Amongst all the protracted, grandiloquent digressions which have and will come to constitute this digest, it would appear fairly cavalier to try and present a singular guiding principle for my thought. Alas, I am a little too young and brash to help myself. The motto I currently have in mind is one I draw unreservedly from Christian doctrine, but with which I fear the majority of Christians do not themselves sufficiently reckon. Namely, that is, that God is not something distinct from life, but is Life itself.
This is not, as I intend to make clear in another publication, a profession of bland, unqualified pantheism. It is merely an assertion that God, as the essence and source of all being, cannot fail to be in all things at all times as their very core and telos, from whom they deviate into sin only by merit of an ignorance of their very selves. This is an ignorance most often seen in the treatment of God as object; what I suggested in my original triptych of posts to be the common supposition of most religious people. This presumes God to be simply the foremost existent entity, bearing priority over all other beings, in whose unfettered sovereignty all other insubordinate corners of life should be whipped into dutiful submission. This, to be sure, seems to be the vision of traditionalist factions of various religions, who seem to think that the implementation of an integralist, quasi-theocratic rule of law is what naturally proceeds from study of the Scriptures and a pious sensibility.
We see the ire of such types particularly inflamed when attempting to explain the contemporary recrudescence in non-institutional spiritual interest in the West (often Reiki, neo-paganism, Tarot, astrology, Wicca, and the like). There is, believe it or not, a more sophisticated explanation available than simply saying ‘the heart is inherently disposed toward (my) God’, and then waving off all such endeavours as aborted intuitions falling short of the full glory of an established religious tradition. There is some truth in this - at least in the sense of being drawn toward (just) God - but it wants a little for rigour, and in most cases is usually a wounded scoff, its speaker grasping acerbically at what they can to justify their continued correctness in the face of a rapid decline in religious popularity.
But in any case, so long as one thinks God an object in my corner, it gives rise to all manner of theological disasters, just as an untuned piano will always produce horrid sounds. The structure I am reflecting on, to be clear, is the inherently exclusivistic claim that I am in possession of full truth with my belief over here, and by merit of this fact you must be utterly devoid of truth over there. Plus, you’ll probably go to hell too, just for being wrong. It is this framework which encourages much of the discourse of religious righteousness to be explicitly belligerent, to become a matter not of reconciliation, openness, and caritas, but pugnacity, conflict, and separation. The more forcefully one can subjugate the Other, wrestle its being into the fold of our sacred Same, the more laudation one merits, and the more pious the attitude is thought to be. When God is object, soldiery becomes sanctity. Defence and advancement of that object is the sum total of religious practice. It should go without saying that this is the disposition of participants in the Crusades, or, as another example, in the early medieval and early modern colonial endeavours of the Islamic Caliphates and European Christians respectively.
One might object that we see the language of ‘spiritual warfare’ aplenty in established traditions and sacred texts. This is very true, but should also be duly qualified. So long as the cultural imaginations of the Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian (for example) are to remain true to their collective proclamation of the Unity of Being, all their terminology of enmity between forces of angelic light and demonic darkness must simply be an elucidatory device demonstrating the inseparable concrescence of immanent good and evil, and the importance of our continued and righteous struggle toward a world wherein the latter is totally absent. Not to say that such beings necessarily do not exist, only that their featuring in the conceived cosmos is categorically conditioned, and so folds into a broader metaphysics in which the Good dwells beyond all their hostilities, not simply as the supreme imperator of one camp, exhorting his decorated old guard into battle with a rousing oration on St. Crispin’s.
Every cultural, religious, or political system that functions on such stark dualism inevitably ends up eating away at itself. Fascism, for instance - being the most extreme and repugnant of examples, relies on an Other that it must persecute until it can no longer - and then it has to find another, or begin to collapse. This is the ultimate spiritual destitution of dualism; that it shall always be haunted by the spectre of the Other, unable ever to quite settle under the unshakeable impendence of some foreign principality, always tormented by the two-pronged curse of attraction and aversion. However this ‘Other’ may be presented by state, media, or market, we should be highly wary before all else of any structure which pits ‘us’ against ‘them’, recognising it as a fundamental failure of religious consciousness.
Religion, to state what one would hope (though often in vain) should be a truism, is not warfare. Which brings my long and perhaps slightly heavy preamble to the theme through which I hope to explore my ‘motto’ today: meditation.
