Spiritual Training

“Paradoxical as it may seem, it is, for very many persons, much easier to behave selflessly in a time of crisis than it is when life is taking its normal course in undisturbed tranquility. When the going is easy, there is nothing to make us forget our precious selfness, nothing (except our own will to mortification and knowledge of God) to distract our minds from the distractions with which we have chosen to be identified; we are at perfect liberty to wallow in our personality to our heart’s content. And how we wallow! It is for this reason that all the masters of the spiritual life insist so strongly upon the importance of little things…

The saint is one who knows that every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision – to chose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life; between interests exclusively temporal and the eternal order; between our personal will, or the will of some projection of our personality, and the will of God.

In order to fit himself to deal with the emergencies of his way of life, the saint undertakes appropriate training of mind and body, just as the soldier does. But whereas the objectives of military training are limited and very simple, namely, to make men courageous, cool-headed and co-operatively efficient in the business of killing other men, with whom, personally, they have no quarrel, the objectives of spiritual training are much less narrowly specialized. Here the aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of their own and all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all, even the most trivial circumstances of daily living without malice, greed, self-assertion or voluntary ignorance, but consistently with love and understanding. Because its objectives are not limited, because, for the lover of God, every moment is a moment of crisis, spiritual training is incomparably more difficult and searching than military training. There are many good soldiers, few saints…

What is true of soldiers is also true of saints, but with this important difference – the aim of spiritual training is to make people selfless in every circumstance of life.”

– Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

The Age of Noise

"The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire— we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions— news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose— to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving— to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground."

Half of the battle is just turning off the radio, the TV, the podcasts. I’m really trying to drastically reduce all of that. Drive in silence. Read. Walk without listening to a podcast. Most of the time we can’t even hear ourselves think. The real solutions to our problems need to come from within. We usually already know what we need to know.

The Mystics are Boring

"Nevertheless, insofar as they are saints, insofar as they possess the unitive knowledge that makes them 'perfect as their Father which is in heaven is perfect,' they are all astonishingly alike. Their actions are uniformly selfless and they are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is their true relation to the universe and its spiritual Ground. Of even plain average people it may be said that their name is Legion— much more so of exceptionally complex personalities, who identify themselves with a wide diversity of moods, cravings and opinions. Saints, on the contrary, are neither double-minded nor half-hearted, but single and, however great their intellectual gifts, profoundly simple. The multiplicity of Legion has given place to one-pointedness— not to any of those evil one-pointednesses of ambition or covetousness, or lust for power and fame, not even to any of the nobler, but still all too human one-pointednesses of art, scholarship and science, regarded as ends in themselves, but to the supreme, more than human one-pointedness that is the very being of those souls who consciously and consistently pursue man’s final end, the knowledge of eternal Reality...

...Among the cultivated and mentally active, hagiography is now a very unpopular form of literature. The fact is not at all surprising. The cultivated and the mentally active have an insatiable appetite for novelty, diversity and distraction. But the saints, however commanding their talents and whatever the nature of their professional activities, are all incessantly preoccupied with only one subject— spiritual Reality and the means by which they and their fellows can come to the unitive knowledge of that Reality. And as for their actions— these are as monotonously uniform as their thoughts; for in all circumstances they behave selflessly, patiently and with indefatigable charity. No wonder, then, if the biographies of such men and women remain unread. For one well educated person who knows anything about William Law there are two or three hundred who have read Boswell’s life of his younger contemporary. Why? Because, until he actually lay dying, Johnson indulged himself in the most fascinating of multiple personalities; whereas Law, for all the superiority of his talents was almost absurdly simple and single-minded. Legion prefers to read about Legion. It is for this reason that, in the whole repertory of epic, drama and the novel there are hardly any representations of true theocentric saints."

                                               
                                                                                      – Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

Real Simplicity

"In the world, when people call anyone simple, they generally mean a foolish, ignorant, credulous person. But real simplicity, so far from being foolish, is almost sublime. All good men like and admire it, are conscious of sinning against it, observe it in others and know what it involves; and yet they could not precisely define it. I should say that simplicity is an uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness. It is not the same as sincerity, which is a much humbler virtue. Many people are sincere who are not simple. They say nothing but what they believe to be true, and do not aim at appearing anything but what they are. But they are forever thinking about themselves, weighing their every word and thought, and dwelling upon themselves in apprehension of having done too much or too little. These people are sincere but they are not simple. They are not at their ease with others, nor others with them. There is nothing easy, frank, unrestrained or natural about them. One feels that one would like less admirable people better, who were not so stiff.

