's Gift​ by Carlos Castaneda in the Modern Mystic Book Club, and I am struggling with it.

I am having a hard time with Castaneda himself. Maybe this is a generational thing since I know a lot of boomers embraced him (I'm Gen X); or maybe it’s an artifact of my academic training, not being able to see the forest for the trees (but these are some massive trees).

It’s quite likely that I’m missing information, since The Eagle’s Gift is the first of his books that I’ve read but the sixth that he wrote. However, I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching him now, and the more I do, the more uncomfortable I become. This article at Salon.com is a good summary of the events I refer to here.

I realize that what I’ve written below is harsh, and I do not mean to detract from anyone’s experience. We find doors to growth wherever they appear. I am simply putting forward my own encounter with the material and the questions that surfaced through it. I would gladly listen to alternate points of view and hope they are forthcoming.
**********
To begin, the experience of reading the book was not rewarding. I felt like I was slogging through miles of literary shallows to get to one piece of rehashed spiritual philosophy. When there was something new, it was often disturbing, especially those claims that advocate manipulation: statements such as stalkers are “consummate artists in bending people to their wishes.” And “a teacher must trick the disciple.”

Plus, there is this merciless attitude toward “humans” and “human-ness” throughout, as well as a division of the sexes that characterizes most of the females as crazy or lacking in intellect. Not all, but most. I get that he was talking about losing the ego when he said he and others were becoming less human, and that’s not my problem. My problem is that there’s no compassion for anyone outside of the characters in the groups, and little even for them.

The part where he implies that “don Juan” was not celibate, even though he claimed to be, smacked of revisionism of his own created mythology and led me to wonder how much of this and his other books were written with his harem and cult followers in mind, to continue to bend them to his will.
**********
Don Juan never existed. Castaneda’s master’s thesis, which became his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, (as well as everything that followed and hinged on it) was at least in great part fabrication. He stitched together elements from the research of other anthropologists, as well as the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism, to create a tapestry of beliefs and then passed them off as authentic indigenous spirituality. I find this mortifying. He purposefully misrepresented the sacred traditions of indigenous people for his own gain. (He backpedaled on the Yaqui derivation of his mythology early on and in The Eagle’s Gift as well.)

I get that many people have been deeply influenced by Castaneda’s works. They contend that there’s still merit in his books regardless of them being based on lies for profit. But because of his methodology of lifting the actual practices and philosophy from several traditions and schools, I doubt he presents anything new that we can’t find somewhere else in a more honest and encompassing way.

That he used his fame and charisma to become a manipulative cult leader only takes me past discomfort into full blown disgust. Like the imaginary don Juan, Castaneda claimed to be celibate while using his position of power to lure young women into his sphere, and then flattered and seduced them - bending them to his wishes. Not only did he have sex with them, but he dictated their appearance and created an atmosphere of jealousy and rivalry through his distribution of affection.
**********
Our discussion group has talked before about finding value in the message regardless of the messenger. But when does it just become too much? Should we trust an author like Castaneda when we know what we do about him?

I am reminded of the ethical dilemma that scientists faced after WWII: should we or should we not use the findings of the grotesquely horrible experiments Nazi doctors performed on concentration camp inmates? The fact that this even comes to mind says something about how repelled I am by Castaneda.

And that was science—where it is conceivable on some level to separate results of at least certain kinds of experiments from their circumstances; and where those who were experimented on may have found at least a modicum of solace had they known their suffering would benefit future generations.

But this is spirit—and we’re back to the same question: can you separate the message from the messenger? The sacred journey is an aspect of the human experience that has universally (?) held honesty and compassion as foundational. Can someone lacking those qualities be a worthy guide? (I'm open to examples of spiritual paths that disregard honesty and compassion. None come to mind, but that doesn't mean that none exist.)

I spend a lot of time in the yogasphere, where we are up against this question all the damn time. Bikram is only the loudest current example of it; for decades the people around him advocated tuning in to “the message not the man.” And during all of that time, the abuse persisted.
**********
There is much more to this story but for now and for the purposes of discussion here, my question to you is, what if any redeeming value is there in Castaneda’s work? 

