Tag Archives: Meditation

Meditation Reining In the Spinning of My”Monkey Mind”

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In 2011 I stumbled into a meditation class at an Episcopalian Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas in which Eastern and Christian meditation were equally emphasized.  The class was exploring a book by Richard Rohr, “The Naked Now,” a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, New Mexico who was the founder and director of The Center For Action and Contemplation.  It was this class and luminaries such as Rohr, Thich Nat Hanh, Thomas Merton, et al who brought to my consciousness the relentless “spin” of my religious mind/heart.

That class taught me there was no “right” way to meditate.  I learned that meditation was about reining in the incessant chattering of the “monkey mind” and that any daunting of that relentless mantra of the egoic mind was the goal.  The basic instruction was, “When you find your mind, wandering away, merely bring it back to a mantra, a ‘sacred word,’ or even one’s breath.  The goal was merely “reining in” that mind, not doing anything “perfectly.”  One thing I quickly realized was just how much my spiritual life was about “getting it right,” aka “perfectly.”  I gradually became aware of the relentless unconscious mantra, an internal dialogue which had haunted my life, “Do it perfectly.” This venture into the discipline of meditation brought to my consciousness the tyranny of self-talk which was a piped-in “muzak” drone designed merely to fill the otherwise pregnant void of my life.

This experience was the advent of “the light of day” to my life, inviting me to “listen” better to what I was hearing “out there” but also to the incessant grind of unexamined internal dialogue.  “Ears to hear that were ‘hearing not’” were beginning to hear for the first time; eyes that had never seen before were beginning to see for the first time.  One could even say I was being “born again” in a very real sense though without the hysteria of the “born again” culture.  I want to share here a relevant observation from a noted teacher of meditation, Laurence Freeman, who is the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM):


To see reality as it is, or at least to free oneself progressively of its
filters, is a major act of faith. It expresses the trusting face of faith
because our attachment to the beliefs and rituals of our tradition can
become a false and falsifying security. And so, many deeply religious
people feel an aversion or antipathy to meditation because it seems to
(and indeed does) undermine the secure boundaries that protect our world
view and our sense of being superiorly different from others.

A way of faith, however, is not a dogged adherence to one point of view
and to the belief systems and ritual traditions that express it. That
would make it just ideology or sectarianism, not faith. Faith is a
transformational journey that demands that we move in, through and beyond
our frameworks of belief and external observances—not betraying or
rejecting them but not being entrapped by their forms of expression
either. St Paul spoke of the way of salvation as beginning and ending in
faith. Faith is thus an open-endedness, from the very beginning of the
human journey. There is, of course, value in a framework, a system and
tradition. [But] if we are stably centered in these, the process of change
unfolds and our perspective of truth is continuously enlarged.

NOTE:  Laurence Freeman, WCCM, and meditation culture are a gift to me as a result of blogging.  Freeman and many others I would never had heard of without having cyber “met” a woman from Toowoomba, Australia.  Thank you, Anne-Marie.

Thoughts About a Chattering Monkey Mind

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In the following epigram, one of four epigrams under the title “Four Poems after Callimachus” by Stephanie Burtt, I discover the presence of a cautionary self-reflection with anyone who deigns to write…even in the humble milieu of the blogosphere.

(Epigrams, 60)

Lucky Orestes.
          If you know his story,
you probably think that saying so makes me a jerk.
Fair enough. But I’ve been losing my mind
in my own way this week: Orestes lost his,
but at least he didn’t insist
on asking his loyal companion to read and critique
his own book-length original fictional work.
That’s why he kept Pylades as his friend.
True friendship can exist.
          As for me,
I need to learn how not to speak,
when not to hit send.

