Katsuki Sekida's Four Types of Samadhi | #4 Neither Man nor Circumstances are Deprived

So far we've looked at three types of samadhi, or states of mind developed through Zen.  Sekida's fourth type of samadhi is "neither man nor circumstances are deprived."

(1) Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived.
(2) Circumstances are deprived; man is not deprived.
(3) Both man and circumstances are deprived. 
(4) Neither man nor circumstances are deprived.  

As we have seen, "man," as Sekida defines it, is "that certain self-ruling power (which) dominates the mind. This spiritual power is the ultimate thing we can reach in the innermost part of our existence."  This "man" is what is developed through zazen meditation.  

In the first form of samadhi, "man" is absent (although he is ready to make his appearance when needed), and one is wholly absorbed is outward events.  This state of samadhi is the surgeon immersed in his operation, the basketball player immersed in the game, the pianist immersed in the performance.  As far as I can tell, it is what Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow."

In the second form of samadhi, experienced during zen meditation, "man" is present, but circumstances are not.  The picture is of one completely absorbed in inward meditation as practiced in the zen tradition.

In the third form of samadhi, one enters into an even deeper state of meditation in which all self-reflective consciousness (i.e. "I know I'm meditating") ceases.  This is a rare state according to Sekida, and seems to be simply an intensification of the second form of samadhi.

Finally, we come to Sekida's fourth form of samadhi, in which both man and circumstances are present.  Here's how he speaks of this type samadhi:

"This category, 'neither man nor circumstances are deprived,' is the condition attained in the Zen student's maturity. He goes into the actual world of routine and lets his mind work with no hindrance, never losing the 'man' he has established in his absolute samadhi. If we accept that there is an object in Zen practice, then it is this freedom of mind in actual living.

To put it another way: when you are mature in practicing absolute samadhi, returning to ordinary daily life you spontaneously combine in yourself the first and third categories. You are active in positive samadhi and at the same time you are firmly rooted in jishu-zammai – the self-mastery of absolute samadhi. This is 'neither man nor circumstances are deprived,' the highest condition of Zen maturity. True positive samadhi achieved through Zen practice ultimately resolved into this fourth category.

A man may practice zazen and make certain progress in absolute samadhi and be successful in establishing the 'man' within himself. Then a new problem will arise, that of how he can exercise this man in his actual life in the busy world. When sitting on a cushion doing zazen he can attain samadhi and experience the man, and can realize that the man is really his absolute self. But when he comes out into his daily routine and eats, talks, and is active in his business, he often finds he has lost the inner man. He wonders how he can manage to maintain the man in himself in his daily life...

In short, the student who is puzzled how to retain the inner man in his daily life – who wonders how he can embody Mu in himself in his actual life – is striving for the condition in which both the inner man and the outward concerns – man and circumstances – are not deprived but are freely in action. In the first category man was inactive; in the fourth category man has returned to the front line. One who has attained maturity in Zen can behave freely and does not violate the sacred law: both man and circumstances are in vigorous activity and there is no hindrance. Only maturity in Zen will secure this condition – the ultimate aim of Zen practice."

This feeling that one is absorbed in the content of daily life, and is, at the same time, being directed by the "inner man" is, according to Sekida, the aim of Zen practice.

The way he describes this form of samadhi is very similar to the language of working with an "Inner Observer" or "doubled awareness" in other traditions.  This reality has been described as being aware of the contents of consciousness and the field of consciousness at the same time.  In Centering Prayer, it might be spoken of as being fully present to God and the present moment circumstance at the same time.  Drawing parallels between traditions is sometimes dangerous and fails to respect the uniqueness of each tradition, but the parallel here jumps out at me.  As I mentioned in the first post of this series, when describing types of samadhi, Sekida almost seems to be describing my own experience of Centering Prayer, just with different terminology.

