A Paper
Recently I complained in this blog about a seminar I have been going to. Yesterday I had my chance to try to clarify to the group some of the many problems I feel we are facing. Here is the paper.
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How
long shall I be in the world of the voice and not of the world of the word? For
everything that is seen is voice and is spoken with the voice, but in the
invisible world there is no voice, for not even voice can utter its mystery.
How long shall I be voice and not silence, when shall I become word in an
awareness of hidden things; when shall I be raised up to silence, to something
which
neither voice nor word can bring?(1)
I follow John the
Solitary in the way I regard silence: silence is an infinite interior
spaciousness; a way of being in the natural world
At the outset,
however, I want to register an objection to the use of the word mystical and its cognates: this word has changed in meaning
from something mysterious to being, as William Harmless says, "a catchall
for all sorts of religious weirdness." In this paper I will attempt to
give a definition of the word but we would be better off without it.
This paper also
attempts to put some empirical order into what is often a chaotic subject.
Hence the diagram on your handout. Because most scholars approaching religious
texts are using a post-Cartesian methodology, their method is at war with the
content they are studying. That is to say, their mental model is merely linear
and their hierarchies of argument require closure. Many of the texts they
study, however, are polysemous: they are based on two ways of knowing and they
try to lead the reader or hearer into the infinite spaciousness of silence.
I will first
present some fundamental facts about the way the mind works, which can be
discerned by anyone who bothers to watch their own mind. These processes have
been confirmed—but are not dependent on—the findings of contemporary
neuro-psychology. I want to emphasize that I came to this interpretative model
through the close reading texts, not through extrapolating from fMRI scans, and
that my research and understanding has independently paralleled that of writers
such as Iain McGilchrist.(2)
Secondly, I will
give some examples of problems that issue from reading without the model of two
ways of knowing, and from reading literally instead of literarily. These errors
have contributed to the mis-use of the word 'experience', and the loss of the
crucial word 'behold' and its cognates. It has also led to the careless use of
the words "transform" and "transcend" when
"transfigure" is meant. I will discuss the theology surrounding these
words. I will also suggest some ways that the texts that concern us could be
classified, as the present system is unsatisfactory. Finally, if there is time,
I will list some of the tropes involved in reading literarily. Many ancient and
medieval texts should be read as poetry, even though they may be set out as
prose.
There are two
aspects to knowing. Self-conscious knowing is everyday mind; it relies on the
information given to it by deep mind, which it then categorizes in a
reductionistic way. Ideally it then returns this material to deep mind for
further enhancement. The second aspect of knowing I am calling deep mind, or
apophatic consciousness. This is the greater part of the mind, what
Pseudo-Denys calls the 'hidden mind'(3) and which contains, but encompasses
more than, what is called the 'nous',(4) the faculty by which our shared nature
with God is realised. This part of the mind has direct perception, processes
the more complex aspects of language—though itdoes not speak—and is inclusive,
multidimensional, holographic.
The primary feature of deep mind for our purposes is that it is inaccessible to self-conscious mind except by intention. The permeable membrane between the two aspects of mind is marked by paradox, although it should be noted that paradox is paradoxical only to the self-conscious mind. The role of paradox is to halt the ratiocinating, schematizing activities of the self-conscious mind to give it a moment of quies. In this moment it is open to receive the gifts that deep mind is ready to offer. Because self-conscious mind has no access to deep mind except by intention, there can be no phenomenology of deep mind.
The primary feature of deep mind for our purposes is that it is inaccessible to self-conscious mind except by intention. The permeable membrane between the two aspects of mind is marked by paradox, although it should be noted that paradox is paradoxical only to the self-conscious mind. The role of paradox is to halt the ratiocinating, schematizing activities of the self-conscious mind to give it a moment of quies. In this moment it is open to receive the gifts that deep mind is ready to offer. Because self-conscious mind has no access to deep mind except by intention, there can be no phenomenology of deep mind.
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(1) Sebastian Brock, 'John
the Solitary, On Prayer', Journal
of Theological Studies, New Series,
30 (1979), 84-101, 87.