Crucial counsel given to those beginning meditation of any sort is not to disdain the itinerant ambling invariably undertaken by the mind. The general impression we tend to have is that we are actively seeking to eliminate thoughts. However, upon assuming this aim, the practice of meditation soon proves nothing more than a source of immense frustration: if we are even attentive enough to realise how easily the mind wanders and how helpless we are to prevent it, we become quickly irritated by our mental walkabouts and our conscious impotence to make ourselves heel.
Depending on the habit and practice of the given tradition, we may be focusing on a mantra, a prayer, an icon, a verse, our breathing, or on nothing at all, but in each case when we realise we have become distracted it is quite important not to dedicate our energy to self-chastisement. Chan, or Zen (only a Sino-Japanese variation between the two) Buddhism emphasises this especially well, and I will honourably mention Advaita Vedanta in the same vein. What we might have in mind is a scenario of our sitting with austere and dignified expression in a lofty mountain cave, a mind hollowed of all cognition. But this is an idea, and so - as Hegel has shown - something necessarily distant from ourselves. We are back to dualism, without having realised it. What we are trying to cultivate in ourselves is, in the case of Zen, the Buddha-nature (buddhadhātu): that which we always already are, not something extrinsic we lack, something we can only acquire by way of continued discipline toward a separate goal.
The result is, curiously, that errors in meditative practice only really become errors once we make them so: that is, once we begin to admonish ourselves for failing to do this or that correctly, and so create a dualism between what is and what should be. If we understand the essence of the practice, we know that there is quite literally nothing we can do (Christians must think of grace here) which may truly sever us from our true Buddha-natures. To have forgotten this is only to have fallen for an illusion and so, in a very real sense, never to have forgotten it at all. We can never be truly alienated from the One: only mistake ourselves as having been alienated.
But this is a very difficult principle to articulate without collateral misunderstanding. It does not mean to say that we may happily throw away all received wisdom or doctrine for personal preference, that newcomers to Zazen should do nothing to try and control their breathing or posture, or (God forbid) call themselves masters on account of their equal participation in the Buddha nature as all others.1 Or at least, they should not do what plenty modern Christians seem to think is entailed by believing oneself ‘a god’ - namely, acting like Kanye West. This is the exaltation of egoism: a good example that religion is needed to make normative statements and direct us toward the Truth. But this is where we start to wonder how ‘ultimate’ such directions can truly be, if the Ultimate is always Unity.
Indeed, often - as the wealthy tradition of Zen kōans will show - the greatest avenues for enlightenment may arise not through perfect discipline, but through committing the most menial of spiritual blunders. Moments where we find that our intentionality - even directed toward the most pious end - is scuppered or disrupted can often be the instances of effective revelation. After all, if we become acquainted with the intellectual, liturgical, prayerful inhabitation of a religion, soon - as is human tendency - such practices will likely lapse into mere habit, become automata undertaken in dutiful responsibility, our commitment perhaps stoked by shared participation by our nearest and dearest, but nevertheless no longer with reason to care with the intensity we once did. We discover that we have for some time been squinting intensely at a particular collection of ideas, texts, and creeds - or, even in purely secular terms, a collection of people, activities, and habits - trying with all our might to extract the bliss priorly located within them, but which now appears painfully absent. But, as Buddhism teaches, this is where we must be so bold as to simply let go, to relinquish our clinging and fall into Being, knowing that our courageous drop will result in the discovery of Peace’s ubiquitous character, irrespective of where we are when we fall.
This letting go is - again, I address the gritted teeth of the traditionalists - entirely native to established religion. What I am extolling is the quite frankly genius notion of upaya (‘skilful means’), the liberty of practitioners to adapt habit and even doctrine in accordance with what best suits their psychology.2 Accompanied by a healthy spirit of kaushalya (‘cleverness’) (perhaps an analogue for us Westerners would be the Greek sophrosyne), it recognises that the cultivation of wisdom cannot always simply be a matter of following a manual. It is a blunt fact of religion that the transformation we seek is always inner. One can follow the Law without inner love of God (Pharisees) and one can even flout the Law with a true love of God (Jesus). In either case, it is not the Law in itself that bears the weight; rather, our relationship to it. This fact opens us to the curious possibility that religious morality and doctrine might themselves become obstacles to our seeing God.
