Category Archives: Esoterica & Mysticism

Jesus Lama

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…the encounter between Catholicism and Buddhism cannot take place at the level of the Magisterium, it can only take place at the level of two contemplatives talking together in private.

—Harold Talbott, paraphrasing Dom Aelred Graham, in “Thomas Merton in the Himalayas, An Interview with Harold Talbott” from Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Summer, 1992.

If the typos and the fuchsia are off-putting in the link above, I recommend reading the article in full at Tricycle (you’ll need a paid membership; pick up a copy of Rebel Buddha while you’re at it.), here.

More highlights:

He went out to take photographs and met Sonam Kazi. I knew this from his eyes before he told me. And that was the birth of the blues, the beginning of the Dzogchen teachings for Thomas Merton. Sonam Kazi was the official interpreter assigned to the Dalai Lama by the government of India, the interpreter, for example, in the talks between Nehru, Chou En Lai, and the Dalai Lama. Sonam ran into Merton on the road, invited him to a teahouse and zapped him.

…Merton was a ripened and ready object of a visit from Sonam Kazi and he got it. He said to me occasionally after that “I came to Asia to study Zen in Japan and now I have changed my itinerary and I’m going to study Dzogchen in India with the Tibetans.”

…

[T]he Dalai Lama looked at Merton and said, “What do you want?” And Merton said, “I want to study Dzogchen.”

…

Tricycle: What did the Dalai Lama ask Merton about Christianity?

Talbott: If I’m not mistaken, it was about how you live the contemplative life in the West and what you do to make it possible in this modern world to live the life of a monk in the West. How do you stave off spiritual annihilation?

…

The fact is that he told the Dalai Lama that wanted to study Dzogchen so the Dalai Lama spent hours preparing him to find a Dzogchen guru. And he found him in the Chatral Rinpoche. He went down to Sri Lanka where he convinced himself that he had the experience of dhamakaya (emptiness), seeing the status of the Shakyamuni statues and Ananda. Then he was electrocuted and died and we are left to sit here and talk about how Dzogchen was the final bestowal on Merton by a divinely compassionate savior.

…

Then he went and addressed the heads of contemplative communities in Bangkok. The conclusions he reached were conclusions that the late Trungpa Rinpoche had drawn too: in Merton’s words “It’s every monk for himself now.” Structures can no longer be relied on to provide protection to foster the spiritual life. Everyone – ordained or not- for himself, through his practice of her practice. And one of the most congenial means for going on your own is Dzogchen.

“Fed manure and kept in the dark…”

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Daniel Ingram:

An old friend and former meditation teacher of mine and I were ranting in our typically passionate style about this very topic one day, and we came up with the “Mushroom Theory.” Mushrooms are fed manure and kept in the dark, and we speculated that part of the problem was that some meditation teachers were using the “mushroom method” of teaching, thus raising a crop of “mushroom meditators,” all soft and pale. This is actually a bit of an extreme way to describe the situation, and is not meant to imply that the teachers were being malicious. However, there is this cultural factor in Western Buddhism that real insight, insight into the fundamental nature of reality or the Three Characteristics, is almost never talked about directly, unlike in Burma or some other settings. My friend and I called this cultural factor the “Mushroom Factor.”

And here:

If the teacher makes hints of enlightenment (by being an abbot of some monastery, teaching but not answering the question), this will tend to attract people who are not quite so devotionally religious, but still rather into the hierarchy, religion, worship, scene, and sort of into the practice, though starting to grow up, but usually don’t really expect to get far and probably still have some unrealistic expectations and disempowering projections about the whole enlightenment thing. It will also tend to disappoint realists and serious practitioners who, instead, like things being clear, open, down-to-earth and balanced, as they don’t like being treated as if the dharma is PG-13 and can only be discussed as it actually is between adults (monks/gurus/senior teacher list/etc.).

The Cloud of Unknowing, “in whiche a soule is onyd with god”

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Partially in order to a brush up on my middle english (rusty since reading Chaucer in college), I’ll be working through text of the medieval Cloud of Unknowing, one of the sources of the practice of Centering Prayer. I’ll let you know what I find.

HERE BYGYNNITH A BOOK OF CONTEMPLACYON, THE WHICHE IS CLEPYD THE CLOWDE OF UNKNOWYNG, IN THE WHICHE A SOULE IS ONYD WITH GOD.