(2) Iain
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale, 2008). See Vincent Gillespie and
Maggie Ross, 'The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of
Norwich', The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53-77; and '"With mekeness aske
perseverantly..."': On Reading Julian of Norwich', Mystics Quarterly, 30 (2004), pp. 125-40; and Maggie Ross 'Behold
Not the Cloud of Experience' in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England
VIII, ed.
E.A. Jones (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 29-50; Writing the Icon of the
Heart,
(Abingdon: BRF, 2011, and Eugene, OR, 2013); 'Jesus in the Balance', Word
and World,
Spring, 2009, 152-161; 'The Apophatic Ordinary', Anglican Theological
Review, Vol.
LXXIV, No. 4, Fall, 1992, 1992, 456-474; Silence: A User's Guide, forthcoming.
(3) Celestial
Hierarchy 149C, Luibheid
and Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, 153.
(4) Andrew
Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford, OUP, 2007), xiv–xv.
posted by Maggie Ross at 9:50 am
26 Comments:
As a follower of this blog, here are some points i've been pondering in view of the two ways of knowing:
- this silence is not afforded an ontological, metaphysical status the way philosophers like Max Picard would characterize it and try to pin it as objectively as possible
- that mysticism, aside from being subjected into the modernist lens by way of giving prominence to "extraordinary religious experience," (William James, Thomas Merton, William Johnston, Thomas Dubay) or the modern binary of the sacred an the profane turned into secular/public versus religious/private spheres, mysticism has become captive to a larger sociocultural matrix of privatistic capitalism in search of gratifying experience/s
- McGilchrist's work on how the profoundly divided and assymetrical hemispheres of the human brain is immensely helpful in understanding the holographic dialogue between silence and speech; nonetheless, it lacks the theological grounding found in Maggie's work because McGilchrist characteristically dwells on "knowing," on how the two hemispheres know uniquely, whereas Maggie's work goes beyond "knowing" into adoring.
- because Maggie's work hinges on silent beholding which is true adoration, anything that is capable of holding this holographic interplay between being silent while beholding, or nudges one into this mode, can give a paradoxical value/charge to it. They serve as paradoxical guides into this "stance of adoration" including poetry, or sacred spaces like the OT First Temple habitus exposed by Margaret Barker or the Sermon on the Mount as parallelisms of this Temple developed by John Welch.
- and because this "stance of adoration" is non-linear but spiral, perpetually moving from a certain center which is everywhere, as if extending kenotically, it tries to cover as many as possible those dwellers on the margins left behind by a culture of statuses, celebrities, fueled by a linear mind of competition for gratifications or extraordinariness.
Seems to me, "being silent while beholding" is a description of an experience. Adoration runs along the same line.
There is no object and no field to this. Non self aware presence does not mean the slate is blank however.
Namaste,
mike
I hope I am not misquoting Maggie but I seem to remember her using the a phrase like 'the deep mind is holographic' and in desertfisher's comment she uses the term 'holographic interplay' in the context of beholding. The dictionary definition of hologram/holograph isn't helping much. Can anyone shed some light?
You are correct. 'Interplay' is not my word. In a holograph you can see the whole from every angle. It looks three dimensional. The deep mind is inclusive: every part relates to every other part. What seems like paradox to self-conscious mind is not paradoxical to deep mind. Like any analogy, it has its limits. It's impossible to give an accurate phenomenology of deep mind.
As to 'being silent while beholding' good catch. It's very subtle: 'silent beholding' would be the way I'd put it; each entails the other. Again, no analogy is going to be accurate, but beholding is not an experience. MR
I had the image of Albert Einstein riding his bicycle, laughing, his hair raised by the wind when i used the word 'interplay'.
'Holographic interplay' is a personal interpretive rendering, thinking that 'human speech' in any form, assuming they are borne out of a habit of beholding, is also part of the 3-dimensional hologram. In other words - human speech charged by the silence of the deep mind - like RS Thomas's poetry where one can almost sense the 3-dimensional rendition of the Welsh landscapes.
True enough, "beholding" remains a very elusive word to explicate. But so far, it seems one can b in a state of beholding even while giving an impassioned lecture on the psalms as poetry - there's silence of a self-conscious mind as it gives way to the logos from the deep mind - being silent while beholding (the flow of lecturing). I don't know. Maybe.