To be absorbed in the world around and never turn a thought within, as in the blind condition of some who are carried away by what is pleasant and tangible, is one extreme as opposed to simplicity. And to be self-absorbed in all matters, whether it be duty to God or man, is the other extreme, which makes a person wise in his own conceit – reserved, self-conscious, uneasy at the least thing which disturbs his inward self-complacency. Such false wisdom, in spite of its solemnity, is hardly less vain and foolish than the folly of those who plunge headlong into worldly pleasures. The one is intoxicated by his outward surroundings, the other by what he believes himself to be doing inwardly; but both are in a state of intoxication, and the last is a worse state than the first, because it seems to be wise, though it is not really, and so people do not try to be cured. Real simplicity lies in a just milieu equally free from thoughtlessness and affectation, in which the soul is not overwhelmed by externals, so as to be unable to reflect, nor yet given up to the endless refinements, which self-consciousness induces. The soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity. Such simplicity is indeed a great treasure. How shall we attain to it? I would give all I possess for it; it is the costly pearl of Holy Scripture.

The first step, then, is for the soul to put away outward things and look within so as to know its own real interest; so far all is right and natural; thus much is only wise self-love, which seeks to avoid the intoxication of the world.

In the next step the soul must add the contemplation of God, whom it fears, to that of self. This is a faint approach to the real wisdom, but the soul is still greatly self-absorbed; it is not satisfied with fearing God; it wants to be certain that it does fear him and fears lest it fears him not, going round in a perpetual circle of self-consciousness. All this restless dwelling on self is very far from the peace and freedom of real love; but that is yet in the distance; the soul needs to go through a season of trial, and were it suddenly plunged into a state of rest, it would not know how to use it.

The third step is that, ceasing from a restless self-contemplation, the soul begins to dwell upon God instead, and by degrees forgets itself in Him. It becomes full of Him and ceases to feed upon self. Such a soul is not blinded to its own faults or indifferent to its own errors; it is more conscious of them than ever, and increased light shows them in plainer form, but this self-knowledge comes from God, and therefore it is not restless or uneasy."

– Francois Fenelon, quoted in The Perennial Philosophy

Island Universes

Ok, one more Huxley quote and I'll be done with him for a bit.  He's just such a fascinating writer.

Here he talks about how we can't ever truly share an experience with anyone.  We are "locked inside" ourselves, and there's really nothing we can ever do about that.  Just interesting to think about...

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

– Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Agnostic Meditation

As I continue to develop this site, I am starting with the practices that I feel I know the most about.  My primary spiritual practice is Centering Prayer, what you might call "resting in God," beyond thoughts, images, ideas, and emotions.  You can check out the Centering Prayer page under the Spiritual Practice tab for more.

While I'm in my Centering Prayer writing mode, I wanted to include some extended quotations from an essay by Aldous Huxley entitled Symbol and Immediate Experience from his collection The Divine Within: Selected Writings in Enlightenment.  

What I find most interesting is not only his discussion of a certain type of mystical experience (which I find similar to what can happen during Centering Prayer), but also the idea that you don't have to hold certain religious beliefs to practice these disciplines.  The Transcendental Meditation movement has really moved in this direction and uses almost completely secular language, even though it comes from the explicitly religious Vedic tradition.

So, a few quotations.  Huxley starts by describing "the mystical experience":
 

"Very briefly, let us discuss what is the mystical experience. I take it that the mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and, while the experience lasts, being identified with a form of pure consciousness – of unstructured, transpersonal consciousness, lying, so to speak, upstream from the ordinary discursive consciousness of every day. It is a non-egotistic consciousness, which seems to underlie the consciousness of the separate ego in time. Now, why should this sort of experience be regarded as valuable? I think for two reasons: First of all, it is regarded as valuable because of the self-evident sensibility of value, as William Law would say. It is regarded as intrinsically valuable just as aesthetically the experience of beauty is regarded as valuable. It is like the experience of beauty, but so much more, so to speak. And it is valuable, secondarily, because as a matter of empirical experience it does bring about changes in thought and character and feeling which the experiencer and those about him regard as manifestly desirable. It makes possible a sense of unity, of solidarity, with the world. It brings about the possibility of a kind of universal love and compassion..."