0 Comments

On the Cloud of Unknowing: Medieval Mysticism from a Yogic Perspective

8/24/2016

2 Comments

 
PictureDark Cloud Silver Lining, by Nareign. CC BY 3.0
The Cloud of Unknowing is a classic text of medieval Christian mysticism.* For some, this book has just too much about our “wretched sinful nature.” I completely understand. It took me some time to process my initial negative reaction. I wrote about that here. And now? I am absolutely digging The Cloud! And I want to tell you why.

In amongst all the talk of sin and the devil and our shame and guilt and puniness, there is the essence of mysticism. Check this out: after our anonymous author bids us not to be “inside yourself, outside yourself, above yourself, behind yourself, or on one side or the other” (chapter 68), he tells us spiritual work should feel as if we are doing exactly nothing.

“Continue doing that nothing, as long as you are doing it for the love of God. Do not stop. Work hard at it with a powerful desire to be with an unknowable God. . . . [C]hoose ‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothingness.’ Do not worry if you are not able to figure this out in your mind. That is the way it is supposed to be. This nothingness lies beyond your grasp. It can be felt more easily than seen. It envelopes those who contemplate it even briefly in blinding darkness. An abundance of spiritual light creates this darkness. Only our outward nature calls it ‘All.’ It teaches the essence of all things, both physical and spiritual, without giving specific attention to any one thing alone. The experience of this ‘nothing’ that happens ‘nowhere’ dramatically transforms our love” (68-69).

Do nothing; be nowhere; become transformed. That's the message of the mystics throughout the ages. Elsewhere he says, much as the Tao does, to “Think of yourself as wood in a carpenter’s hands, or as a house in which someone else lives” (34). But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Goal

​A mystical path is one of seeking union with the Ultimate, and that is our author’s stated purpose. “I desire to help you tighten the spiritual knot of warm love that is between you and God, to lead you to spiritual unity with God” (47).

The method he advocates is contemplative prayer. This is not the kind of prayer I grew up with. Not “Now I lay me down to sleep” or reciting the rosary. This is not the freeform supplications of Sunday morning or even Wednesday evening preachers. To describe what he means, our nameless author says, “The essence of contemplation is a simple and direct reaching out to God. People who pray at this depth do not seek relief from pain nor do they seek increased rewards . . . ” (24).  They are not praying for anything; well, not for anything other than moving closer to God.

Also super important, our author does not see God as a father-figure God, a jealous God, or any other form of God that can be described. “[Y]ou are far better off contemplating God’s pure and simple being, separated from all his divine attributes” (5). Much later he says, “We speak one way with people, and another way with God” (47). In fact in this type of prayer, “Words are rarely used” (37).

Contemplation is wordless prayer to a formless God.

The Work

PictureInfrared Dark Cloud, NASA public domain.
Contemplative prayer isn’t easy. In fact, “Everyone finds contemplation difficult,” he says, “regardless of personal experience” (29).  It is hard and constant work, as we see in these admonitions:
  • “Devote yourself now to a time of contemplation. Beat upon this cloud of unknowing. Rest will come later. This will be hard work, unless you receive a special grace. Let it become habitual from continual practice” (26).
  • “Though I highly recommend brief prayer, there is no limit on the frequency of prayer” (39).
  •  “You do not have any freedom to practice moderation during contemplation” (41).
  • “Engage in it tirelessly for the rest of your life” (41).

​He does not, however, advocate “vulgar straining.” Rather he beseeches the reader to “discover how to love God joyfully with a gentle and peaceful disposition of body and soul” (46).

To accomplish this “devout intention directed to God” (39) we must forget everything else: “Let modest love prompt you to lift up your heart to God. Seek only God. Think of nothing else other than God. Keep your mind free of other thoughts. Give no attention to the things of this world” (3).