Yes, I know what you mean. MR
@ Matthew:
Yes, human words are mere descriptors, the way Teresa's
"interior castle" is. It is not the actual beholding.
Which brings me to another question: in the context of the deep mind, how shall we account those 'mystical images' including the 'dark night of the senses' that implicitly or explicitly serve as standards or canon of what contemplation or the contemplative life is?
One answer that seems to make sense is those images were appropriate to its time and place. Again, just musing. But it seems the gifts from the past can also be viewed or accounted from this articulation and 'development' on the deep mind.
Thanks for that folks - I came across the following analogy/descriptor in an article by Andrew Brown in the Guardian in 2011 about a visit by Rowan Williams to Grendon Prison: (Quote) 'He talked about this daily prayer in the most careful, practical way, almost as if it was therapy: "Breathe regularly, sit upright, breathe, and say some simple words. I will often say 'Lord have mercy' slowly, at intervals, and just let it settle into my stomach. It doesn't always seem to work. Sometime I can be there for half an hour and the thoughts just go galloping round like horses in the Grand National. Then I have to remind myself that this is time God gives to me, and not just time I give to God." Then, still in the same matter of fact way, he said: "You are trying to open the cellar door and be aware of the darkness underneath the water."
@ Matthew
The simplicity of it, i guess it's essentially what is even if the "darkness underneath the water" could get scary at times as a metaphor for vulnerability.The problem is if culturally, one is always pounded by the 'gold standard' of prayer or way of doing retreats whose metrics is not the simplicity of sitting in silence but the consolations and/or desolations of the moments, and all the while, you know that this is not contemplative adoration in the sense of how kenotic love works through the deep mind.
Samadhi is recognized as having degrees of detachment, sometimes called "flavors" in Zen. The same is said of kensho. What is named Great Death, Maggie calls event horizon and "beyond" this is no self/no time. Briefly so.
Theresa metaphorically speaks of this as the prayer of union.
One simply cannot be in the groove while thinking one is in it. To think is finished with it. "Do not anticipate, do not reflect." might as well be the operating instructions on how not to.
namaste,
mike
@ Mike,
I'm afraid Maggie's 'event horizon' is not equivalent to Teresa's prayer of union. As far as the 'event horizon' is concerned, it is only a point of waiting, and beyond this, the self-conscious mind is incapable of describing either the prayer is one of union or otherwise.
But then again, it's good to revisit 'mystical images' from the 'canonized' with the 'two ways of knowing' in mind.
More pondering.
One can no more teach a baby to walk than one can teach a Christian the rooted-ness of the Christian experiment when the root experiment is so thoroughly expunged from this life as "lived in" Christ. This very simple Truth's fullness is corrupt in Western Christendom. Even so, All of This is God's business, so, be fear full when feeling fear and be otherwise when fully feeling otherwise.
A quote. “Behold is the marker word in the Bible. It interrupts the narrative to keep the reader’s mental processes in the boundless present. Beholding is embodied. It opens on the deep mind where incarnation, transfiguration and resurrection are rapt into one.” Maggie Ross
First time I read that second sentence I literally gasped out loud. For good reason too.
This (quote) is made of revolutionary stuff, and it is TOO BAD it is necessarily so. But it's great for those with ears, with eyes, with mindful hearts. And, hopefully, for those with great doubt.
Namaste,
mike
"What seems like paradox to self-conscious mind is not paradoxical to deep mind."
This statement may come handy to read but its implications are quite wide-ranging. Let's take the case of the pain of economic poverty or job insecurity. They could come painful especially if one starts to be linear about one's occupational capacity or sense of desert for a better pay. To the self-conscious mind, if i get this right, the dissonance between capability and economic insecurity would be paradoxical. Or if i could put this by way of a question - is it the self-conscious mind that feels the pain of the paradox, or the deep mind? Or the deep mind nudging the self-conscious mind to embrace the vulnerability, to freefall-in-trust on Mercy, and in a gentle way, show a system on what really matters?
I found a parallel insight on the above quote from a verse in Psalm 23: "what is darkness may not be dark for You."
