Christian Mantra Meditation

"If you like, you can have this reaching out wrapped up and enfolded in a single word. So as to have a better grasp of it, take just a little word, one syllable rather than of two, for the shorter it is, the better it is in agreement with this exercise of the spirit. Such a one is the word "God" or the word "love." Choose which one you prefer or any other according to your liking--the word of one syllable that you like the best. Fasten this word to your heart, so that whatever happens, it will never go away. This word is to be your shield and your spear, whether you are riding in peace or in war. With this word you are to beat upon this cloud and this darkness above you. With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting, so that if any thought should press upon you and ask you what you would have, answer it with no other word but this one. If the thought should offer you, out of its great learning, to analyze that word for you and to tell you its meanings, say to the thought that you want to keep it whole and not taken apart of unfastened. If you will hold fast to this purpose, you may be sure that the thought will not stay for very long. And why? Because you will not allow it to feed itself on the sort of sweet meditations that we mentioned before." (The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 5.)

The Cloud of Unknowing's recommendation to use a suitable word of a single syllable as a tool of contemplation bears a striking resemblance to the use of short mantras in Hindu and Buddhist meditation. The author of the Cloud permits personal discretion in the choice of a word for contemplation, unlike in some Hindu and Buddhist meditation traditions, which prescribe particular words (either for everyone, or to particular individuals).

The purpose of repeating and focusing on a single, spiritually appropriate word seems similar in all of these traditions: to enable the mind to loosen its attachment to particular objects of sensation, thoughts, and feelings, and to increase the focus and power of the contemplation or concentration exercise, which can eventually result in the transcendence of the ego and the experience of sacred reality--variously conceived as God, Atman, or Nirvana.

This resemblance should not, of course, blind us to the very real theoretical and practical differences between these religious traditions. But the resemblance is striking, and may come as a surprise to many; even the Cloud's description of how contemplation of a single word can serve to "strike down every kind of thought" is strongly reminiscent of Zen texts which advocate abandoning "dualistic" thought through the practice of repeating "mu", or through other koan work or zazen techniques. Indeed, the central theme of The Cloud of Unknowing is that of the thought-transcending mystery which surrounds the sacred or the divine (hence the work's eponymous image, which is based on the cloud surrounding Moses during his period of revelation on Mount Sinai), a theme also present in Hindu and Buddhist mystic texts.

Why did all of these traditions insist upon the inability of thought or reason to penetrate the sacred or the divine? This, despite the fact that they all have intricate theologies or metaphysical theories which attempt to reduce the sacred to a comprehensible form. And, granted that the sacred is in some sense a mystery, when a person uses mantra meditation or some other technique to climb the mountain and experience the sacred, what does he find there? There is no way to know except to climb the mountain, to follow in the path of those who have gone before. What will you see?  

Links

1. Review of Katy Butler's Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. 

2. "Noise is the supreme archenemy of all serious thinkers."

3. A thoughtful critique of Reza Aslan's Zealot.

4. Philosophy has a sexual harassment problem.

5.  Review of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

6. Sarah Stillman's stunning piece in The New Yorker on the injustices of civil asset forfeiture.

7. National Geographic profile of amaranth.

8. Progress towards explaining near death experiences.

9. Apps for pets. 

10. Never give up!

The Evolution of an SF Archetype

1. C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith;

2. George Lucas' Han Solo;

3. Joss Whedon's Malcolm Reynolds.

Critique of Barbara Frederickson's Happiness Research

Debunking Barbara Fredrickson's happiness research: it's a maths problem. Fredrickson collected the wrong kind of data to use with her co-author Losada's differential equations, and Losada's math is gibberish, according to a new paper by Brown, Sokal, and Friedman. (Hat tip to Marginal Revolution; Will Wilkinson blogs the story.)

Georges de La Tour, Magdalene with the Smoking Flame

Another spiritual and artistic masterpiece by de La Tour.

Georges de La Tour, The Penitent Magdalene

Influenced by Caravaggio's chiaroscuro technique, Georges de La Tour made it his own, creating religious themed works of great depth and power (in addition to his more light-hearted but still psychologically revealing genre paintings). The subject matter of The Penitent Magdalene makes its connection to the Christian contemplative tradition clear. Mary Magdalene, in the words of The Cloud of Unknowing, "stands for all habitual sinners truly converted and called to the grace of contemplation" (ch. 22).

Incidentally, this view of Mary Magdalene has its origin in Luke 10:38-42: "Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’" The "one thing" was later interpreted as God; Martha became a symbol of the active life, Mary of the contemplative life.

The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th century English text which contains advice for Christian contemplatives, also makes use of the mirror imagery which can be found in de La Tour's piece: "God's word, whether written or spoken, is like a mirror. The spiritual eye of your soul is your reason. Your spiritual face is your consciousness. And just as your bodily eyes cannot see where the dirty mark is on your bodily face without a mirror, or without someone else telling you where it is, so with your spiritual faculties. . . . It follows, then, that when a person sees in the bodily or the spiritual mirror, or knows by the information he gets from someone else, goes to the well to wash it off--and not before" (ch. 35).

Students of Zen Buddhism will recall the use of the mind as mirror metaphor, which originates in Laozi's Daodejing, but which is taken up in Zen works such as Hui-Neng's Platform Sutra. However, in Zen, the mirror stands for the mind itself, which must be cleansed through meditation so that it reflects the world and one's true nature more clearly; in The Cloud of Unknowing, the mirror represents the word of God, not the mind, though it performs the similar function of enabling one to see clearly into one's true nature (in this case, for the purpose of sussing out sin).