This instruction to turn our thoughts away from worldly things is central to contemplative prayer, because “whatever you think about looms above you while you are thinking about it, and it stands between you and God” (5).  “Whatever you think about”—we are to forget about everything, even things we might not consider worldly, things we would consider sacred—everything but God.
  • “Even holy work interferes with meditation. Similarly, you will find it inappropriate and cumbersome to think profound holy thoughts while working in this darkness of the cloud of unknowing” (8).
  • “Thinking about humility, charity, patience, abstinence, hope, faith, temperance, chastity, or voluntary poverty is counterproductive” (40).
  • “Forget about time, place, and body when you engage in spiritual effort” (59).
  • “Put distracting ideas under a cloud of forgetting. In contemplation, forget everything, including yourself and your accomplishments” (43).

Our author recognizes the difficulty of this, especially in letting go of the self. He offers a few pieces of advice that we’ll recognize as encouraging mindfulness, such as “Pay attention, then, to how you spend your time” (4), and “I want you to evaluate carefully each thought that stirs in your mind when you contemplate God” (11). At one point he entreats his reader to relax completely, realizing the impossibility of our effort, and to accept ourselves as we truly are (32). “Nothing humbles us,” he says, “more than seeing ourselves clearly” (13).

Clearing the mind of thoughts about oneself is key to clearing the mind of everything: “You can see that if you are able to destroy an awareness of your own being, all other hindrances to divine contemplation will also vanish” (44).

There is one tool that our author offers to help us control the wandering mind, and that is to choose a word and hold fast to it.

“You may wish to reach out to God with one simple word that expresses your desire. A single syllable is better than a word with two or more. ‘God’ and ‘love’ provide excellent examples of such words. Once you have selected the word you prefer, permanently bind this word to your heart. This word becomes your shield and spear in combat and in peace. Use this word to beat upon the cloudy darkness above you and to force every stray thought down under a cloud of forgetting. . . . Do not allow the word to become fragmented. If you keep it intact, I can assure you distractions will soon diminish”(7).

But earlier, you may be saying, didn't he say this type of prayer was different, wordless? The difference is in the way we use the word: “Let the word remain in a single lump, a part of yourself” (36). He is not advocating using words to ask for anything, nor is he advocating the intellectual investigation of the concept the word represents. That would be futile. Really, he’s quite persistent in reminding us that our thinking minds are unable to comprehend God:

​“[W]e are incapable of thinking of God himself with our inadequate minds. Let us abandon everything within the scope of our thoughts and determine to love what is beyond comprehension. We touch and hold God by love alone” (6).

The purpose of the focal word is to turn off the thinking mind, not encourage it.​

The Cloud

PictureCampfire and Sparks, by Kallerna. CC BY-SA 3.0
​Then, when we have quieted the mind, put all of our thoughts under a cloud of forgetting and set aside even our discriminative faculty, we approach the cloud of unknowing.

“God remains far beyond even our most profound spiritual understanding. We will know God when spiritual understanding fails, because God is where it breaks down. St. Denis wrote, ‘The only divine knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing’” (70).

The experience of the cloud of unknowing, he says, consists of “a dark gazing into the pure being of God” (8).

While he tells his reader that the process is lifelong, the actual experience of union can happen in a flash.

“Genuine contemplation comes as a spontaneous, unexpected moment, a sudden springing toward God that shoots like a spark swirling up from a burning coal. . . . Any one of these sparkling moments may take on a unique quality resulting in a total detachment from the things of this world.”(4)

“Many think contemplative prayer takes a long time to achieve. On the contrary, results may be instantaneous. Only an atom of time, as we perceive it, may pass. In this fraction of a second, something profoundly significant happens. You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God. This brief moment produces the stirring that embodies the greatest work of your soul.” (4)

And that is the end to which he would have us strive: “the greatest work of your soul.” Later he amends himself, saying “Perhaps it would be better to speak of it as a sudden ‘changing’ rather than a stirring” (59).