I might alter his statement by saying that this is a mystical experience.  Huxley himself wrote about his experience on mescaline in The Doors of Perception, which he would take to be "mystical" but clearly a different sort of experience than he his describing here.  But "consciousness beyond thought" or "pure consciousness" is, in my opinion, a fair secular way to describe the state potentially reached by Centering Prayer, Transcendental Meditation, and Zen.  

Huxley goes on to discus a method of getting to this state:
 

"Now, very briefly, I must just touch on the means for reaching this state. Here, again, it has been constantly stressed that the means do not consist in mental activity and discursive reasoning. They consist in what Roger Fry, speaking about art, used to call "alert passivity," or "determined sensitiveness." This is a very remarkable phrase. You don't do anything, but you are determined to be sensitive to letting something be done within you. And one has this expressed by some of the great masters of the spiritual life in the West. St. Francois de Sales, for example, writing to his pupil, St. Jeanne de Chantal, says: 'You tell me you do nothing in prayer. But what do you want to do in prayer except what you are doing, which is, presenting and representing your nothingness and misery to God? When beggars expose their ulcers and their necessities to our sight, that is the best appeal they can make. But from what you tell me, you sometimes do nothing of this, but lie there like a shadow or statue. They put statues in palaces simply to please the prince's eyes. Be content to be that in the presence of God: he will bring the statue to life when he pleases.'"

This alert passivity or determined sensitiveness could easily describe what we're trying to do in Centering Prayer.  Although Huxley says he is discussing a method for reaching this state, he doesn't touch on an actual methodology.  Centering Prayer, Transcendental Meditation, and Zazen each, it seems to me, have their own ways of getting you there.  In Centering Prayer you are releasing thoughts and setting an intention to be open to God; in Transcendental Meditation you are focusing the attention on a mantra; in Zazen, you are typically focusing the attention on the breath.  These practices aren't "all just the same thing," but I do think each could potentially take you to this state of consciousness beyond thought.

Huxley concludes by stating that you don't have to have any particular religious belief to experiment with this type of meditation:
 

"And of course if anyone does not want to formulate this process in theological terms he does not have to; it is possible to think of it strictly in psychological terms. I myself happen to believe that this deeper Self within us is in some way continuous with the Mind of the universe, or whatever you like to call it; but you don't necessarily have to accept this. You can practice this entirely in psychological terms and on the basis of a complete agnosticism in regard to the conceptual ideas of orthodox religion. An agnostic can practice these things and yet come to gnosis, to knowledge; and the fruits of knowledge will be the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, and peace, and the capacity to help other people. So that we see then, there is really no conflict between the mystical approach to religion and the scientific approach, simply because one is not committed by it to any cut and dried statement about the structure of the universe..."

As we find ourselves in an increasingly secular society, this idea that you don't have to hold certain religious ideas to find a contemplative practice clearly removes a barrier for a lot of people.  I'm with Huxley in that I interpret contemplative experience in religious terms.  But I think we will continue to see contemplative practices "unbundled" from their religious contexts.  

The Perennial Philosophy Review

Drawing from primary texts across the spectrum of the world's religious traditions, in The Perennial Philosophy Aldous Huxley synthesizes mystic thought in a variety of areas.  Beginning with what the mystics believe about the nature of reality, Huxley goes on to show how this "Perennial Philosophy" plays itself out in their lives.  A fantastic springboard for exploring primary contemplative texts, there is no better book for an introduction to world mysticism.  

Overview:  Huxley begins by defining the "philosophy of the mystics," what has been called, since Gottfried Leibniz, the Perennial Philosophy because it shows itself in religious traditions across the ages.  In Huxley's words:
 

"Philosophia Perennis – the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing – the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being – the thing is immemorial and universal."