I am “full of words”; yes, even too full of them, like Elihu in the book of Job who noted, “My belly is full of words, like a taut wineskin, about to burst.”  And that is ok; all of us have our “belly” full of something and I’m glad my stubborn willfulness is sublimated into verbiage as opposed to less benign “stuff”.  But I’m certainly learning how to “not hit send” more often and the same discretion is being exercised in my daily life.  It makes me remember a bromide from a pastor in my youth, three filters through which should pass anything we might say—-1) Is it true?; 2)Is it kind?; 3) Is it necessary?  Number three is really challenging, putting about anything we do or say into question.  I recall the tune from the ‘60’s, “Silence is Golden” by the Tremeloes.  My meditation experience of the past ten years gives rise to these thoughts about silence.  This practice continues to remind me of the chattering of the monkey mind and how that much of this chattering can take the form of “noble” thoughts.  It often is still “chattering.”  W. H. Auden noted, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.”

The Simple “Complexity” of Spirit

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I have deep conviction that life is essentially a spiritual enterprise; or, as someone has said, “We are spiritual beings having an human moment.”   But to be honest, I’m hesitant to even use words like “spiritual” for in my culture they too often refer to jargon and rhetoric which I now see as ideological bondage described by the Apostle Paul as, the “letter of the law” which he described as spiritually lethal.

Bear with me here as, in my hubris, I attempt to define “spirit,”  to put into words that which is Ineffable and therefore beyond the grasp of language. The human ego is driven to attempt to but this Essential into words, to capture that which always eludes the effort to grasp it.  This is the existential dilemma of human beings, having in their heart an intrinsic drive to find meaning only to eventually to discover that the Ground of our being where meaning is found is always beyond our ego’s effort to capture, and therefore “own” it.   This obsession eventually brings us face to face with the experience of humility in which we have the opportunity to accept that this “Ground” is present in the very quest that drives us and is satisfied when we begin to resign from the “beseeching” of the ego and rest in the comfort of Grace, in the knowledge offered to us by W. H. Auden that “the Center that we cannot find is known to the unconscious mind.  There is no need to despair, we are already there.” Or, to put this wisdom in biblical terms, we must come to realize that God is “the author and the finisher of our faith” so that at some point we give up the efforts of “the flesh” to earn salvation, be this effort intellectual or moral endeavor.

This brings up the subject of meditation, a dimension of prayer which is usually dismissed in Protestantism as it is antithetical to Protestantism’s obsessively rational approach to Spirit.  Meditation brings one to recognize the limitation of rational thought, a recognition that teaches one the value of thinking but simultaneously the value of recognizing, and experiencing that there is more to spiritual endeavor (and to life) than rationality.  The most powerful expression of this insight I’ve ever run across was provided by Shakespeare when, in Hamlet, King Claudius was on his knees in prayer, offering these words, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

So, how have I done in defining Spirit?  Failed miserably huh?  Well, good.  Then I’ve accomplished my purpose.  Life is a spiritual enterprise and rational understanding of it is completely beyond the grasp of our finite mind.  When this understanding and experience of finitude begins to sink into our ego-ridden consciousness, we are brought to our knees…so to speak, or perhaps literally.  For then we begin to embrace the incomprehensible Mystery of life which, paradoxically we recognize always has and always will Graciously embrace us.  “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”

ADDENDUM–I am about to diversify with this literary effort of mine.  In this blog I plan to focus more on poetry and prose.  Below you will see two other blogs of mine relevant to spirituality and politics which have lain dormant for most of the past five years.  I hope some of you will check them out.  However, the boundaries will not be clear as my focus is very broad and my view of life is very eclectic/inclusive/broad-based.  Yes, at times too much so!