What exactly is this “greatest work?” What is it that changes? “After God graciously transforms our soul, we begin perceiving what is ordinarily beyond our comprehension” (4). The cloud of unknowing “teaches the essence of all things, both physical and spiritual” (68). We begin to gain control of our will and may come to experience heavenly bliss (4). We find rest for our soul (26). And “Once this moment passes,” he says “prayer for others will be inclusive, caring equally for everyone.” After which he immediately assures us that,
​
“When I speak of the passing of the moment, I do not imply that we come down completely, but rather that we descend from the height of contemplation in order to perform activity required by love” (25).

Perception, presence, bliss, rest, seeing into the essence of things, and recognizing the equal worth of all people—those are the results of union with God.

The Cloud and Yoga

Every one of the mystical elements our author relates is also described somewhere in the Yoga tradition. The Bhagavad Gita tells us to reach toward God with love. The Yoga Sutras tells us that after we still the mind and come to reflect the Sacred, we will have a new perception of reality and control of our will.

In Yoga, some of the tools we use to overcome the self are
  • bhakti: devotion
  • tapas: discipline
  • svadhyaya: study of scriptures and self
  • pratyahara: withdrawing attention from the senses
  • vairagya: detachment from the world outside and from the ego
  • dhyana: meditation

These tools help induce samadhi (union), which results in ananda (bliss).
​
That is what I saw in The Cloud of Unknowing, a stunning description of the timeless human experience of touching the Sacred.

Om / Amen

Picture
Darwin River Dam, by Bidgee. CC BY 3.0.
* Link is to the modern interpretation I use throughout, edited by Bernard Bangley.
2 Comments

​Morality at the Foot of the Mystic Mountain

8/13/2016

2 Comments

 
PictureDharma Wheel on the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha, India
If we start with the idea that all mystical paths lead up the same mountain, it can be a useful exercise to compare the scenery on the different paths, to get an idea of the terrain they all share.

Morality is a prominent feature at the base of the mountain of mysticism, like mesquite trees before moving up in elevation to manzanita and oak here in the desert. Every mystical path begins in the mesquite morality forest. Getting our ethical existence in order is primary, before practice, before higher states, before experiencing the great indiscriminate Absolute.

The eight limbs of Yoga put the yama and niyama (the moral restraints and observances) squarely first. And the noble eightfold path of the Buddha puts right speech, right action, and right livelihood before mindfulness and concentration.

These Eastern schools tell us there is a practical reason for this. We have to get our moral lives tidied up before we can make real progress toward liberation. Otherwise, when we sit to meditate, the inner landscape is cluttered with emotion and thoughts about things left undone.

What I want to explore here is the same idea in Christianity, especially through the perspective of the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing. This little text is a window onto the Christian monastic mysticism of the Middle Ages. Reading this book for the first time, I was surprised at the familiarity of his message. Contemplative prayer has a lot in common with the meditative practices of Yoga, with the goal being to settle the mind on one focal point in order to pierce the Cloud of Unknowing and, eventually, experience Ultimate Reality.

A little background: I was raised in the Catholic Church. It felt very unmystical to me. To my child mind, it appeared to be rule-based and cold—a land of authoritarian priests and nuns; pompous, empty rituals; and an outdated morality shot through with gender inequality. I quit the church in my early teens, rejecting the beliefs of my parents, as we do, in order to become an autonomous young adult with ideas of my own.

In college I studied the Tanakh / Old Testament and the New Testament. I learned the history of Christianity and even some theology. I read the medieval women mystics. But I was always wary. Christianity never attracted me the way Hinduism and Buddhism did.   
​
But that was all a long time ago now, and I was hopeful that I could approach The Cloud in the same way I would any other mystical text—with respect for its parent tradition and seeking what benefit it holds.

All was going well, even delightfully, until our anonymous author started to talk about sin. And not just sinful acts but our “sinful nature.” Call it a stumbling block, a button pusher, a trigger—I had a visceral reaction, my gut and shoulders tightened up, one eye brow raised, and mentally I kept trying to check out, reading without really processing.