This will be the last post of this series.  I highly recommend Sekida's Zen Training as an accessible introduction to Zen.  It's important to note that it is an introduction from only one persons's perspective; and different authors from the Zen tradition often describe it in very different ways. 

Ten Thousand Commandments

"In an age in which the Ten Commandments seem to lose their unconditional validity, man must learn more than ever to listen to the ten thousand commandments arising from the ten thousand unique situations of which his life consists."

– Victor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Victor Frankl on Meaning

"Thus, to all appearances, meaning is just something we are projecting into the things around ourselves, things which themselves are neutral. And in the light of this neutrality, reality may well seem to be just a screen upon which we are projecting our own wishful thinking, a Rorschach blot, as it were. If that were so, meaning would be no more than a mere means of self-expression, and thus something profoundly subjective.

However, the only thing which is subjective is the perspective through which we approach reality, and this subjectiveness does not in the least detract from the objectiveness of reality itself. I improvised an explanation of this phenomenon for the students in my seminar at Harvard. 'Just look through the windows of this lecture hall at Harvard Chapel. Each of you sees the chapel in a different way, from a different perspective, depending on the location of your seat. If anyone claimed that he sees the chapel exactly as his neighbor does, I would have to say that one of them must be hallucinating. But does the difference of views in the least detract from the objectivity and reality of the chapel? Certainly it does not.'

Human cognition is not of kaleidoscopic nature. If you look into a kaleidoscope, you see only what is inside of the kaleidoscope itself. On the other hand, if you look through a telescope you see something which is outside of the telescope itself. And if you look at the world, or a thing in the world, you also see more than, say, the perspective. What is seen through the perspective, however subjective the perspective may be, is the objective world. In fact, "seen through" is the literal translation of the Latin word, perspectum.

I have no objection to replacing the term 'objective' with the more cautious term 'trans-subjective' as it is used, for example, by Allers. This does not make a difference. Nor does it make a difference whether we speak of things or meanings. Both are 'trans-subjective.' This trans-subjectiveness has really been presupposed all along whenever we spoke of self-transcendence. Human beings are transcending themselves toward meanings which are something other than themselves, which are more than mere expressions of their selves, more than mere projections of these selves. Meanings are discovered but not invented...

...Thus we have arrived at a definition of what meaning is. Meaning is what is meant, be it by a person who asks me a question, or by a situation which, too, implies a question and calls for an answer. I cannot say. 'My answer right or wrong,' as the Americans say, 'My country right or wrong.' I must try hard to find out the true meaning of the question which I am asked.

To be sure, man is free to answer the questions he is asked by life. But this freedom must not be confounded with arbitrariness. It must be interpreted in terms of responsibleness. Man is responsible for giving the right answer to a question, for finding the true meaning of a situation. And meaning is something to be found rather than to be given, discovered rather than invented."

– Victor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

We could say that meaning is the answer that an individual must give in light of the demands of life.  

Here's Frankl with a short interview on The Will to Meaning:

Katsuki Sekida's Four Types of Samadhi | #3 Both Man and Circumstances are Deprived

Sekida's third type of samadhi, or mental state, associated with Zen is "Both man and circumstances are deprived."

(1) Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived.
(2) Circumstances are deprived; man is not deprived.
(3) Both man and circumstances are deprived.
(4) Neither man nor circumstances are deprived.

This type of samadhi, achieved during Zen meditation, is an intensification and deepening of State #2.  The difference, according to Sekida, is that the "self-reflecting action of consciousness" is lessened, even to a point where it disappears altogether.  

Here's how he describes "Both man and circumstances are deprived":

"The third category is "Both man and circumstances are deprived." A discussion of this category must be preceded by an explanation of self-consciousness. I have said that consciousness functions in two ways, outwardly and inwardly. There is another important action exercised by consciousness: one that reflects upon its own thought. This kind of reflection must be distinguished from general introspection, which deals with character or behavior. When we think, 'It is fine today.' we are noting the weather, but we are not noting that we are thinking about the weather. The thought about the weather may last only a fraction of a second, and unless our next action of consciousness reflects upon it and recognizes it, our thought about the weather is allowed to pass away unnoticed. Self-consciousness appears when you notice your thought, which immediately precedes your noticing it, and you then recognize the thought as your own.

