Category Archives: Religion

Meditation 8: and gender.

March 12, 2014gender, Meditation, Middle Way Philosophy, Practice, Psychology, ReligionPeter Goble

I woke from sleep in the early morning hours recently, and my first conscious thought consisted of the word “provisionality”. It was as prominent as if a banner with the word had been hoisted across the foot of my bed. And I knew at once why it was there, and what it meant.
A few hours earlier I’d been struggling unsuccessfully to draft an article on meditation for this blog. This unannounced and unexpected banner-headline in the quiet of my bedroom, in the dark, turned a searchlight on my struggle, and resolved it.

While I was sitting in front of my monitor, I couldn’t put into words the conflict I was experiencing about Robert’s intelligent disquisition on the hindrances to meditation, which seemed to reflect the kind of stuff I’ve read before in Buddhist tracts and articles about how arduous and difficult meditation is, but worthwhile for the ultimate reward of solitary ecstasy . They all have that hallmark of the experience of robed sitting by people, almost exclusively men, who – by sitting in meditation for many years and by assiduous effort, overcoming formidable obstacles and hindrances – have reached the pinnacle of spiritual attainment, personal enlightenment.

How could I question that? Yet I still do, insistently.

Let me return to my sudden waking up, and set aside the conflict for a moment, though I think they’re linked somehow. Maybe that’s my inner philosopher in me speaking, with new-found confidence, and in a softer, more open and provisional style.

What follows is a rather crude and simplistic comparison of two approaches to meditation, devised by me, and based on my own experience of, observation of, and talking with women, especially nurses, but also Buddhist women, and of women in Africa, where lifestyle is still quite other than here in the developed Northern hemisphere (still curiously referred to as ‘the West’).

‘Male ‘model of meditation and principles of practice

Emphasises physical stillness in a prescribed erect sitting posture, eyes closed to shut out worldly distractions.

More or less totally (and deliberately) divorced from all forms of common worldly activity or engagement with other people e.g. social or family relationships, childcare, sexuality, work (including housework and gardening or growing crops), play, leisure, celebration, contingent events etc.

Performed in complete silence, often regards sound as a distraction or as contamination.

Solitary practice encouraged, group meditation takes care to exclude the possibility of any physical contact by meditators.

Oriented to personal achievement of bliss, ascending hierarchy of attainment (simile: climbing a lofty mountain, leaving the world and its cares far below).

Highly structured, elaborately detailed, concept-laden and often ‘scripted’ technique to be followed, rigour recommended.

Narrow focus of attention, discipline and effort prized.

Body regarded as vehicle for mind, used instrumentally, often seen as source of undesirable distraction from mind (Body-Mind dualism).

Teaching (on technique and to provide ideological buttressing) originated, articulated, controlled and directed (almost exclusively) by men.

Women’s voices and unique experience marginalised.

‘Female’ model of meditation and principles of practice

Allows and promotes activity and movement, spontaneous and purposive, open to the world and embraces it, eyes open.

Integrates short, naturally occuring periods of stillness, silence and relaxed, comfortable repose (no imposed postural requirements) with activities of daily living, and seamlessly in relationship with other people (specially attentive to children, the elderly, or animals), on an emergent basis as life unfolds.

Encourages and welcomes togetherness, especially the company of other women.

Characterised by shared conversation, or singing/crooning, and comfortable shared silence, especially when carrying out shared activities (household tasks, cultivating gardens, fetching water or firewood, weaving or sewing, pounding or sieving grains, community cooking,

reciprocal grooming like hair plaiting, manicure etc).

Oriented to cooperative, cohesive and collective purposes.

Uncontrivedly self-effacing and ‘unselfish’.

Body-mind understood in ‘wholistic’ terms, expressed as an intuitive apprehending of feelings, and understanding sensations as metaphors of influence and meaning, a naturalistic and concept-free ‘integration of desires’.

Wide focus of attention, open to the whole visual (and aural and osmic) field, while (like a bird) able to pick up particular detail. (‘without stirring from the unity of self-refreshing pristine awareness, the details of experience are clearly differentiated without being contrived’ [Longchenpa])*

Uncontrived: elaborate conceptual expressions of technique and ideological underpinnings for meditation experienced as redundant, at variance with women’s experience, and ironically referred to as “typically male” or in other earthy, bawdy terms…..!)

Teachings shared informally, in light jests or personal anecdotes, by story-telling, in songs or poems, in pictures, or by clothing, body adornments, experiment and innovation in make-up and hair-styling,

through the positioning and re-arrangement of household articles, artefacts, flowers or elemental things (feng shui).