There is a deftness here often lost on (usually Abrahamic) religions which have an unfortunate propensity to bludgeon catechumens over the head with irreproachable dogma until their misunderstandings are beaten into submission or, for the marginally more learned, engaging in awkward and unconvincing apologia to try and explain away the inevitably uncomfortable qualms. Buddhism, however, is on the whole far more tranquil about the veracity of its own doctrine, and so feels no obligation to continually and paranoically justify a list of facts without which its system of thought would irreparably collapse: as said the Buddha, ‘ehi passiko’ (‘Come and see’). With this spiritual confidence it moves freely, happy to allow practitioners to glide across cognitive barriers so as to arrive at the place which they could only ever end through a unique voyage of ‘self’-discovery.
This - for the secular in my audience - is also a common principle for modern Western therapy. We must over and underspeak, be able to exaggerate and sometimes even directly lie in order to force open language to a sufficient degree to let our emotions flow outward from the cages of our words. The tortuous knottiness of human psychologies ensures that this extends at times to such an extreme that we should be able even to directly contradict ‘accurate’ language. For example, let us say we live in a world where Catholicism is wholly true. Then take a young adult who suffered childhood in an abusive Catholic household. By merit of their association with this abuse, practically all the language, practice, and doctrine of the Catholic faith are immediately marred by a severely traumatic stain. When offering therapy, would it make sense to try and vindicate these elements on their own terms, to prioritise the preservation of their dignity rather than attend to the suffering their misuse has inflicted upon the human being? Or would that not be orienting ourselves in precisely the wrong direction by merit of trying to remain literally faithful to the letter of doctrine itself?
The most effective means the therapist can employ there - even if, let us say, this is a therapist who is also a Catholic priest, to emphasise the apparent (but false) conflict of interest - could well come in the form of a provisional condoning of atheistic outburst. In this case, the behaviour most conducive to a recognition of God’s True Love may well come in this young person’s lengthy and wild vociferations against the Catholic faith during the session. They may curse and blaspheme God like the most benighted heathen, ridicule canons and orthodoxies like the most stubborn heretic, dismiss all believers as incorrigible morons like the most supercilious sceptic. If the therapist keeps a kindly mien about him, sincerely listens and hopes to understand, and asks the right questions, at around minute thirty-five the rant will dissolve into tears, and there we will have reached the raw, emotional heart of the whole affair, beyond blasphemy and piety alike. All that child wished for was to be loved; the people who claimed to represent God failed to provide that. God never suffered such a failure. Here, when this young adult begins to practice realising the presence of God within, this may even mean letting go - however counterintuitive this may seem - of a cognitive belief in God’s existence. Declarations of theism and atheism, after all, as with all intellectual asseverations, are both conditioned and so enfolded within the broader reality of Being, technically just as ‘illusory’ in their attempts to realise or reject God as are the attempts to seek something in meditation, to fix and alter our wanton thoughts. To return to the Father, we need not move from our seat.
This is really the very same thesis I presented in my previous post: that conditioned, immanent reality is defined by dualisms, and so a movement beyond to the Unity that encompasses those dualisms will result in a kind of loving carelessness with respect to their ‘lower’ distinctions; a freely transgressive, windy spirit that ‘blows where it pleases’ (John 3:8). Often we will have to cling less tightly to the strictness of our immanent movements in order to harness the effects which reside beyond them.
If this is all too abstract, take an example from personal experience. I have been, for the preponderance of my life, utterly petrified of public speaking. All the usual symptoms were suffered at each occasion of performance: the sweaty palms, buckling knees, parched throat, jittering words, scarlet face. Determined to overcome these near-paralytic inhibitions, I undertook some online research to discover the logic behind it. It was all perfectly Darwinian, so I gathered: our biology naturally causes us to feel ostracised from the pack when solitary on stage, and so a life-saving instinct kicks in which hikes adrenaline, bearing all our unwanted symptoms.3 Alas, I discovered that this was no saving knowledge. But on one occasion, when I was to give a presentation at a student symposium, it suddenly dawned on me that I could do what I previously thought impossible: I decided to cease needing to perform well. I simply accepted that whatsoever would happen in this speech would happen, and if my body strangled itself with fear, then so be it. I would allow it, without resistance. The result was a speech that had neither been written nor memorised; I had one page of disparate notes to which I did not refer, and simply spoke extemporaneously for about twenty uninterrupted minutes before the crowd: quite staggeringly out of character, given my history.
