Opening the Door

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core is also a manifestation of Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’ which connects us to the universal agency which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’ first appears during the Axial Age.  While this recognition may well bring us closer to a ‘Secular Understanding of God’, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.  This week we’ll open that door. 

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God.  One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding our “true” selves and this core, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice.  As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma or hermeneutic, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to our ‘secular’ approach.  As we shall see, however, echoing Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well for a method for experiencing God as it did for the definition.

We’ll start with the insight of Teilhard de Chardin, who closely followed Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘ground of being’.  Teilhard described his own experience of meditation in his book, “The Divine Milieu”. This description is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions, and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

While overtones of Christian belief obviously color this description, we’ll accompany it with the secular basis of the steps that he describes.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

  “And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

   Here Teilhard begins with an exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears.  How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have erected as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

   “But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.  At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. “

  How can we begin to objectively see ourselves, steeped in our facades and scaffolding as we are?  What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them?  How can we ultimately trust that what lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’?  Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

   “And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.”

Where does our life come from?  Every day we are barraged by stimuli from our instinctual brains, fears, elations, and ideas that arrive unbidden from what we refer to as our ‘unconscious’.   One philosopher refers to our life as “what happens while we were making other plans”.  How does that happen?

Step 4: Facing The Intangibility of the Font

   “What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?  It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion.  And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

    We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.”

While we might well recognize that there is a font from which flows the stuff from which we are made, it cannot be empirically articulated.  Whatever the source, it is beyond our grasp.

Step 5: Accepting Our Powerlessness Over The Source of Our Life

   “But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.  My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.  Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature.  Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart.  In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

In addition to our inability to rationally and empirically articulate this flow of life into us, we are also unable to control it.  Our only choice is to accept it, and come to enough appreciation of it that we are able to cooperate with it.

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

  “Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss.  But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.

  This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.  Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.”

Teilhard recognizes not only the source of life within us, but how this source is also interwoven into the ‘innumerable strands which form …the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality”

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

   “Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us.  But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikely-hood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

  At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars.  And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                         It is I, be not afraid.”

How do I dare believe that whatever is at the source of my being, indeed of all being, it is nonetheless on my side?  How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into me at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into fuller being?  How do I dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in me.   How can I begin to recognize, trust and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that I can be carried onto a more complete possession of myself?

In this short but very personal and straightforward description of the journey into himself, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a quest for the ‘ground of being’ that is within us that we call God.

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these seven steps.  The assumptions about the nature of the universe (The Framing of the Universe) that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them.  As these posts discuss, the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, not only is necessary for inclusion of the human person into the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of universal evolution itself.

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Many readers will note the similarity between these seven steps and the very successful “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous.  The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western thinking.  Psychology, as we will see in the next few posts, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God, and identified his seven basic steps which emerge in our general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

 

Next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.