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

 

 

Embedded in our Own Thoughts, Part 2

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Embedded thinking, part 2

We are naturally embedded in our own thinking because thinking…at least in the West…is inherently linear.  But it is possible for those steeped in this “linear-thinking” to find the courage to “step back” a bit from that comfortable cognitive grasp of his world and in so doing find that his world view is finite but nevertheless valid.  This “stepping back” is the exercise of a meta-cognitive muscle that we have the capacity for but is frightening to use for one who has made an inordinate emotional/spiritual investment in the world view that circumstances has given him.  This is precisely what Jesus had in mind when he chided those who have “Ears to hear but hear not, eyes to see but see not.”  Jesus recognized that being conscious, that is being spiritually alive, involves more than simple regurgitation of a mind-set and view of the world that one acquired by accident of birth.  And, if I might speak for Him now, he is telling people like me who were “Christianized” by accident of birth that mindless regurgitation of Christian dogma and teachings…and doing so with like-minded souls…can easily find us amusing ourselves in an echo chamber, which, borrowing a line from Goethe, is  “like kittens given their own tails to tease.”

Thinking is linear because of our “fall” into the time-space continuum, or that which is known as “reality.”  In fact, in the Genesis Creation story, eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is an illustration of falling into “thought” which always bifurcates our world even as it “bifurcates” our selves.   At that point we have been “categorized” and begin to exercise a “categorical imperative” to carve-up into dualities what had been a unified field, creating “good and evil,” male and female, right and wrong, and…yes…even Democrats and Republicans!  Linear thinking has created this world we live in and perpetuates it….and may it ever be!  For without linear thinking, our world would crash and burn immediately.  But when linear thinking runs amok without the God-given gift of “the pauser Reason” the world will still face calamity; for, any phenomena carried to an extreme becomes problematic and even dangerous.  Ideological extremism illustrates for us daily what can happen when someone or some groups gets too carried away with their “noble” and “enlightened” ideas.

Meditation has helped me immensely on this issue.  And though my “monkey mind,” incessantly running to and fro and chattering without cease, it has been given pause and this “pause” has been pregnant, allowing me to open my heart to hidden dimensions of life.  With even my lame success at meditation I have learned more intimately that “embeddedness” in my own thought has been a cognitive prison and this insight…cognitive and emotional…has been redemptive.  And that “redemption” has allowed me to experience being “out of control” which has come to me as simple anxiety.  Of course, this “simple” anxiety is not “simple” at all as it brings me face to face with my own human-ness which is always experienced as vulnerability; Norman Brown noted, “To be, is to be vulnerable.”  And it has been fear of this vulnerability that has kept me locked in this cerebral prison, the escape from which is still in progress and will be in process for the rest of my life until at last I cast off this “mortal coil” and return to my Source.

I’m planning on this “transition” not taking place for decades!  For, “fallen” though this world may be, it is a beautiful world and I am increasingly delighted with the simple but profound beauty which surrounds me every day.  The only issue is, and always has been, “Will I pay attention?”  And, paying attention is relative to the meditative lesson of looking beyond the end of my nose, peering outside of that “small bright circle of my consciousness beyond which lies the dark.”  It is in that “darkness” that I see glimmers of light and these “glimmers” are the best that we can hope for. For these “glimmers” are the brilliant flash of light that we are blessed with when we find the humility to simply “see through a glass darkly.”

Embedded in our Own Thinking

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To think is to go beyond. Thinking that deserves the name never attempts to make a cage for mystery. Reverential thought breaks down the thought-cages that domesticate mystery. This thinking is disturbing but liberating. This is the kind of thinking at the heart of prayer, namely, the liberation of the Divine from the small prisons of our fear and control. To liberate the Divine is to liberate oneself. Each person is vulnerable in the way he or she sees things. You are so close to your own way of thinking that you are probably unaware of its power and control over how you experience everything, including yourself. This is the importance of drama as a literary form. It provides you the opportunity to know yourself at one remove, so to speak, without threatening you with annihilation. Your thinking can be damaged. You may sense this but put it down to the way life is. You remain unaware of your freedom to change the way you think. When your thinking is locked in false certainty or negativity, it puts so many interesting and vital of life out of your reach. You live hungry and impoverished in the midst of your own abundance.  (John O’donahue, “Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Yearning to Belong.)