Women will share generously and with no expectation of reward or desire for acclaim or special ‘recognition’.

Men only have to notice that they are there, and that their contribution to meditation practice, although divergent, is of equal value to mens’.

* Quoted from Longchenpa, You Are the Eyes of the World, translated by Lipman K, Peterson M (2000), Snow Lion Publications, New York

The MWS Podcast: Episode 14, Mark Vernon

March 2, 2014Ethics, Philosophy, Podcast, Religionagnosticism, how to be an agnostic, Iain McGilchrist, Jung, mark vernon, Middle Way, plato, Podcast, SocratesBarry Daniel

In this episode, the writer and journalist Mark Vernon talks about agnosticism, its relation to theism and why he feels it’s useful to adopt such an approach. He puts the case for why virtue ethics should play more of a role in how we live our lives. We also discuss influences such as Plato, Socrates, Jung and Iain McGilchrist and how he understands the Middle Way with regards to agnosticism.

MWS Podcast 14: Mark Vernon as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_14_Mark_Vernon

Previous podcasts:

Episode 13: Robert M. Ellis on his life and why he formed the Middle Way Society.
Episode 12: Paul Gilbert on Compassion Focused Therapy
Episode 11: Monica Garvey on Family Mediation
Episode 10: Emilie Åberg on horticultural therapy, agnosticism, the Quakers and awe.
Episode 9: T’ai Chi instructor John Bolwell gives an overview of this popular martial art.
Episode 8: Peter Goble on his career as a nurse and his work as a Buddhist Chaplain.
Episode 7: The author Stephen Batchelor on his work with photography and collage.
Episode 6: Iain McGilchrist, author of the Master and his Emissary.
Episode 5: Julian Adkins on introducing MWP to his meditation group in Edinburgh
Episode 4: Daren Dewitt on Nonviolent communiction.
Episode 3: Vidyamala Burch on her new book “Mindfulness for Health”.
Episode 2: Norma Smith on why she joined the society, art, agnosticism and metaphor.
Episode 1: Robert M. Ellis on critical thinking.

Mysticism

February 18, 2014Religiondhyana, jhana, mysticismRobert M Ellis

Following my post on dhyana last week, I thought I would expand this into a discussion of mysticism. Mysticism is a phenomenon that has been misunderstood and treated with prejudice on many sides – particularly by scientific naturalists and by traditional Protestants, who often seem to use it as a pejorative term. For these people, ‘mysticism’ often seems to mean something like ‘supernaturalist obscurity’. Presumably they see mystics as cloaked dogmatists who confuse the issues through too much emphasis on ambiguity. For me, however, the term ‘mystic’ is overwhelmingly positive. Mystics are the heroes who have stood out against dogma and continually laid the emphasis on genuine experience in all the world’s religious traditions.

Mysticism begins with dhyana-like sublime experience, a type of experience available to anyone and not at all tied to religious beliefs of any kind. Here is an example from the autobiography of Jane Goodall (the chimpanzee expert), ‘Reason for Hope’:

Many years ago, in the spring of 1974, I visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once the cathedral
was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a
wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D Minor. I
had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire
vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was at though the
music itself was alive. That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity,
was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy
of the mystic.

This is a modern example, but experiences like this have been recorded across cultures and religions. In Hinduism and Buddhism mystical experience is actively cultivated in meditation and is part of the mainstream tradition. In Islam it is an important part of the Sufi tradition, and in Christianity you can read the experiences of a succession of mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Richard Rolle and Jacob Boehme.

What these people had in common was that, having experienced temporary integrated states, they could see beyond the rigidities of metaphysical belief. Often this put them into conflict with the metaphysical mainstream of their religions (for example, the persecution of Sufis has been a regular feature of fundamentalist phases in Islam). More often, however, mystics have been happy to pay lip-service to the metaphysical pieties that surrounded them, whilst actually being largely indifferent to metaphysics. At the same time they have earned a far more profound respect from those who experienced their genuine degree of integration, and the wisdom and compassion that flowed from that.

Mystical experience is sometimes treated as a subset of religious experience, or sometimes identified with religious experience as a whole. I am more inclined to the former, as there are many types of experience that can be called ‘religious’. Some other forms of religious experience are also recorded by mystics – particularly visions. Visions, however, like dhyana-type experiences, can be recognised as powerful and valuable experiences without being attached to metaphysical beliefs. The significance of a vision can be implicitly or explicitly recognised as archetypal rather than conveying representational truths-out-there.