Nuggets

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Ken Wilber, in Always Already: The Brilliant Clarity of Ever-Present Awareness:

Many people have stern objections to “mysticism” or “transcendentalism” of any sort, because they think it somehow denies this world, or hates this earth, or despises the body and the senses and its vital life, and so on. While that may be true of certain dissociated (or merely Ascending) approaches, it is certainly not the core understanding of the great Nondual mystics, from Plotinus and Eckhart in the West to Nagarjuna and Lady Tsogyal in the East.

on Boomeritis Buddhism:

But as authentic as those states truly are—and nobody is denying that!—they are immediately snapped up and interpreted by the green meme [postmodernism/pluralism].  Consequently, the person then interprets Buddhism—or simply his or her own spiritual experiences—to mean that authentic spirituality must be anti-hierarchical, relativistic, primarily a matter of participatory sharing, focused on caring dialogue, a democratic jettisoning of any ranking between teacher and student (‘the sangha is the buddha’), denying any grading and judging, encouraging a multiplicity and diversity of equally valid truths, asserting a plurality of spiritual ultimates, de-emphasizing enlightenment since any ‘higher’ states might marginalize somebody, seeing the spiritual teacher as merely an egalitarian friend with whom we walk the nonhierarchical spiritual path, hand in hand as equals, dispensing with intense discipline and denying that awakening is anything other than doing the laundry with some sort of awareness….”

theFWD submission #3

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[I'm not the first person to feel that spirituality is a bit of a Chinese finger trap, but I haven't heard it posed in game language per se.  For the Future We Deserve collaborative book project.]

Spirituality as a game

“My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, too long, and it is too demanding. What I would suggest, if you haven’t already begun, is to go to the door, ask for your money back, and go home now. This is not a picnic. It is really going to ask everything of you and you should understand that from the beginning. So it is best not to begin. However, if you do begin, it is best to finish.”

—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Viewing spirituality itself as an evolving, self-perpetuating game may be a potentially useful perspective for a secular monastic tradition (which itself is very much like a game [see "Art Monastery as game"])

Holding a spiritual view and being skilled at distinguishing between the views and goals of others are important skills; some views and goals are more favorable, helpful, or accurate than others.

Should you begin, upon surveying the world’s spiritual traditions by reading texts and attending lectures and meditation retreats for several years, to view spirituality as a pursuit of something you already are, something you already have, you begin to wonder: well why can’t I experience it? Why am I not aware of it? Where can I look or the absolute, God, bodhichitta, pure unborn non-dual awareness, wisdom, compassion, mindfulness, gratefulness, truth, if that’s what I already am? Any goal you might be able to articulate or name is an illusion, you begin to feel, because you immediately are making it something you are not. You begin to desire some kind of relief, some kind of fruition, you want to reach some conclusion, yet you’re trapped in language games, contradiction and paradox.

Very quickly you realize that, despite yourself, you have moved from having spiritual views to having spiritual goals. When you make that transition—from holding spiritual view to having a spiritual goal—you have entered the Game of Spirituality.

The primary goal of the game of spirituality, the only way to win, and the only essential rule, is to see through the game, to recognize the game as a “game”.

Secondary rules are designed to help you see through the game, to get out of your own way. The rules are regularly argued about by all the players. Thus, some rules will be experimented with, and seen as superior or inferior to others.

Secondary goals to spirituality may include things like finding more people to play with, deepening your connection and alignment with your fellow players, crafting better secondary rules or creating more beautiful expressions of the game, but only as long as they serve the primary goal. Secondary goals are not valuable in themselves, but only in relation to the rest of the game, the play, and the fun.

The opponent is your own sense of alienation from the goal.

Winning often happens as soon as you’ve given up playing, or as if by the “grace of God”. Having won the game, a reasonable response is to craft more helpful, better secondary goals & rules. You are still playing until you can see through the game, constantly.

Thus (to use Roger Caillois’s criteria for what constitutes a game), spiritual pursuit is considered a (rather esoteric) sort of fun for a finite period of time, in which we discover, create and follow rules, accomplished nothing useful and all the while acknowledge the illusory quality of the whole affair.