Shakespeare addressed this issue in his first sonnet in a challenge to a friend who was so embedded in his own thinking that he was unable to make the commitment of marriage. Shakespeare described him as “contracted to thine own bright eyes,” telling us that being entrapped in a verbal prison limits us in our ability to see beyond the end of our own nose. Persons like this live in an echo chamber and their private prison is reinforced as they usually gravitate toward social groups that view the world from a similar prison. Conrad Aiken described it as “seeing only the small bright circles of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” Those who do not see the world as they do, those who believe differently and often even vote differently are seen to be in that “darkness” and in some instances are seen as “going to hell.”

Now those of you who drop by from time to time recognize that this is a favorite subject of mine. Yes, “you spot it, you got it” applies to me also! I grew up in a very close-minded view of the world and have not escaped it yet…at least not fully. As O’Donohue noted, even beginning to see what I like to call “epistemic closure” has us in its clutches is often so frightening that we refuse to give the notion another thought. And he noted that “annihilation” is the subconscious fear for ego-identity (our persona) is a verbal construct and for even one plank in this artifice to be threatened evokes primordial fears of disintegration. It is easier to just cling dogmatically to what has been “tried and true” and is validated by our peers and go merrily along our way.

Meditation has been immensely helpful to me to find some degree of clarity or “spaciousness” so that I can catch myself immersed in repetitive thought patterns of non-productive value. And when you can learn to “catch yourself” at “stinkin’ thinkin’” the poisonous thoughts often begin to diminish in power. Until we begin to pause, catch ourselves interpreting things in a worn-out manner…which must be boring and annoying to others…we will remain ensconced in the story that we tell ourselves daily.

Intensity, Viola, and Meditation

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I love chamber music.  And this passion had its roots even before my wife started to learn the violin and viola.  There is an intensity in the strings that resonates with the intensity you often see demonstrated in this venue.  Here is a poem about the viola which likens the artistry of the violist to meditation:

INTENSITY AS VIOLIST by Michelle Burke

That she was not pretty she knew.

The flowers delivered into her hands post-concert by the young girl,
pretty, would be acknowledged only. To display was to invite
comparison.

Skilled at withholding, she withheld: it was a kind of giving. As
when meditation is a kind of action,

a way of leaning into music the way one leans into winter wind, the
way a mule leans into a harness,

the way a lover leans into the point of deepest penetration.

After a ship’s prow cuts the water, the water rushes back twice as
hard.

“This Spirituality Stuff is Nuts!

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“This stuff is nuts!”  I would periodically make this observation with my Sunday School class when I returned to the Episcopalian church in the spring of 2011, doing so with feigned frustration Now, I did so only after they knew me well enough to know that I was not being serious, but was only reflecting the cognitive dissonance between the mature approach to spirituality the class afforded me and the very linear, legalistic spiritual mind-set that still lay in the depths of my heart.

This was not an ordinary Christian church as it permitted a Sunday School class of this sort, one which emphasized a non-dual approach to Holy Writ and the Christian tradition. Each week we would meditate for 20-30 minutes and then discuss the book we were reading at the time, each book reflecting the non-dual approach to reality/Reality. And our discussion was personal, not being a mere regurgitation of the “party-line” that the church or the Christian tradition suggested. This discussion was an open, honest exploration of spiritual teachings and the meaning they had in our day-to-day life. But, with this “non-dual” emphasis we usually waded deeply into the aether, into the nebulous dimensions of spiritual life, “wrestling with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) and finding that our faith in God, in the human enterprise, and with each others deepened in the process.

And, from time to time I would abruptly interject our discussion with, “This is nuts” and then share how dissonant our discussion was with my past but also how absurd it would be with most people in our community, not to mention the world. For our world is very linear and depends on our ability to mute the “non-dual” dimension of our heart and mind in our day-to-day functioning and fulfill our responsibilities in our personal and professional lives. And the people in this class were highly functional, highly educated and accomplished people who were very adept in making their way in the linear world. But their presence in this class, and their discussion of the subject matter in the class, revealed their awareness of another dimension of life that was very important to them and actually gave meaning to their day-to-day life.