Of course, mystics in the theistic religions have often talked about God. However, for them God seems to have been an experience of uncertainty rather than the dogmatic basis of certainty that assertions about God and his revelations seem to have been for others. Where they express apparent certainty, it usually turns out to be a recognition of how far their lives had been changed by mystical experience, rather than any assertion about propositional ‘truths’ behind that experience. Where mystics have written about their experiences, they have often used language that may appear vague. They were writing, after all, about the cloud of unknowing (the title of a fourteenth century English mystical text of anonymous authorship), so their degree of vagueness was entirely appropriate to their subject matter. When it comes to advice on mystical practice, on the other hand, they are quite capable of precision. It is those who write about uncertain matters with a misleading amount of precision that we should be more suspicious of than of the mystics.

The mystical traditions of the world offer a huge resource of inspiration for the practice of the Middle Way. Of course, past and present mystics are each limited in their assumptions by their historical and religious circumstances. They can also be one-sided because their openness is so much concentrated towards the emotive end of the spectrum of meaning, so that they are not very likely to show deep critical thought or an investigative attitude to the world. Nevertheless, the mystics have absorbed and kept alive an important element of the spirit of agnostic scepticism through the ages, and we can still benefit from that spirit today.

The three christmases

December 24, 2013Middle Way Philosophy, Myth, Practice, Religion, The ArtsChristmas, festivalsRobert M Ellis

There seem to be three ways in which Christmas is meaningful to people. To Christians, Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation – of God coming to earth. To neo-pagans, Christmas is a celebration of the winter solstice. For consumerism, Christmas is an opportunity for self-indulgence, and its meaning lies in the ways that we hope to be made happy by exchanges of gifts and eating rich food. It seems to me that all three of these Christmases offer meaning in experience, but they also offer metaphysical beliefs that tend to hijack them.

The winter solstice is obviously something we all experience: or at least, those living in temperate or arctic regions of the northern hemisphere. There is a certain anxiety and foreboding about the increasing darkness, and a visceral desire for the light to return, that can make celebrating the winter solstice just a way of recognising these fears and hopes. But if it becomes part of a worship of ‘Nature’, or a desire to placate the gods of darkness, pagan beliefs are not really very far removed from theistic ones. The spring does not return because we ritualise our desire for it to do so, nor does ‘Nature’ make it return.

Consumerism, too, hits experience in some ways. We can feel, and renew, a connection with relatives by exchanging gifts with them and eating special food with them. However, an egoistic belief in ourselves and our objects of desire as unchanging can be strengthened by Christmas indulgence. Gifts can merely feed neomania, a cognitive bias that takes no account of how fast technology will change or how little gifts will matter over time. The gifts and sharing can also often just reinforce the projections in our relationships, perhaps because we haven’t resolved the archetypal view we have of parents, partners or children and recognised them fully as individuals beyond that role in our lives.

I can ride those two Christmases – they both mean something to me, but I hope not too much. A Middle Way in relation to them is relatively easy to see. However, it’s the Christian meaning of Christmas that is both more profound and more troubling. I don’t believe that God was incarnated in the form of Jesus – but I don’t deny it either. Such a claim is so obviously beyond experience that it is best left alone and not indulged one way or the other. Nevertheless, the incarnation is meaningful to me. What’s more, as someone from a culturally Christian background, I think that the profundity of its religious meaning is harder to get away from than I have often recognised. For many years I have just avoided Christmas by going away on retreat, but that has been an avoidance strategy that’s often stopped me really asking myself what it means.

How is the incarnation meaningful to me when I don’t believe in it? I find this easiest to articulate in archetypal terms (if you’re unfamiliar with archetypes, see here). If God is a forward projection of the integrated psyche, the appearance of God in human form is a reassertion of the need to integrate the symbolic God into our lives. The incarnation thus represents the unlikely, baffling glimpses of the possibility of integration that we experience from time to time, often in the symbolic form of a wise old man or woman or of a mandala-like structure.

However, it’s one think to offer that explanation in theory and quite another to recognise it in experience. For me, it is the Renaissance painters who help me get to grips with this best. It seems that they really experienced that meaning fully and directly, and yet had a world-view close enough to the modern to represent it in a way we can relate to now. It is almost as though the Renaissance painters offer a moment between sleep and waking when the symbols are still vividly alive, yet we are still capable of considering them with full critical awareness. It is representations of the Annunciation that seem to capture it most often: a bewildered ordinary girl suddenly recognising a mind-boggling potential within herself. Sometimes, too, the Adoration of the Magi can offer something of that sense of awe in the face of the God archetype.

