Category Archives: Contemplation

Contemplation

Thomas Merton: “Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself”

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Thomas Merton, in the introduction to the Spanish language edition to his complete works:

Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… Without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moments… Without contemplation, without the intimate, silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.

“the simple way” » 12 Marks of New Monasticism

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Through a google alert pointing me to this article, I just stumbled on The Simple Way, “a community in inner-city Philadelphia that has helped birth and connect radical faith communities around the world.”

I am looking forward to exploring more. But first, I love this clear exposition of their values (how many elements of monasticism can you count?):

  1. Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.
  2. Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
  3. Hospitality to the stranger
  4. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
  5. Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
  6. Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate.
  7. Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.
  8. Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
  9. Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
  10. Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.
  11. Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.
  12. Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.

via about the simple way » 12 Marks of New Monasticism.

Alan Wallace on DharmaCafe.com: Renunciation as Emergence Out of X and Towards Y

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In this excellent interview from dharmacafe.com (via @c4chaos), Alan Wallace says that what often gets translated from Buddhist texts as “renunciation” is something closer to “emergence,” as in when we emerge from childish strategies that don’t work toward something more authentic and fulfilling.

It’s more than a radical disillusionment, like Sartre or Camus… They’re renouncing something, but it ends in something pallid, something sterile and flat… Renunciation [or emergence] is recognizing the vanity of vain desires, the pointlessness of pointless behavior, a lot of which we get very fixated on, on occasion. It’s waking up, it’s growing up, and recognizing, “I yearn for a quality of genuine fulfillment, of meaning, of something that will provide me with some deep and lasting satisfaction.” And that doesn’t mean being chipper and happy all the time; for that you can just take a drug.

So the spirit of emergence: it’s emerging from childish desires… “When I was a child I spoke as child” and that sort of thing. [It's] growing up, and recognizing that I’m seeking fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness and meaning, and I’m not going to get it by more material acquisition and fame and wealth and sensual pleasures. It’s hopeless; I’ve awakened to the fact that that’s not there. That’s the renunciation aspect, but the spirit of emergence is that definitely, with confidence and certainty, we emerge out of childish desires and emerge towards (and that’s what’s often missing) authentic aspirations and ideals, an authentic way of life that does hold the promise of providing the fulfillment that we seek.

So it’s got to have the dual valence, but you’re right that this is what runs against the grain of modernity as a whole, which is trying to sell us on things you can buy, you can consume, that will keep the GDP growing, and keep us tapping the natural resources and making money for somebody. And [renunciation] is saying: to have enough, a car that runs, clothes that keep you warm, sufficient food that keeps you healthy, this is really quite sufficient. When you’ve got that much, then the world has done enough.  That is, the mundane world has provided you to now focus your attention with all your strength, your soul, your might on that which is truly meaningful

—Alan Wallace on DharmaCafe.com (at roughly 1 hour 10 min of this video)

 

B. Alan Wallace from DharmaCafe.com on Vimeo.

5/5/11 in Berkeley: “Artmonk Sangha: the Bay Area’s Ritual Laboratory for Artmonks”

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Based on practices that we have been developing at the January 2010 & 2011 Artmonk Retreats in the Mojave Desert, these weekly (or semi-weekly) meetups will provide an opportunity for anyone in the Bay Area who is interested to explore the path of the artmonk.

DEFINITIONS:

  • “Artmonk”: someone who dwells (alone or in community) at the intersection of contemplation, creativity, and activism.
  • “Sangha”: the Pali/Sanskrit word for a Buddhist or Jain community, and refers either to a community of monks, or to a broader community of practicing individuals.
  • “Artmonk Sangha”: a practicing community of artmonks.

WHEN & WHERE

May 5th, 5:30-7:30pm

1798 Scenic Avenue

Doug Adams Gallery/Badè Museum, in Holbrook Hall,

Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, CA

http://goo.gl/AR92d

Contact Nathan @ (510) 520-4747

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Seeking iPad app developer for Touchsight

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I’m looking for a partner who can help me make this idea a reality. If someone is willing to do the bulk of the coding, I’m happy to give them the bulk of the profit (should there be any!). The rest will go to making another dream happen.

Contact nathan@artmonastery.org

Immanence

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I’m heading off the grid for a week, but I really look forward to giving this more attention when I get back: ”artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead,” a post by Adrian Ivakhiv.

If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.

The monastic ideal has always been about living deliberately. And in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the secular-religious divide — becoming simultaneously post-secular, for those outgrowing the constraints of secularism, and post-religious, or at least post-traditional, for those no longer in obeisance to inherited religion — monasticism today is reinventing itself in interesting and creative ways. “Artmonks” are those who bring a mindful deliberation and dedication to the creative process, following it wherever it leads them. They are the monks of immanence, post-traditional devotees synthesizing the vita contemplativa with the vita activa in an age of Burning Man and the internet.

Ivakhiv lists a handful of outstanding artmonks:

Some others who’ve pursued their creative visions down whatever spiritual rabbitholes they led them include Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Marina Abramović, Stan Brakhage, Genesis P. Orridge, David Tibet, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Andrei Tarkovsky, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, John Cage, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Richard Long, Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, Vito Acconci, outsider artists like Henry Darger and Ferdinand Cheval, and on and on and on.