(part 1/3)
here's my stab at understanding the this two ways of knowing/2 hemispheres of the brain, but keep in mind that i can only partially understand maggie's academic writing, and that i'm not religious in the conventional sense, so quite possibly i'm way off base.
consider that common knock-knock joke with the punchline "orange you glad i didn't say banana!" your mind (linear mind?) is going down the garden path thinking about fruits, and orange plays into that. then suddenly, without your linear mind reprocessing the input, it jumps to understanding that "orange you" sounds like "aren't you", and the laughter begins. my hunch is that it's this deep mind thats processing the input along several parallel lines at once, and suddenly a second solution presents itself to the linear mind from the deep mind, resulting in laughter. i think this example (if my hunches are correct) might illuminate the holographic / parallel processing nature of the deep mind. and humor isn't usually funny if it has to be explained, and humor is usually the last and hardest part to comprehend when learning a foriegn language or culture.
along a similar line, i stumbled across the writing of the very eccentric and very smart Raymund Smullyan. (google his bio: he's a magician, logician, mathematician, musician, and an all-around eccentric and humorous sort of guy. and quite old now too.) one of his stories was comparing religion and mysticism to laughter. the beginning and end are rather strange, and personally i think he pushes the analogy too far, but the middle does a good job of using laughter and humor as a metaphor for mysticism, and how "faith" and "logic" and mimicking the outward forms don't get you closer to sense of humor. as readers, since the majority of people do have a sense of humor, but everyone has a different sense of humor and has likely tried to explain a joke to someone else, or had a joke go completely over their head, i think the analogy works rather well, at least for me and my non-academic understanding, of trying to use rationality and linear mind to get there. a few excerpts:
(part 2/3)
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http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/smullyan.html
Planet Without Laughter by Raymond M. Smullyan (excerpted from one of his books)
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Among the Pro-Humorists there raged bitter controversy as to whether the existence of Humor could be established by pure reason, or whether it could be known only by an act of faith. The Pro-Humorists were roughly of three sorts; the Rational Pro-Humorists, who claimed that the existence of Humor could be established by pure reason; the Faith-Humorists, who believed that reason could be somewhat helpful but that an act of faith was crucial; and finally there were the ``Mystic-Humorists'' (known in modern times as ``laughers''), who claimed that neither reason nor faith were of the slightest help in apprehending Humor; the only reliable way it could be known was by direct perception.
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Let me indicate four common false roads.
1. Some of you take an approach which is far too objective and scientific. You read all the literature you can find on the philosophy of humor. You perform elaborate linguistic analyses of what the word ``humor'' could possibly ``mean.'' [....]
[....]
4. The most insidious error of all is to try to learn humor by merely imitating the outward forms of the laughers! This error is so subtly deceptive and dangerous, and so difficult for us to correct! You listen most attentively to the sound of our laughter and then you try to make the same sounds yourself. [....]
Coming back to the point about joke memorization, we can easily see by the way you tell these jokes that you completely fail to see the humor of them. To put the matter quite plainly, you tell them far too seriously. A joke is not something like a solemn liturgical chant; it is virtually the opposite in spirit. [....]
The most serious offenders of you do the following: You combine the two techniques of joke memorization and forced laughter, and you are then sure you have ``arrived.'' But God Almighty, how wrong you are! You first parrot forth your ``joke'' and then parrot forth your ``laughter,'' and are then sure you have a sense of humor! You do not realize that your intense preoccupation with the mere outward forms is the very thing which has prevented the spirit of humor from entering your souls. And furthermore, you will not even believe us when we assure you that you are further away than ever. You get angry and ask us to give you scientific proof that you do not yet have a sense of humor. You absolutely refuse to trust your intuition in this matter, and you wrathfully leave our monasteries and go forth into the world claiming yourselves to be ``authentic laughers.'' Nothing sabotages our cause more than this! The skeptics who meet you are almost rightfully reinforced in their belief that humor is something which is ``a mere sham and delusion.''
