... bear with me, I'll make this relevant (but it's gonna take a while ...)
Open Mind, Open Heart 20th Anniversary Edition:Amazon:Books
I'm Reading Father Thomas Keating's "Open Mind, Open Heart" on Centering Prayer (a pre-cursor to Contemplation) -
Keating studied Eastern meditation and helped revive the Christian contemplative tradition (with a little help from Vatican II) and bridge the Eastern appeal - what so many thought was missing from their Christian tradition ...
Below is a description of the Night of Sense which has been compared to the experience of ".. falling into the Pit of the Void" in Buddhism ...
However, the night of sense is considered common, the beginning of contemplation in fact - whereas the Pit of the Void is considered rare:
"... entails an authentic and irreversible insight into Emptiness and No Self."
and is considered a bad trip requiring guidance to fully process.
The difference I think comes in the concept of a relationship to God which lies behind it for the Christian and which is of course not present for the Buddhist (another topic for another post)
"Night of Sense
John of the Cross teaches that contemplation begins with what he calls the night of the sense. This is a no-man's land between one's own activity and the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit in which it becomes almost impossible to think thoughts that stir up sensible devotion.
This is a common experience among those who have practiced discursive meditation over an extended period of time.
**One reaches the point where there is nothing new to be thought, said, or felt.**
If one has no subsequent direction in the life of prayer, one will not know what to do except perhaps to get up and walk out.
The night of sense is a spiritual growing-up process similar to the transition from childhood to adolescence in chronological life.
The emotionalism and sentimentality of childhood are beginning to be laid aside in favor of a more mature relationship with God.
In the meantime, because God no longer gives help to the sense or to the reason, these faculties seem to be useless.
One is more and more convinced that one can no longer pray at all.
In a remarkable passage in The Living Flame of Love in which John of the Cross describes in detail the transition from sensible devotion to spiritual intimacy with God, he says that when one cannot reason discursively or make acts of the will with any satisfaction during prayer, one should give the situation a quiet welcome.
One will then begin to feel peace, tranquility, and strength because God is now feeding the soul directly, giving His grace to the will alone and attracting it mysteriously to Himself."
Note: Here a loss of sense and reason, an emptiness or non-experience is a sign of a deepening spiritual experience. Proof of this is in the fruits of the practice - i.e. the person is more patient, kinder, less anxious and has a more mature sense of spirituality despite a paucity of experience in their prayer life ...
(The fact that contemplation/meditation leads to the cultivation of these complex, positive qualities requires an explanation that goes beyond the "relaxation response" or a return to an animal state of awareness.)
"People in this state have great anxiety about whether they are going backward. They think that all the good things they experienced in the first years of their conversion are coming to and end, and if they are asked how their prayer life is, they will throw up their hands in despair. Actually, if questioned, further, they reveal
that they have a great desire to find some way to pray and they like to be alone with God even though they can't enjoy Him.
Thus, it is evident that there is a secret attraction present at a deep level of their psyche.
This is the infused element of contemplative prayer.
Divine love is the infused element. If it is given a quiet rest, it will grow from a spark into a living flame of love."
So one question is how to account for the sweep of meditative experience, how spirituality (or "spirituality" if you prefer) unfurls in stages from a simple practice, stages that are at least cross-culturally recognizable ... (If there is any unity in religion it's in the agreement of the mystics) ... Much like Keating's analogy with adolescence ... but where is the biological underpinning? The evolutionary impetus to develop spiritual qualities and further to experience an unquenchable and almost unbearable desire to do so that can lead one away from rational action in biological or selfish terms ... As love is wont to do!
Some will say such consistency has only one place to hide: the common evolution of the brain (see Austin's "Zen and the Brain" for such an attempt) ...
And then how this was discovered? Keating says 5% of cloistered religious (monks/nuns) have any mystical phenomena or experience - feel anything like the presence of God - but endure on the basis of pure faith and monastic discipline and support. Yet they practice without such feedback and gain the same fruits.
He says married (spell check put "martyred"!) persons and those with extremely active ministries have the richest interior prayer life - he feels because they need the most support - whatever the case - we also need an explanation of how, absent such phenomena (night of the sense, dark night of the soul) humans persevered? What conception drove them through these rigors? In my own experience, contemplation can lead one to some unpleasant places "hell realms" in Buddhism, in Christianity there is an experience of the "numinous" Rudolf Otto:
"Otto was one of the most influential thinkers about religion in the first half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his analysis of the experience that, in his view, underlies all religion. He calls this experience "numinous," and says it has three components. These are often designated with a Latin phrase: mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
As mysterium, the numinous is "wholly other"-- entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of silence. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum. It provokes terror because it presents itself as overwhelming power. Finally, the numinous presents itself as fascinans, as merciful and gracious."
Mystery, terror and grace ... Oh my!
And yet the longing remains, the sense that more lies ahead. If it were only the void, surely nature would have equipped us with an "a-voidance" instinct or reflex?
...
What I'm getting around to saying is that I'm very wary of claims on theoretical bases of what the interior of the human mind should or can look like ...
That, I think is an empirical question ...
"When the bird and the book disagree ... Go with the bird." John Audobon.
Where I live, consult a map but ask a local, especially on the back roads.
So anyone who wants to engage in the study of consciousness should see some sort of introspection as fundamental - if they aren't temperamentally suited (I argue very few can't engage in some kind of introspection profitably) - a close acquaintance of the literature is desirable.
In phenomenology then we have a philosophy of consciousness built from the ground up on observation of the very thing itself ... and increasingly recognized and incorporated in consciousness studies.
What other area would we even consider studying without such first hand knowledge as a cornerstone or based merely on our everyday experience?
"I'm conscious so I know what The mind IS." equals "I've taken baths, swum in pools and drank glasses of the stuff ... so I'm a hydrologist!"
;-)
] and David Chalmers and colleagues for providing us with the Phil Papers resource [
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