Economies of Merit

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In many monastic and religious traditions, ethical and spiritual “merit” gets traded like a commodity.1

Nuns and monks agree to live a certain way, abiding by a certain kind of behavior (which their society has deemed the most virtuous or ethical), and in exchange they don’t have to earn their own money to stay alive, but can focus on loftier or more personally pressing matters. What the monastics bring to the bartering table is merit—a substance, not much more abstract than money, that your good deeds earn you and which earns you future spiritual favor (a trip to heaven, a better rebirth, decreased negative karma, etc.). How a monk or nun lives effectively earns them points, which, for their purposes, will be directly or indirectly useful in attaining whatever it is they are seeking. When monastics follow the rules and earn a surplus of merit, which they agree to share with each other, with laypeople (alive and dead), and other beings, they earn their worldly keep.

This merit benefits the surrounding society in a number of ways. Directly, lay folk ask the merit-rich monks, nuns and priests to pray for them and for their (living or dead) relatives, and to perform rites and ceremonies for them. Indirectly, the knowledge that the monks you give alms to exist as exemplars of (your definition of) purity and holiness, encapsulated in special buildings more beautiful than any, is a gift.

On a broader level, monasteries themselves agree to uphold and enforce merit-earning behavior, and are given land, buildings, and special rights. Monasteries are merit-engines.

So which came first in monastic traditions around the world: morality, merit, or money?

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  1. For example, the 15th and 16th century papacy’s practice of selling spiritual indulgences: “the Church drew from the the treasury of merits accumulated by the good works of the saints, and in return the recipient made a contribution to the Church. A voluntary and popular arrangement, the practice allowed the Church to raise money for financing crusades and building cathedrals and hospitals. At first applied only to penalties imposed by the Church in this life, by Luther’s time indulgences were being granted to remit penalties imposed by God in the afterlife, including immediate release from purgatory. With indulgences effecting even the remission of sins, the sacrament of penance itself was seemingly compromised.” (Richard Tarnas, in Passion of the Western Mind) ↩

The Monastic University

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Is there room for monasteries on university campuses these days?

More and more, I envision joining the work we’ve been doing at the Art Monastery Project to existing academic institutions. Imagine artmonks & postgrads, exploring the wide world of (secular/interfaith) monastic living together.

Especially if you convinced them that being a monk didn’t have to mean being silent, celibate & sober, I imagine that there would be plenty of graduate students (perhaps in religion, philosophy, business, neuroscience, art, art history, physics, music, mathematics…) interested in living an experimental monastic life for a semester or two, alongside artmonks and monks from existing monastic traditions.

How could universities not benefit from fostering self-sustaining contemplative communities?

Contemplative Studies

Timothy Morton of Ecology Without Nature points out:

There’s a brand new field of “contemplative studies” opening up, which will play a big part in the American Academy of Religion’s conference next year. It involves humanists and scientists working together to think about practices such as meditation.

Morton references a promising program at Brown University:

The Contemplative Studies Initiative is a group of Brown faculty with diverse academic specializations who are united around a common interest in the study of contemplative states of mind, including the underlying philosophy, psychology, and phenomenology of human contemplative experience… Our goal is to develop a coordinated program in this rapidly emerging field that focuses on many of the ways that human beings have found, across cultures and across time, to concentrate, broaden and deepen conscious awareness as the gateway to cultivating their full potential and to leading more meaningful and fulfilling lives.

A New Nalanda

Last September, Indian parliament approved plans to rebuild the campus of Nalanda University, a monastic university in northern India that existed for almost a millenium before it was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders in 1193 CE. The new university, “aimed at advancing the concept of an Asian community…and rediscovering old relationships,” will serve as a post-graduate research university with programs in:

  • Buddhist Studies, Philosophy, and Comparative Religion;
  • Historical Studies;
  • International Relations and Peace;
  • Business Management and Development;
  • Languages and Literature;
  • and Ecology and Environmental Studies.

I’m curious if Brown’s program or the new Nalanda will be open to incorporating the institution of the monastery, at some level.

Given the current economic situation most universities are facing (especially here in California) and the low-cost nature of monasteries (especially ones that grow their own food or produce a sellable product…), it seems like an experiment worth making.

Monasticism: “putting one’s central energy into a life that revolves around awakening.”

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From Benedict’s Dharma:

What are sometimes called “lay monasticism” and “householder practice” are certainly not new, but as vehicles of awakening they are “really a big experiment,” as Joseph Goldstein said. “At a conference some months ago I met a psychiatrist, a very busy guy, who told me that in the last twenty years not a day had gone by when he hadn’t sat in meditation for two hours, one in the morning and one in the evening. I was really impressed.” Such impressive dedication can be intimidating as well as inspiring, but the key is, as Joseph continued, “putting one’s central energy into a life that revolves around awakening.”

Rohan Gunatillake on the Social Life of Meditation

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I just came across this video on the “Social life of Meditation” from Rohan Gunatillake of 21awake.com and the Here & Now Project.  After wrapping up a series of posts on monastic separateness and engagement a few days ago, it’s great to see these issues confronted from a different perspective. Rohan identifies “four major ways in which meditation is social—the positive effect the practice can have on people around us, how it can radically re-orientate the relationship of self to other, the value of a community to support one’s practice and lastly, the enabling of new practice modes through social media.”

Continue on to Buddhist Geeks to read on about the role of social media in meditation, and Rohan’s peer-to-peer meditation experiment.