Instead of letting myself of the hook, I decided to ask, Where does this come from? What does it mean to the writer and does it mean something different to me? And of course, that’s exactly what was going on.

Sin as Avidya / Ignorance

As kids, moral teachings come across as “This is a sin. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” It’s just a list of rules and proscriptions. This was my experience with Catholicism, because I was a kid.

As adults we can understand that “sin” is anything that moves us away from the Truth, away from the experience of union with God.

(I gotta say, I still don’t have the same experience of the word God that I do with Brahman, the Tao, or the Sacred, though I understand intellectually that they are all referring to the same Ultimate, the Absolute.)

In Yoga, sin is the equivalent of ignorance, avidya. Because we misunderstand the Truth about the sacredness of the world, we act according to our own selfish desires, seeking to affirm our attachment and avoidance preferences. To make progress toward spiritual liberation, we have to learn how to let go of our self-centered and self-constructed desires. Therefore “bad” thoughts, words, and deeds are those that are unwise, that move us away from Truth, and “good” thoughts, words, and deeds are those that are wise and move us closer to it.

In The Cloud of Unknowing, our unknown author tells us that sin is the result of “weakness and lack of understanding.”  Lack of understanding causes misperception, and this faulty perception in turn creates errors in thought and false judgments. The misperception, he says, is cleared up through humility, through selflessness.

He advocates using the word “sin” as the focus of contemplation, not as a reminder of individual acts, the memory of which he says will only distract from contemplation, but as a reminder of the evil that is to be overcome, the ignorance that creates distance from God.


“Sin,” he says, “is an indefinable lump that is nothing other than yourself.” This might seem startling to some, but is this idea so different from the yogic principle that the ego personality, your self, is not your real Self? I proposed it could make sense to think of it in such terms.

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake"

PicturePositivity! (At quotesgram.com, this is labeled as an advertisement.)
But equating the self with "sin," with ignorance and misperception, is difficult for many of us to do for at least two reasons: (1) the baggage of our childhood experiences with Christianity. And (2) 100 years of our culture being imbued with the positivity-at-all-cost model, starting with New Thought, then New Age and the self-esteem movement. We’re so afloat on the power of positive thinking that we shrink back from or rise against anybody who tries to point out our faults.

​We are good. We are worthy. We “deserve the best.” We have been sold the idea that everything ought to make us feel good about ourselves, especially spirituality.

PictureBy SanDorfALot
But go deep enough into any religion, and you’ll be told the opposite. Not only are you not, by default, good and worthy. You are not, as Chuck Palahniuk has Tyler Durden remind us, “a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying matter as everything else.”

There comes a time when we have to learn that we are nothing; we are less than the shit in a fly on the windshield of the Universe. Compared to the vastness of the Absolute; to the eternal nature of the Sacred; and to the inevitability of death, we are terrifyingly meaningless. Our existence is a flash in the pan; we are tiny, fragile, limited, and finite. In fact, a central theme of mysticism is that “you” aren’t even real. You have to let go entirely of any sense of “you” to meet what is Really Real.

This experience of our utter insignificance, trembling before the Ultimate, brought low by the realization of Truth—this is the dark night of the soul. This is the “perfect humility” The Cloud
 talks about. And out the other side of it is the way to knowledge, understanding, and the experience of union.

To tie this with the topic of morality, the author tells us, "Strive for perfect humility. When you have it, you will not commit sin. Once you have experienced a moment of perfect humility, you will remain less susceptible to temptation."

It is these instances of selflessness that change us at the core.

Moving up the Mountain

It’s a long and treacherous path up the mystic mountain, and we prepare for it with morality. “The first step toward contemplation involves cleansing your conscience from sins you know you have committed, following the regular practices of the Holy Church. This will destroy the root and ground of sin in the soul,” says The Cloud.

Just like with the yama and niyama or any seemingly proscriptive list of rules, at first they are external, then with their internalization and with progress on the path, the principles on which those rules are based emerge as part of our perspective, the lens through which we see the word and act within it. With these principles in place, actions in accord with the “rules” spontaneously flow from the movement closer to the Sacred.

