r/streamentry • u/improbablesalad • Jul 10 '16
Christianity [theory] contemplation
There are two possible audiences for this post. 1. People who are curious about other insight-related traditions and want to hear about the Catholic tradition. 2. People (probably Christians?) who are interested in actually doing it.
I am profoundly unqualified to address either of these audiences. What you will get out of this post is mostly a list of useful books that contain things I should have known, but did not know. I am a lay Catholic in the US and have always been Catholic. My generation is by default amazingly ignorant about this tradition, or at least I am; YMMV. (Monasteries and convents are things that exist and that, judging from one's family's Christmas shopping, produce candies and fruit preserves and that is all one knows.) I still have no idea what I am doing.
The definition of contemplation and meditation got swapped sometime in history. Today, contemplation is thinking discursively about something, and meditation is thinking the thought of not thinking (or whatever definitions you prefer). But previously, it was the other way around! A recipe for confusion! Keep this in mind throughout.
Historical books: St. John of the Cross wrote The Ascent of Mount Carmel and (you've probably heard this phrase before) The Dark Night. St. Theresa of Avila wrote The Interior Castle. These books are maps. It might also interest you to know that The Dark Night was not intended to be scary. It's not that kind of "dark". An anonymous author wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. This is less like a map but still somewhat like a guidebook. I would summarize each of these succinctly but that is somewhat beyond me. The authors were incredibly domain-knowledgeable and loving people but also not very organized, and I am if possible even less organized and know very little about the domain. Read the source material (in translation) unless you know that a commentator has experience (if they are a Carmelite or Trappist they probably do, I would think.)
For audience #2, unless you already know way more than me, I recommend getting "The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything" which fills in gaps in basic knowledge, such as "what prayer is anyway" since there are more kinds than just asking God for stuff or being thankful for stuff or even praising God for stuff. WHO KNEW.
Other modern books I consider worth reading, Thomas Merton's The Ascent to Truth, and New Seeds of Contemplation. I could make a much longer list. (Incidentally, the phrase "Thomas Merton" is my personal Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon for all of 2016.)
What's "Lectio divina"? A kind of prayer that I did not know about. http://www.trappists.org/monastic-life/practice-lectio-divina reading the Bible slowly, meditating on it (the OLD definition of meditating, i.e. thinking about it), then potentially having intellectual insights or other personal responses to it. The audience for the old books mentioned above were monks and nuns who were assumed to be doing plenty of old-definition meditation. (Contemplation is also a kind of prayer. In fact, if I sit zazen and happen to be aware of the presence of God is this also praying? Maybe, I don't know, but I'm still going to call it zazen. "Mind if we call you Bruce to keep things clear?")
The Interior Castle is a map that describes seven stages. The first three are where you are basically working on being a good person (maybe getting rid of attachments) and stuff has not gotten weird. The fourth is the start of contemplation (you might consider this stream entry). She has a nice metaphor at this point about two fountains, one older one where you have to work hard (via meditating, like lecto divina) in order to get any water into it, and the other newer one where the spring is right there and water just shows up without you doing anything. Good description.
The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night are two halves of one map. The first half of the map is the "dark night of the sense" (you might consider this stream entry). The second half is the "dark night of the soul". TAoMC talks about stuff that you do, and TDN talks about stuff that is done to you (by God.) The stuff you do is to get rid of anything and everything that is self-centered; one's goal is to live with God as the center of your life. John is extremely clear about needing to let go of absolutely every attachment (and even to let go of almost any experience that happens during contemplation). Presumably this freaks out modern readers who have not already read a lot of Zen, which, superficially, it strongly resembles. At some point on this path after you have gotten rid of a bunch of attachments, when you (the historic monk or nun) try to meditate, it's basically impossible, your brain just does not want to do that. This is a truly shocking thing to you the historical person, right?, and was one reason for writing the book.
After that, what you do is: If you feel like contemplating, contemplate; if you feel like meditating, meditate while you feel like it and then switch as needed. A person would still be working on consciously getting rid of attachments and not picking up any new attachments (have I mentioned what a tremendous pain in the ass "pride" is? Same thing people say about "ego" in Buddhism, it's very sneaky.) But in addition, now some incomprehensible stuff happens, during contemplation. You sit or kneel or whatever, and let go of everything you can, or do whatever the Cloud of Unknowing guy says, and authors describe various things which may or may not correspond to cessation (n.b.: cessation fans should read the first essay in Thomas Merton's Love and Living), but honestly I very-deliberately don't hang onto details of the experience and could not tell you. The idea is that you are gradually rewired, but this isn't a process that it's possible to consciously make any sense out of. Another thing that John reassures people about is that sometimes stuff just doesn't work - let's say by now you are used to contemplating and experiencing joy, but if you get too used to it, guess what shows up... pride, or ego. So every so often expect the rug to get yanked out from under you, which tends to counteract the idea that a person has got everything under control and is running the show: this is not the case.