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(part 3/3)
it seems that many/most of the attempts to describe or get to these mystical states is via words, and i suspect that the linear mind keeps running around in circles, trying to square up all the different words and perspectives. i've read of various guru's that have students keep asking them to compare/contrast their teachings with every other tradition. is your use of 'emptiness' the same as this other persons use of 'the void'? how does that fit in with freud, or jung, or ....? all grist for the linear mind to keep humming along, but doesn't get you closer. hence a paradox or koan of some sort to either get the linear mind to give up, wear out, or realize it's limitation.
in contrast, douglas harding came up with visual experiments, which seem to work well for some people, regardless of religious background. (he's died, but one of his students continues to propogate his work.) assuming my hunches are correct, i think his visual experiments get more directly to the deep brain rather than the linear brain, and without lots of word definitions to engage the linear mind in loops.
a video excerpt of one of his talks (~12 min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcDMJvO6aHU
his experiments are here: http://www.headless.org/experiments.htm
you have to actually do the experiments, not just read them. when i went thru them, i almost didn't actually do the pointing experiment, since my linear brain was all "i know what i'm doing and don't need to waste my time with this", but i didn't the experiments anyway, half-heartedly at first, and they are more powerful than they appear i think. and i doubt it would have worked at all to just read it. my reaction was similar to a comment from someone who wrote in to the website (altho i'm not buddhist as the commenter was):
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http://www.headless.org/Comments/pointing.htm
Something interesting happened last night. I was visited by a man that I didn't know very well and he noticed a calligraphic scroll I had hanging, with only the character for "mu" (nothingness) on it. He asked, "Toler san, have you ever entered the world of Mu?" I said "Yes. Many times." He then asked "How can you do it? At what times do you do it?" I said, "Oh, you can do it anytime". He asked, "How?" So I led him through the pointing exercise. When I came to the question, "Now, what do you see at the place where your finger is pointing?" He said, "Nothing." I said, "Well, that's Mu, isn't it?" He thought about that for about ten seconds, then suddenly laughed loudly and clapped his hands and said "I've been pondering that for years, and you showed me in a minute!" and thanked me profusely. J.T. (Zen abbot) Japan
-----
if anyone finds it of interest, there are also some interviews with people who have used his experiments, including a catholic monk and a buddhist monk. of the interviews, the ones i thought were best (if memory serves) were: Interview with Amaranatho (buddhist monk), Interview: Suvaco (buddhist monk), Interview: Hymie Wyse (former jesuit priest).
i suspect that this is similar to beholding, or at least closer to it than the normal everyday linear brain spinning that people go thru. but of course, i'd appreciate any insights from maggie and other readers, who individually and collectively have far more expertise in mystical literature and practice than i do, whether i'm in the ballpark, or lost in the weeds.
@ sgl
Using McGilchrist, the left hemisphere is a stickler to something definite or certain, like your orange, so that consequently, the left can easily isolate and exclude. This story from Anthony de Mello somehow portrays the operation of the left hemisphere:
The devil went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop down and pick up something from the ground.
“What did that man find?” asked the friend. “A piece of Truth,” said the devil.
“Doesn’t that disturb you?” asked the friend.
“No,” said the devil, “I shall let him make a belief out of it.”
Even the devil could be laughing at the left hemisphere's narrow perception.
But it is the right hemisphere that perceives the broader truth beyond "orange" or the "piece of truth." Unless the left hemisphere has a humble relationship with the right hemisphere/deep mind, humanity dominated by your "orange perception" will remain laughable. Humor and humility have the same root words.
@desertfisher
You write: "But then again, it's good to revisit 'mystical images' from the 'canonized' with the 'two ways of knowing' in mind."
This strikes me as dismissive.
Another way to look at it.
“If you don’t have ability you are like a blind person. You want to liberate beings but you can’t find the path yourself. People with experience can explain the path. They’ve been to this land of 'no creation, no destruction'. They’ve entered the fortress, they come back down this road and write it all down ... and tell everyone. 'If you haven’t been there you can’t lead anyone down the road and you can’t liberate anyone.’ The Buddha said this.”
quoted from: Amongst White Clouds, a film by Ed Berger. The speaker is not named.