Then, with the inner landscape tranquil, we can head up the mystic mountain in earnest.

Now, with this more tolerant and perhaps more mature understanding of sin, God, and humility, I turn back to read The Cloud of Unknowing
 again, to find what waits on this new plateau.
Picture
Table Mountain Contour Path, By Abu Shawka CC0
2 Comments

Embodying the Tao

7/19/2016

1 Comment

 
PictureChinese bone oracle script for "de" or virtue. From the 2nd millennium BCE.
A companion piece to Finding the Tao Within

People who embody the Tao are called by different names in different translations of the Tao Te Ching - sages, masters, holy men, wise men (though the original text doesn't distinguish gender). And these are the people we are called on to emulate. Throughout the text, their virtues are listed and praised.

What follows is my attempt to create a complete and yet succinct list of the characteristics of those who embody the Tao. I suppose I do so in hopes that in remembering to practice these virtues I too might come to embody the Tao, even if only for small moments here and there.

Contentment

Those who embody the Tao
  • Practice contentment; they are free from desire and unaffected by temptations and distraction. They accept what arises and are content and accepting of themselves
  • Do not strive and do not seek success
  • Let go of plans and concepts; they do not set goals
  • Do not chase after what is difficult to obtain
  • Do not wish to stand out but prefer to blend in
  • And they are accepting of death​​

Wu-wei (non-doing)

Those who embody the Tao
  • Practice not-doing; they are unmoving and do not seek
  • Act without action; work without effort; teach without words
  • Let actions come spontaneously
  • Have learned to stop thinking and stop learning; they do not look to others to tell them what to value
  • Practice non-interference and do not meddle; they stay uninvolved

Detachment

Those who embody the Tao
  • Are detached from their actions
  • Don’t try to control things or impose their will on others
  • Have no expectations; they act without agenda
  • Do not cling to the outcome of their work
  • Don’t shy away from something because they may have to give up comfort, because they are not attached to comfort.

Simplicity

Those who embody the Tao
  • Practice simplicity; they conserve time and energy
  • Practice moderation; they eliminate extremes and avoid complexity
  • Focus on basic needs and live simply
  • Stay composed; they don’t become restless; they don’t rush or scurry
  • Do only what needs to be done, and they ask for nothing in return

Non-competitiveness

Those who embody the Tao
  • Manage the ego
  • Are humble and selfless
  • Are unconcerned about ego-gratification; they don’t seek approval or become arrogant or self-satisfied
  • Are not greedy
  • Do not try to put themselves ahead or above anyone
  • Do not seek faults in others
  • Don’t compare or compete; they do not rejoice or gloat in defeating an enemy

Silence, solitude, peace

Those who embody the Tao
  • Practice quietude; they do not talk more than is necessary
  • Practice serenity and tranquility
  • Value peace
  • Embrace solitude

Impartiality & Compassion

Those who embody the Tao
  • Are kind
  • Are impartial they treat everyone and everything as equally valuable; they don’t close their minds with judgments
  • Practice compassion, even toward the ignorant, the bad, or an enemy; they care for all things and people; they are available to all people
  • Are tolerant and amused

Integrity

Those who embody the Tao
  • Are forthright; they do not use cunning or contrivance
  • Have integrity; they are genuine and incorruptible
  • Are dignified and courteous; they respect themselves and others
  • Don’t practice superficial virtues to look good to others
  • Abide in the depth of substance, in what is real
  • Are aware when things are out of balance; they assess situations without becoming part of them
  • Maintain awareness of what is essential, the heart of each matter; they are able to read situations and respond appropriately without ever leaving their calm center
  • Are circumspect and serious when it is called for
  • Do not forget their humanness
  • Understand the whole and view the parts with compassion
  • Admit to faults and to not knowing; they know that they do not know
  • Are careful and alert; they are as careful at the end as at the beginning
  • Fulfill obligations and correct their mistakes