What it feels like, after the A&P and the unpleasantness (which I thought was not very bad, probably because I had already bought into "the ego is a tremendous pain in the ass and I now see that I do want to get rid of it ASAP", chiefly by sitting zazen and reading The Confessions of St. Augustine which I would not have expected to get some insight into that from but that's what happened): I don't recall any fancy thing like people describe as cessation or any special insight into how the universe really is, but I do actually love God now (best way I can describe it, and I am still frankly astonished when I think about it), or want to wholeheartedly love God, in alternation, and this totally rearranges one's outlook on life so maybe that's the same sort of thing. "Totally" is an overused word, and has lost the punch it should have. I feel occasionally a rare-earth-magnetic pull that makes sense out of conversion stories like The Confessions of St Augustine or The Seven Storey Mountain where someone drops everything to change their life. Sometimes everything is very confusing and/or sad, and sometimes everything is wonderful. (It is reassuring that The Ascent to Truth describes this. I think the confusing part settles down after a while, maybe already has.) Also, the thing about the brain not wanting to pray totally happens. Sometimes it happens during the day on its own and one just wants to sit somewhere quiet and do nothing - and sometimes one can't, because one has responsibilities and is not a contemplative monk (though for all I know they also have this problem) so it has to be put off until later. I don't try to hang onto details of the experience, due to being steeped in a bunch of Zen books and St John of the Cross, who are all like "don't get attached to interesting experiences in [old] contemplation / [new] meditation", basically I just go ahead and forget it if I can, so read primary sources if you want descriptions - they will have more breadth in any case, even a single source will describe a breadth of experience in order to help readers. But I think that what you will find is that human brains are human brains regardless of how they make sense of their subjective experiences.
From the outside I doubt anyone has noticed any difference. Maybe I am flattering myself.
As noted in another thread I have been practicing zazen and prefer to have no goal, and am (by temperament) fine with not understanding things and with ... it's not even "with not being in control", it's "with realizing that I have in fact never been in control." This is a good match for Zen. This is also a good match for a path where God is incomprehensible, contemplation is an encounter with the incomprehensibility of God that you are just never ever going to understand, and where none of it is in your control. If this is not a good match for you, you should still read the Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything... it mentions yet another kind of meditation (Spiritual Exercises) that I know almost nothing about, and it also describes in detail an intuition-based decision-making process which is pretty interesting if you like thinking about how brains work, which I suspect most people here do (read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" if you haven't).
I can attempt to answer specific questions.
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u/lesm00re Jul 10 '16
Ona Kiser has a brief contemplative guide as well as a long list of books on the subject. Too lazy to look it up at the mo.
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u/psychoalchemist Jul 10 '16
Great post. I'm a big fan of Merton as well. Here's a few other books and resources to consider:
The Path to No Self Bernadette Roberts
The Experience of No Self Bernadette Roberts
What is Self? Bernadette Roberts
Friends of Bernadette Roberts Website
The Path of Centering Prayer David Frenette
Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer Thomas Keating
Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel Thomas Keating
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u/CoachAtlus Jul 11 '16
Awesome stuff. Thanks for sharing all of this. It always brightens my day to see folks connecting the dots in different traditions. I've actually been listening to Adyashanti's Resurrecting Jesus in the car lately, and although Adyashanti grates my nerves occasionally (for whatever reason, my issue, not his ;)), it's been fascinating to hear his take on the Jesus story. I also loved Thay's Living Buddha, Living Christ. I started my practice as a "secular pragmatist," but eventually realized how limiting that label was. Nowadays, I can get down with Jesus, God, the Holy Ghost, and any other relatively useful / powerful / touching / sacred (yet ultimately empty) phenomena / conceptualization that points me back to JUST THIS. :)
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u/improbablesalad Jul 12 '16
Chesterton has already described (in Orthodoxy) the feeling of going from secular mindfulness to reading about Buddhism to Zen to Thomas Merton to St John of the Cross and thus I will not make the attempt. Behold, I have discovered England. lol
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u/mirrorvoid Jul 10 '16
Thank you very much for writing this up! Extremely fascinating, and beautifully expressed.
An immediately and deeply relevant lesson for everyone on the path, regardless of tradition or practice.
You mention a couple of possible parallels to "stream entry". I'm curious about other parallels. I'd think the A&P would get some press as it tends to be the first and most spectacular milestone? How about other commonly reported phenomena such as the experience of powerful energy currents sweeping through the body, or the bizarre experiences usually accompanying the process of "pacification of the senses" that result in replacement of the sensory fields by stable internally generated phenomena during contemplation/meditation thereafter? Any similarities to the concentration/insight distinction (temporary unification of the mind through single-pointedness vs. using the heightened awareness that results from this unification for deep non-discursive investigation into the fabric of reality and the three characteristics)?
I bet many would like some elaboration here!