More on “5 Leadership Secrets of a Trappist Monk”

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A comment by someone named “elizdelphi” on the Washington Post page for the “5 Leadership Secrets of a Trappist Monk” caught my attention, even before I read the article (I wonder how often I scan comments before reading an article online, and what this says about me):

As a Secular member of the Carmelite Order, which is known for the most authentic Catholic Christian mystical teaching, I would like to point out that Catholicism and Buddhism are far from interchangeable. Authentic Catholic mysticism is fundamentally a unifying love relationship between the soul and the triune God, Who is self-existent Being and Who is Love–the most profound relationship of persons. Zen Buddhist mysticism is basically nontheistic and contemplates a kind of transcendent nothingness “being/nonbeing”. Mystics of both these religions affirm that these are genuinely different experiences. The monastic and contemplative practices of various religions indeed have many similarities, unsurprisingly since it’s human persons doing these things, and humans of different religions have the same basic nature. Another key difference is the Catholic mystic’s attitude of profound sorrow for sin, which becomes an utterly priceless openness of the intellect and will to God’s mercy and love, this is not something characteristic of Buddhist or Hindu spirituality. There are other differences, the point is that we make a mistake about what is most essential about these religious traditions, to see outward similarities and then equate them.

Of the two sections I’ve put in bold above, the first contains one the most concise renderings of Catholic mysticism I’ve come across. I don’t know if it’s accurate, and I definitely don’t know enough about Zen to say agree that “Zen Buddhist mysticism is basically nontheistic and contemplates a kind of transcendent nothingness ‘being/nonbeing’,” but I like that kind of bite-sized mystical nugget. It’s like someone is trying to give an elevator pitch for an esoteric, personal understanding of the universe.

Yet from what little I know of Tibetan buddhism, there may be more in common between some branches of buddhism and Christian mysticism than “elizdelphi” suggests.

Who is self-existent Being and Who is Love

The shentong sub-school of Tibetan Buddhism holds that while everything we generally encounter is “empty”, which is to say, empty of an inherent essential nature, there is a ground of reality (God, if you want to call it that) that is “self-existent Being and Who is Love.”

In more detail: our ideas about things are an illusion (parikalpita) that separates us from things themselves, which exist only relatively (paratantra)1. Yet the ground of reality is only empty of “other-nature.” That is, it is has an essential, if  ineffable, nature that is indistinguishable from qualities of luminosity, emptiness, awareness, wisdom, compassion, and power.

Triune God

And in regard to elizdelphi’s “triune God”, there’s the analogy that some folks2 draw between the Christian trinity and the Buddhist trikaya (the three bodies, nirmanakaya/dharmakaya/sambhogakaya3).

Profound sorrow for sin

And on the second emboldened sentence above, I would say that (at least Tibetan) buddhists have a well developed tradition of self-blame.  Of the 57 or so lojong (“mind training”) points, “Drive all blames into one” (that is, oneself) is one of the primary ones.

Notes:

  1. This has always reminded me of Wallace Stevens “Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself” ↩
  2. Here are a few perspectives:
    • If you can find someone with an Integral Life account, there’s Ken Wilber’s
    • Zen master D.T. Suzuki drew the connection, but this buddhist disagrees
    • Leon draws some important distinctions from a Christian perspective
    • Chogkhan Thubten Tandhar posits a few more possibilities over at one of my favorite sites, Monastic Interreligious Dialogue

    ↩

  3. Reggie Ray, from Dharma Ocean, has a good article on the Trikaya, “Three in One: A Buddhist Trinity” in the September 2004 Shambhala Sun ↩

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well

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Speaking of the inner life of nuns…

Most of the scholars I’ve met who study Western monasticism are also hardcore medievalists, and some of them would fit well into All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be a well, the first novel by Tod Wodicka.  The description from GoodReads:

Meet Burt Hecker: he’s a mead-addicted medieval re-enactor from upstate New York who prefers oat gruel to French fries—because potatoes were unavailable in Europe before 1200 A.D.—and is mourning the death of his wife.

After an incident involving the police and an illegally borrowed car, Burt is forced to join a local music therapy workshop to manage his anger. With this group, he travels to Germany for a music festival. His real goal, however, is to get to Prague, where his estranged son has been living. Armed with what he thinks is a historically accurate understanding of how to fix the past, Burt sets out on a journey that will change his future.

Here’s what’s monastic about it:

1) The book’s title comes from English mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich.

2) At the beginning of the book, Wodicka quotes 13th century German mystic and Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen on becoming an Anchorite at 14:

“They bury you alive so that you will never have a chance to sin. The ceremony is frightening but you cannot cry because Christ is there… Funeral rites are administered. You are bathed in holy water, scrubbed–and you will not cry… There are burial hymns. You are a gift this day, and you pray that you are worthy.”

Is this is an extreme, emotionally evocative description of the pain and promise of the Benedictine vow of Conversatio Morum?