But I still fail to relate to the vast majority of what goes in churches in relation to Christmas. Not only is it still primarily about belief, but it is all still routinely objectified, trivialised, and sentimentalised. Are children in nativity plays, for example, given even the slightest glimpse of the possibility that the baby Jesus in the manger can mean something within themselves? Are the worshippers given any basic integrative practices – grounded in silence rather than endless metaphysical language – to help them cultivate the awe that they will need to recognise the meaning of Christmas? In the vast majority of churches, I think not.

So, here is my recommendation for an integrative reflection on the meaning of Christmas. Go to your nearest art gallery that has a decent collection of Renaissance art. Go when it is quiet, and preferably by yourself. Look at the Annunciations and the Nativities, and forget whatever you may have loved or hated about the story in school or church. Give yourself time to examine the pictures, and give space to allow awe to arise.

Pictures: Adoration of the Magi by Mantegna & Annunciation by Simone Martini (both public domain)

Rebuilding the house

November 25, 2013Current Affairs, Middle Way Philosophy, Religiondisasters, earthquakeRobert M Ellis

I was moved recently when listening to a radio interview with a man who was rebuilding his house in the flattened city of Tacloban in the Philippines. He was amazingly upbeat, saying that he’d get his house back up in a few months, and was not going to be downcast by what had happened. I started to wonder what it is that can give some people such reserves of resilience in such a situation. The evidence is that many societies in a similar state of ruination have rebuilt themselves with remarkable speed, and even gone on to be more successful than they would otherwise because of the way that they have been forced to confront horrific conditions. Germany and Japan after the Second World War offer some remarkable examples.

The ability to not just remain unaffected, but actually benefit in the long run from unexpected disasters is one of the key themes of ‘Antifragile’, the book I’ve been reading by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb’s basic explanation of antifragility is that it comes from ‘having options’ – that is, being free (and able) to adopt a variety of strategies in changing conditions. The people who will be most badly hit by a disaster will be those without options. There will be some who do not have the physical capacity to reconstruct, not just their houses, but their lives. However, there will be others who are not able to do so because they are mentally stuck in an old model, and cannot adapt to a new one.

How would I fare in such a disaster? I really cannot know without experiencing it. My sister and her family were caught up in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, so I know a bit from her about how difficult post-traumatic stress can be, and how unexpected and long-lasting its effects. It is possible that some of those effects just depend on our ‘hard-wired’ physical reactions in ways that would be little affected by attitude. However, I can’t help thinking that at least some of our response to such scenarios must depend on how attached we are to fixed models of our environment, and beneath that to a sense of meaning that depends on things being a certain way. I would imagine that we can’t really believe that such a calamity has happened until we find it meaningful, and to find it fully meaningful we will have to detach ourselves from our previous models of our lives as secure. To detach ourselves in that way, we need a more basic sense of what is meaningful that does not depend on our beliefs about our situation.

That’s why, oddly enough, I suspect that it is things that many may regard as inessential pleasures that help to sustain us in these circumstances. I’m talking about the arts, and more widely about meaning as embodied in culture. If our basic sense of meaning is based in our bodies, and extends from these using metaphor to take in more abstract concepts, that sense of meaning is surely more likely to remain with us even during severe stresses. Perhaps your piano has been swept away by the typhoon and turned into matchwood, but the sense of meaning you got from playing it can still offer sustenance. If, on the other hand, your sense of meaning is based on beliefs about the success of a business that has now been ruined, or about a highly dependent relationship with one person who is now dead, it is much more vulnerable.

I’m sure that many people in the Philippines, a Catholic country, will also be turning to God to sustain them. Where God is a basic part of their experience connected to physicality, I expect he will, but where he is just a belief, there will be a like vulnerability. After the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, many educated people across Europe with highly rationalised beliefs in God lost their faith. Metaphysical beliefs of all kinds are distinguished for their fragility, and it is extreme events like these that can break them.

Probably the most ruinous event that I can imagine happening to me personally would be the destruction, not of my house (tough though that would undoubtedly be), but of Middle Way Philosophy. If my view of the world suddenly proved to be wholly wrong, despite my best efforts to make it provisional and antifragile, that would be the real test. However, if I could overcome such trauma (which is of course always in doubt), I suspect it would be because of a basic confidence and sense of meaning which would not leave me because it would be a recognised part of my basic physical experience. Just as when one’s house is blown down, one still has the land and perhaps the materials salvaged from the wreckage with which to reconstruct it, so if one’s cognitive model is destroyed, one still has one’s bodily experience to provide the foundations, and the ability to create new metaphors as the material with which to build anew. Each time one rebuilds, perhaps, the metaphors will get a little better, a little sturdier and able to weather the next storm.

Picture: House being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina (public domain)