Patience and acceptance

Those who embody the Tao
  • Are patient; they allow things to unfold, to take their natural course, to come and go; they have faith in the way things are
  • Keep their hearts open
  • Trust their inner vision; they remain open so they can listen to their intuition
  • Are loose and fluid; they are receptive, supple, yielding, weak, bending, flexible
  • Do not become defensive
  • Embrace paradox; they understand they must let go to receive; be weak to find strength; be soft to endure; They recognize that the Tao/true virtue may appear otherwise from outside: great integrity can appear like disgrace; perfection can seem flawed; fullness can seem empty
Picture
1 Comment

Finding the Tao Within

7/18/2016

1 Comment

 
PictureDetail from Celtic Horse Gear, Santon, Norfolk. Mid-first Century AD. Photo by Gun Powder Ma. CC BY-SA 3.0
Like the philosophy it espouses, the Tao Te Ching is a fluid text. It meanders this way and that, whirls in gentle circles, and burbles along contentedly. Reading it is like sitting by a quietly flowing stream.

After working with various versions of the Tao these past few weeks, I found myself seeking straightforward answers. What exactly should I be doing? How can I turn this babbling brook into a directed stream?

The irony! I get it. Studying the Tao Te Ching is a practice in itself. In its roundabout way, it plants the seeds of patience and contentment and then nourishes them. Wanting to streamline the Tao is like wanting to hurry along the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. It will take its time.

Be that as it may, I did find the following exercise useful in digging deep into the text and to settling my mind. What I did was this, I sat with two versions, Derek Lin's and Stephen Mitchell's, and went through chapter by chapter writing out every piece of advice, every line that gave a command (do this/be this), and every example of what sages and masters do or are. Then I organized them by theme, while putting them in my own much less formal language. 

These ideas, it turned out, could be separated into two categories: (1) finding the Tao within and (2) virtues of the person who is at one with the Tao. Here I'll post the former, with the latter to follow soon.

How to Find the Tao

The Practices
  • The Tao is within. There is no reason to seek it outside of yourself.
  • In order to tune in to the Tao, practice
    • Relaxation
    • Observation
    • Quiet introspection
    • Concentration
  • Work at understanding yourself.
  • Step back from your own mind. Do not cling to ideas. Know that names and institutions are provisional, not the Tao. Empty your mind of what you think you know about the world.
  • Realize all things change and don’t hold on to them.
  • Cultivate the Tao quietly.

About the Practices
  • Through these practices, develop emptiness, non-being, space within.
  • Keep to the discipline and don’t be lured by shortcuts.
  • The process is gradual and steady.
  • When you identify with the Tao
    • You will stay centered in oneness and let things take their course.
    • You will see the world as yourself.
    • You will be at ease.
    • There will be no need to practice individual virtues; virtue arises spontaneously.
Next time, the spontaneously arising virtues . . . 
Picture
Laozi. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra. CC BY 2.0
1 Comment

What is Mysticism?

7/2/2016

0 Comments

 
PictureHildegard von Bingen, 14th cent. manuscript illustration. Public domain.
With the beginning of the Modern Mystic Book Club, I’ve been thinking a lot about this question, What is mysticism? Since I was young—middle school young, maybe even before—I’ve been fascinated by mysticism. To me, mystics were the people who won at life. That was who I wanted to be.
 
So, what is mysticism? That’s a tough one to take straight on. Allow me to come at it from the side: Who is a mystic? Ah, much easier. A mystic is someone who seeks union with the Ultimate . . . .  At least, that is how it is currently defined.
 
In every religion, every spiritual path, there are people who seek firsthand experience of the Absolute, the Sacred, God, Goddess, the Tao, perfect Being, nonbeing, Brahman, nirvana—the Ultimate however their path defines it. These are the mystics, variously called ecstatics, seers, prophets, yogis, fakirs, saints, and more.
 