Huxley's definition brings together Western personal/theistic thought and Eastern, mostly non-personal, thought into one statement.  To speak roughly in the languages of West and East: 

In Western terms: (1) There is a God who is the Source of existence, (2) God dwells at the core of each human soul, and (3) our ultimate destiny, if we choose it, is union with God.  
In Eastern terms: (1) There is a Spiritual Ground of existence, (2) the core of each human soul is identical with the Spiritual Ground, and (3) our ultimate destiny, if we choose it, is absorption in the Ground.  

Huxley spends his first two chapters, That Art Thou and The Nature of the Ground, expanding on this definition.  In true mystic form, the nature of the Spiritual Ground which lies at the core of each created being is a mystery.  
 

"What is the That to which the thou can discover itself to be akin? To this the fully developed Perennial Philosophy has at all times and in all places given fundamentally the same answer. The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being."

In other words, God can't be defined, He can only be experienced directly.  That, my friends, is mysticism.  The God whom the worshipper may have "known" through their religious texts, doctrine, and faith tradition, suddenly becomes "unknowable."  The mystics are concerned almost exclusively with direct experience of God and how that experience transforms them; theology becomes a secondary matter.  This has, historically, often put them at odds with the official religious institutions they come from.  

After defining and expanding on the core philosophy of the mystics, Huxley spends the rest of the book looking at how this plays out in their lives.  I'll briefly look at three of these chapters:
 

Mortification, Non-Attachment, Right Livelihood:  The way to find God is to die to self.  The goal of the mystic is simply to become an empty vessel through which God may work.  Instead of identifying with the ego, the "I", the normal sense of self, the contemplative identifies with the divine "not-I," what is called the "Higher Self" in some traditions.  The life of the contemplative is thus a life of self-denial, not because self-denial is a good in and of itself, but because it is the ego, our self-will, that separates us from a life of union with God.

The Miraculous:  Here Huxley explores the existence of "miraculous events" and their connection to the mystics.  These type of events – supernatural healings, psychic powers, etc. – are often associated with contemplatives.  Surprisingly, their attitude towards the miraculous is one of indifference and can be summed up by a quote with which Huxley introduces the chapter:
 

"Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly in the air? You have done no better than a bluebottle. Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody."

– Ansari of Herat

It is salvation, deliverance, nirvana and how that experience can be lived out in the world that the contemplatives are interested in, not the cultivation of supernatural powers.  

Contemplation, Action and Social Utility:  The contemplatives believe that contemplation, the direct experience of God, is the ultimate end for which humanity is designed.  Action in the world (good works, etc.) may prepare the soul for contemplation, but action is not an end in itself.
 

"In all the historic formulations of the Perennial Philosophy it is axiomatic that the end of human life is contemplation, or the direct and intuitive awareness of God; that action is the means to that end; that a society is good to the extent that it renders contemplation possible for its members; and that the existence of at least a minority of contemplatives is necessary for the well-being of any society."

Ironically, it is also the contemplative, the one who has purified himself of self-will, that will naturally perform true positive action in the world:
 

"...action that is 'taken away from the life of prayer' is action unenlightened by contact with Reality, uninspired and unguided; consequently it is apt to be ineffective and even harmful."

In other chapters, Huxley delves into personal temperament and how it affects religious action, spiritual exercises, the role of ritual and sacrament, and various related topics.  

Personal Reflections:  Some critics think that Huxley finds too much commonality and not enough diversity in world mysticism, that he "makes the pieces fit" what he believes is a common core.  While there is certainly diversity in these traditions, I think Huxley does show that, while the mystics might not speak with one voice, they do often speak in harmony.

This book was life-changing for me.  As I was coming out of conservative religion, it helped me hang on to the belief that religion may, in fact, point to something real.  That even if all of my tightly held theology had been stripped away, I might still find God.  Nihilism works for some people, but it clearly wasn't going to work for me.  And that's where I would be if I hadn't found the contemplative versions of faith that are represented in this book.   

One of the more fascinating ideas that I come back to from The Perennial Philosophy is the idea that "knowledge is a function of being."  If we change ourselves by consciously "dying to self" and becoming selfless, we can change our "knowledge" or experience of the world.  Instead of interpreting the world through the tainted lens of our own needs and wants, our self-interest, we begin to see the world with different eyes.  And the mystics insist that if we can truly cleanse ourselves of our self-interest, the fruit will be a life of love, joy, and peace.  

I can't recommend this book, or Huxley as an author, enough.  If you are interested in world mysticism, start here.