The point being. This "road" is ongoing and rightly it includes visiting (read conversing with) all of its guides. Who, more likely than not, even two thousand years ago, knew about the "two ways of knowing" way.
namaste,
mike
@ Mike
I don't know where you are coming from when you used the word "dismissive". As far as the study of religion is concern, there are at least 2 phenomenological approaches - from the outside, and from the bottom up. I am trying to constrain as best as i could as Catholic layperson with the latter approach. As regards to your long quote from Ed Berger's film, let me cast my innocence on what you are alluding to. But if it alludes to the spiritual path as a matter of expertise or ability, then, i would take issue on this - what if "blindness" is the very path? What if the widow's last two coins, rather than one's ability or banking on one's past experiences were the very passageways to beholding?
When I say "revisit," I am thinking along Catholic tradition of "canonized" stereotypes or images of contemplation or what the contemplative life ideally is supposed to be. For example, the Jesuit Thomas Dubay, in his book Fire Within, had this quote from Teresa under his exposition on what contemplation is - “a feeling of the presence of God would come upon me unexpectedly so that I could in no way doubt He was within me or I totally immersed in Him”.
When I alluded for a "revisit," I am not trying to dismiss giants of prayer in the past and their "experience" of silent beholding. What I am trying to suggest is that historically, our perceptions and "experiences" on the spiritual life evolve and so is our language for those "experiences". In our times, neuroscience work like McGilchrist's, or the multidisciplinary work of Maggie (The Fountain and the Furnace)or the re-valuing of poetry over prose now afford us with better "language handle" on our "experiences," human language equally capable also of disseminating confusion or preserving an exclusive "field of experts".
Hi all! I've been enjoying your exchanges. This occurred to me:When we speak of "beholding" it is wrapped in mystery. When we speak of laughter, humor, it is not. Yet, I find it just as mysterious. Could it be that laughter marks our "now" just as "Behold" does so in scripture (as Mike noted from Maggie'). When I first met my husband (to be) and introduced him to my best friend, she said, "He laughs in all the right places." I enjoyed how Desert Fisher pointed out how humor and humility are the same roots. Am I forcing a parallel? Blessings, a.t.
@desertfisher
Thank you very much for these clarifications. Understand much better your remarks in such light.
I think "ability" is a relationship and it plays a large part in how one casts the last or only coins. This quality is best understood as an attentive regard for what we might now understand as an "intuition" or "insight" or "gesture". With careful examination it is notable that such "rise" from a sustained engagement with otherness or no self. Even though doing so is inherently paradoxical and the blindness in this is understood, such concerns are dismissed by responding. This is the ability noted in the quote I offered.
Practice matters and it helps one respond well when that moment of call rises.
Thus, a poem is "written" by a poet and songs "come" to singers. The poor widow may well have cast those last two coins in just such a blind manner.
Namaste,
mike
I don't think this is "forcing" anything Abigail. Where can be found any otherness or self ness when laughing? To the contrary it's spot on. "laughter marks our now." Well put. Nice thought!
mike
@ Abigail,
Agree so much how "beholding" when captive to a discussion becomes more elusive. I like how Maggie puts it when she describes the Psalm-singers: "often the psalm-singers seem unreal to us, two-dimensional paper cutouts on a flat plane". And so is beholding on a flat screen! :-)A better way of course is to sing with the psalm-singers. Or touch-base with our anger the way imprecatory psalms are. And then laugh with our follies and foibles :-)!
@Mike
Thank you, too. It's a lovely take on "ability." If i could put a parallel to the nuance you gave - beholding as the habit of "emptying one's hands" as against "grasping". By way of extension, the words "discipline" and "disciple" have again the same root words :-).
@ Abigail
Anthony de Mello had this funny statement:
"No one ever became drunk on the word wine."
But then, on the paradox of human language, and because Mike mentioned about singing, he has this story:
The disciples were full of questions about God.
Said the Master, “God is Unknown, the Unknowable. Every statement about Him, every answer to your questions, is a distortion of the Truth.”
The disciples were bewildered. “Then why do you speak about Him at all?”
“Why does the bird sing?” said the Master. Not because he has a statement, but because he has a song."
Sabbath Shalom everyone!
perhaps because? any gesture effecting deep mind, being wrought of sublimity, brightens whatever it encounters, always.
mike
Thank you for your enlightening comments. You have filled up my little seeings with much greater seeings and in so doing even you see more. There is the paradox (I think anyway). i m blessed. a.t.
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