Mysticism, then, covers everything about their journey. It’s the methods they follow: ethical purity, study, silence, dance, fasting, prayer, meditation, and so on, many of which serve to hollow us out, to empty us of the ego personality.
 
It’s all the results of those practices: the psychological maturity; the compassion and wisdom; the altered states of consciousness, the visions, trances, intuitions; and the union they experience.
 
It’s the descriptions of the Ultimate the mystics return with, as they attempt to put into words what is patently beyond words, relying on paradox to describe the hard won truths they have gathered. And it’s their resignation and admonitions that we must put in the work and see for ourselves.
 
All of this is mysticism, and more.

PictureDervish, 1870s Persia. Public domain.
When I studied comparative mysticism in college, as an undergrad and grad student, the raging debate was between the essentialists and constructivists. (The constructivists also called themselves contextualists and empiricists).

The essentialists claimed some substance to the perennial philosophy, to the idea that all mystics are touching the same Source, even if that similarity was based in the biology of the human brain.
 
The constructivists stood firm in the perspective that all experience is mediated through enculturation and language-based expectations, even mystical experience. And to claim that all mystics are having the same experience is at best wishful thinking. At worst it’s the product of cultural hegemony, erasing difference and replacing it with our own constructs of what we think the mystical experience should be.
 
Twenty-plus years later, the academic study of mysticism appears to have gone full tilt for the latter.
 
I believe both sides have merit. And honestly, I don’t really care if one side is more right than the other. I’m after my own experience. I want to live this life as deeply and as well as I can. I want to know for myself that peace, joy, and assuredness of the mystics. So it occurs to me to return to the sources to find the Source; to seek the advice of others who sought to experience the Ultimate, who touched the godhead and let it transform them. And to let them be my models for how to live.
 
At least very few of them were dicks. ​

0 Comments

The Tao Te Ching (Modern Mystic Book Club #1)

7/1/2016

3 Comments

 
PictureDrawing of Laozi, 1920s. (Public domain)
The Tao Te Ching, or Daodejing in pinyin, is such a fantastic book to begin with! It’s at least 2500 years old, is a foundational text of Taoism, and has been influential in every major religious school in China, including Confucianism and the various incarnations of Chinese Buddhism.

Any verifiable facts about its author Lao Tzu (Loazi) have been lost to history.

The title refers to the fact that there are really two books here: The Tao Ching, which is the first half of the text (chapters 1-37) and the Te Ching (chapters 38-81). If this is your first experience with the Tao Te Ching, don’t worry. The 81 chapters are brief collections of verses.

Picture
Many of us are familiar with the translation of “Tao” as “the Way,” and this is usable if we keep in mind that we are referring to much more than just a path but the all-encompassing, mysterious process of the universe. “Te” means virtue. Ching means something like “important book.” So Classic Texts of the Way and Virtue might be a passable translation of the title.
​
I recommend that we read Derek Lin’s translation. It’s a nice balance of accuracy and fluidity. You can find it free here: http://www.taoism.net/ttc/complete.htm. If you are moved to go deeper, his annotated book is available for around $11 online.

Picture
​A close second recommendation would be Stephen Mitchell’s version, which is not a translation but an interpretation. It is truly beautiful and has been a great comfort to me over the last two dozen years. Comparing translations can be helpful in understanding a text. I also find I learn a lot about myself through my reactions to different versions. Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching has been posted online in a few different places. Only Lin’s translation will be “required reading.” You can find Mitchell’s here:
 http://www.with.org/tao_te_ching_en.pdf.
​
I look forward to the ongoing discussion on the Facebook group page and to our eventual meeting on August 1st.

3 Comments

    Yoga Talk

    Short thoughts applying yogic philosophy to our time on the mat and to everyday life.

    Archives

    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015

    Categories

    All
    Anxiety
    Asana
    Body Acceptance
    Brains
    Letting Go
    Love
    Modern Mystic Book Club
    Peace
    Philosophy
    Yoga Basics

    RSS Feed

Yoga to Ease Anxiety
© 2017 Amy Vaughn 
Proudly powered by Weebly