I think this demonstrates my point well. Nothing about the ‘objective’ truth of my physiological fear of ostracisation was remotely changed by my attitude. In fact, it persisted in being true, as the truth tends to do. But precisely because I ceased to cling to this truth - not reject it as false, crucially, just let go - I ceased thereby citing it as rational justification for an incapacity I had already assumed. I did not try to tell myself that this fear did not affect me, nor did I resist anxiety or bodily reactions of any sort. And so it passed away.4 Ceasing to condemn my anxiety was not an endorsement of it: this would keep me within the dualism. Beyond negation, beyond affirmation, I simply was, and so I spoke with ease. I was no longer trying to be something, nor trying not to be something: I was just being.
Please bear with me if this is difficult to understand. It is, after all, the very currents of language and thought themselves which I (following the postmodernists) am suggesting are to be loosened and unanchored. I will reiterate the maxim: Truth exceeds idea. If we genuinely seek to know that Truth, we cannot be limited by any manner of prerequisite, anything which forecloses some avenue of being, separates this from that, and makes what Derrida and then John Caputo call the ‘cut’.5 Any demarcation, any line drawn in the sand creates a dualism, and dualism heralds spectre. Striving ceaselessly to snaffle this spectre - especially when we find ourselves in particularly lofty competition, where we are not reminded of the possibility of easing off the pedal - is like letting blood, like swimming with a rock tied to the ankle. The constant tension of needing to have the objective result is a slow suicide. Either you attain, and unsatisfied immediately search for something else, or you fail to attain, and convince yourself that that is why you are unhappy. Ad nauseam.
What Zen and Daoism both do exceedingly well is recognise how our progressions toward ‘God’ (though they would use alternative terms, of course) often become ensnared in our ideas about who God is or what he demands we do. We become fixated on these; we defend them as though they were as immutable and eternal as God himself. As such, whilst persisting in the language of piety, morality, and prayer, we come to alienate ourselves from their Source. In order to reorient ourselves, then, we must do as Moses did to the golden calf - namely, destroy our idols, with all the shocking violence that Moses himself mustered (Exodus 32).
Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass (Dao De Ching, LVII).
Consider also this excerpt, describing the Daoist practice of Zouwang, not overly dissimilar from Zazen:
On another occasion, they met again and Yen Hui said, ‘I’ve improved’.
Confucius said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have forgotten rituals and music’.
‘Good, but that is still not enough’.
On another occasion they met and Yen Hui said, ‘I’m getting better’.
Confucius said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I can sit right down and forget everything. (The Book of Chang Tzu, XI).
Or, of course, the infamous kōan:
If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha!6
To which I would add Meister Eckhart’s… dare I call it a ‘Christian kōan’?
We ask God to free us from ‘God’.7
There is virtue in iconoclasm; in the ability to throw everything aside at the drop of a hat if only it were to take us closer to that which is forever near. Hence why good religious practice, especially in meditation, is often self-effacing. If our sense of piety is founded upon a rousing animosity for every lustful thought or prideful feeling that arises in our psychology, we are only ‘succeeding’ by way of a self-subjection to inner violence, and so doing nothing but exhausting ourselves and guaranteeing the future return of those same demons, never to be exorcised by brute force. Ghosts cannot be fought with fists. We may feel momentarily triumphant to have abjured that set of signifiers, feelings, and desires (let us say, some immoral sexual impulse) by the command of this set of signifiers, feelings, and desires (the sense of ‘being a good Christian/Muslim/Jew etc.’), but its strained bestowal of comfort from attaining the identity we believe we should be is always already on a knife edge, always already a quiet declaration that it is not right to let us be as we are (which, once again, is not the same as declaring we should affirm and act on the desire).
This is a seed to cultivate for those who have overcome the fresh-faced growth spurt of spiritual enthusiasm and are now obliged to confront the stubborn sophomore tribulations of plateaus and brain freezes, of agitated bodies and clogged feelings in prayer and worship. To be able to crack open one’s habits and inject them with the liveliness of novelty is an entirely religious endeavour. But especially important to note is that we should not, if we are doing it correctly, really be making that much effort to break from such things. Here again my admiration for Daoism comes to the fore. Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to honest peace (I risk exalting Yoda as the wisest of sages) is trying to get there, setting ourselves unnecessary conditions; whether explicitly, by brittle attachment to dogma, or (more commonly) implicitly, by the learned roadblocks to self-love which litter our psychologies. As we read in Stephen Mitchell’s simple yet gorgeous translation:
Hope and fear are both phantoms
that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don’t see the self as self,
what do we have to fear?See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as yourself.
Then you can care for all things (Dao De Ching, XIII).