This experience taught me that it is possible to live in two different worlds at once, the “common-sense” world that people take to be real as well as the spiritual world that I was facetiously describing as “nuts.” For, when we venture into the realm of the spirit, we are led beyond the pale in a certain sense, into a realm where words cannot capture the matter we purport to discuss. And this does not mean that these words are unimportant. They are. But they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves; or as the Buddhists teach, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”

 

The “Monkey Mind” and Insomnia

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My “monkey mind” is harassing me again so that I cannot sleep. I am so full of chatter.  And I do like my “chatter” but to have any meaning it has to find the primordial silence that is its Source. And I sure appear to be fearful of this Source even though I so often affirm my faith and confidence in it/Him/Her.

I recently read Jiddu Krishnamurti for the first time, a blog-o-sphere friend having recommended Freedom from the Known to me. This book so eloquently presents what I would call a Presence as encompassing the whole of life. As I read this incredibly insightful and powerful book, I am amazed at how it resonates with me on some level and I even suspect that I have some unconscious memory of having known this Presence in my early childhood and yearn to go back there. I think that probably I did know that Presence but discovered that I lived in a world where “chatter” predominated and opted for the validation that it offered.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Krishnamurti that really grabbed me:

You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young – not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age – and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

I do not think that Krishnamurti felt that we could or should purge our minds of accumulated memories. His concern was the attachment to these memories, this “accumulated rubbish,” an attachment which keeps us from being able to “be alone” in the sense of being autonomous.

But note what T. S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets on the issue of attachment and detachment and the oblique relevance of death to the issue:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

 

Prayer

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“My words fly up. My thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” King Claudius uttered this lament as he knelt in prayer with young Hamlet hovering nearby with murderous intent.

I think this is one of the pithiest notes about prayer that I’ve ever come across. Shakespeare was saying that for prayer to take place, words and thoughts must be conjoined and offered up wholeheartedly. In other words, there must be a singleness of purpose, a sublime focus. There must be meditation.

Getting Un-stuck

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This morning I was “conversating” with a friend I have met in Sunday School.  This friend also grew up in a conservative Christian church but now subscribes to a different faith orientation as I do.  Meditation is a key emphasis in our Sunday School class and we commiserated this morning about the pronounced resistance we often face in disciplining our “monkey minds” to meditate.

Personally speaking, meditation meets fierce resistance in my heart as if something deep inside views it with fear and disdain, as if every fiber of being finds it anathema.  I think this is because of deep-seated old recordings from my youth in which anything like “meditation” had the ring of “Eastern” and “non-Christian” and was therefore “of the devil.”

But now I see meditation as a primary direction in my spiritual life, as a key element in the development of my spirituality. I see it as the next step for me to take in the experiencing of my Source, in achieving a very paltry, limited experience of the Incarnation, of the “word being made flesh.”  And this resistance I see in Pauline terms as spiritual warfare.  To borrow the words of Paul, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me, or, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.”  For the Pauline term the “old man” is merely a term for resistance, that stubborn energy constellation that seeks to perpetuate itself, to resist change and maturity.  It is the “letter of the law” resisting the “spirit of the law”

Now still another term I like to use, from modern-day clinical colloquial jargon, is “stuck” or “stuck-ness.”  We tend to live our life in a “stuck” mode and it is very hard to get dislodged.  This is because we tend to live life on automatic pilot and our “automatic pilot” does not was to lose its autonomy.  You could think of this automatic pilot as a constellation of energy which wants to continue to discharge in the pattern to which it is accustomed.  Other relevant terms are “neurosis” or “maladaptive behavior patterns.”

And though relationships with other people, especially close and intimate relationships are essential in addressing these “stuckness”, we are ultimately alone as we battle these demons.  As Shakespeare noted in Macbeth:

MACBETH
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorry,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.