And then a little later, in a verse that should surely be engraved upon the mind of every living being:
Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realise where you came from:
this is the essence of wisdom (XIV).
The newness of Life’s self-disclosure should not be something that we must work to attain, for if this is the case then - as St. Paul most acutely noted - we are in a real sense dead by the letter (2 Cor. 3:6), always infinitely removed from a flawless ideal which suppresses our joy by its perpetual distance, encouraging continual search whenever we think we might just have found a glimpse of God. On paper, technically none of this is incorrect: Gregory of Nyssa most wonderfully forges a vision of the ever-transcendent infinite, our pursuit spurred on by a continual apophatic appetite for satiation beyond the thick miasma of mystical darkness. But Nyssen’s eternal ascent of Sinai should be contrasted with Albert Camus’ Sisyphean task, as two conceptions of the very same motion - an eternal progression, never to be completed - which yet differ wildly in the disposition of the one who undertakes them. The latter grimaces and attempts to accept a reluctant happiness by way of an arbitrary leap into absurdity; the former relishes the prospect of every movement, finding unending repletion yet always seeking more as delightful gratuity. Gregory shows that our progression must always be accompanied by the paradoxical wisdom that, although we shall never reach God by our own intent, we have always already infinitely received him by way of his grace’s outpouring to - indeed, as - creation. We are pursuing an End we have already attained, and so all our pursuits are freedom, play, gift. In this paradox the religious life flourishes.
When returning from halcyon meditation to the stressful habits of daily living, this does not cease to be relevant. To escape the Sisyphean marshalling of morality and dwell only in the peace of God is profoundly difficult (for we are conditioned by culture to consume), yet also the easiest thing of all. The nature of our ontology is such that we cannot fail to be accepted ad aeternam. You are already accepted. Let go. Be at peace. The ideas, the arguments, the disparities, the yearnings, the tensions: these are all secondary. These all arise after the fact. You do not belong to them. They do not belong to you. You abide as One. Let them never impede the original, unchangeable, and eternal truth that you are loved. You are Home.
Although, that being said, the same is just as true: as Ramana Maharshi avers, the distinction between teacher and student is really illusory.
The Lotus Sutra is the best source on Mahayana upaya, for those interested. It is also present in Hinduism, to be clear: see Bhagavad Gita IV.36.
Mind you, when we do rush to the comfort of lying to ourselves, we begin on the path toward a pole of either - depending on our psychology and circumstance - narcissism (where we cannot conceive of anything negative about ourselves) or self-contempt (where we cannot conceive of anything positive about ourselves). In either case, this is delusional. Notice again how the process of clinging to either affirmation (‘I am flawless, all to the contrary is a lie’) or negation (‘I am unlovable, all to the contrary is a lie’) is the cause of our misery: we are in each case tortured by the indelible presence of alterity. The narcissist is never able to quash the frightening paranoia that their spurious self-worship may encounter something which causes it all to come tumbling down; the one without self-esteem is never able to cease yearning for someone to come along and love them, but who - even if they arrived - would be rejected out of a disbelief in the sincerity of their sentiment. Neither can be comfortable in their lie: the spectre of the opposite (‘I may be fallible’/‘I may actually be loveable’) prevents this.
See, for the both of them, John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).
Stephen Heine, Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.
Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Oliver Davies (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 205.
I think a lot about--as we've discussed before--the dialectic of striving and letting go, and when one or the other is appropriate, in practical living and in theoretical, theological spheres. To take anxiety as a practical example, sometimes a lingering anxiety is best resolved by letting go, but sometimes it is best solved by doing something (catch me at the function like, "Oh, how am I doing? Well, there's five things I can see...four I can touch..."). To take a theological example, do we succeed in being like Christ when we strive to imitate him? When we let go and let grace fill in the gaps? Or is it a bit of both? And I'm glad you quoted the koan, "If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha." It's one of my favorites. Also! As for the symposium speech, you did really fantastic, so good on you, man. Public speaking is frightening, and it is not a fear I'm planning on overcoming, spiritual epiphany or not...so cheers for that! And having a good deal of experience meditating, you are right about the mistakes coming from considering them mistakes...trying to control them. Some great analysis, Sam, pleasure to read.
I think I can help with your stage fright (though it sounds like you might have figured it out).
Here's a game called "scoring:"
Before you go on stage if you become aware of a feeling (like panic) score it by making a mark on some paper (or by rapping your hand on a table or your knee or something). If the feeling continues or intensifies, score it again!