If we do not perform this noticing action we do not become aware of our thinking, and we will never know that we have been conscious at all. We may call this action of noticing our own thoughts "the reflecting action of consciousness" to distinguish it from general introspection...

Now, when one is in absolute samadhi in its most profound phase, no reflecting action of consciousness appears. This is Rinzai's third category, "Both man and circumstances are deprived." In a more shallow phase of samadhi, a reflecting action of consciousness occasionally breaks in and makes us aware of our samadhi. Such reflection comes and goes momentarily, and each time momentarily interrupts the samadhi to a slight degree. The deeper the samadhi becomes, the less frequent becomes the appearance of the reflecting action of consciousness. Ultimately the time comes when no reflection appears at all. One comes to notice nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing. This state of mind is called "nothing." But it is not vacant emptiness. Rather is it the purest condition of your existence. It is not reflected, and nothing is directly known of it. This nothingness is "Both man and circumstances are deprived," the condition Hakuin Zenji called "the Great Death." The experience of this Great Death is no doubt not common in the ordinary practice of zazen among most Zen students. Nevertheless, if you want to attain genuine enlightenment and emancipation, you must go completely through this condition, because enlightenment can be achieved only after once shaking off our old habitual way of consciousness."

In this third type of samadhi, all disappears, even one's awareness that they are experiencing samadhi.  

Katsuki Sekida's Four Types of Samadhi | #2 Circumstances are Deprived; Man is Not Deprived

Continuing the Samadhi series, Katsuki Sekida's second form of samadhi is "Circumstances are deprived; man is not deprived."

(1) Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived.
(2) Circumstances are deprived; man is not deprived.
(3) Both man and circumstances are deprived.
(4) Neither man nor circumstances are deprived.

In Sekida's first form of samadhi, one is totally absorbed in outward circumstances.  In Sekida's second form of samadhi, the situation is reversed.  Outward circumstances disappear and one becomes absorbed in the "inner man."

"The second category ... denotes inward attention. When we work on Mu or practice shikantaza, we concentrate inwardly and there develops a samadhi in which a certain self-ruling spiritual power dominates the mind. This spiritual power is the ultimate thing that we can reach in the innermost part of our existence. We do not introspect it, because subjectivity does not reflect itself, just as the eye does not see itself, but we are this ultimate thing itself. It contains in itself all sources of emotion and reasoning power, and it is a fact we directly realize in ourselves.

Rinzai Zenji calls this ultimate thing 'man.' When this 'man' rules within us in profound samadhi, circumstances are forgotten. No outward concern appears. This state of mind is 'Circumstances are deprived, man is not deprived.' It is an inward samadhi and it is what I have called absolute samadhi, because it forms the foundation of all zazen practice. It contrasts with the outwardly directed samadhi described in the first category, which I call positive samadhi. Positive samadhi is a samadhi in the world of conscious activity. Absolute samadhi is a samadhi that transcends consciousness. When we simply use the term samadhi by itself we generally refer to this absolute samadhi."

As a practitioner of Centering Prayer, the similarities here are obvious.  When Sekida says things like "a self-ruling spiritual power dominates the mind," that it is "the ultimate thing that we can reach in the innermost part of our existence," and "it contains in itself all sources of emotion and reasoning power," he is essentially describing the Centering Prayer experience without using the word God.  The major difference is that in Sekida's description, this self-ruling power, what he calls "man," is you ("we are this ultimate thing itself").  Most who practice Centering Prayer would conceptualize this differently, interpreting this power as something outside of themselves, although even this gets hazy as the experience is often described as "the presence of God at the deepest level of your being."

Sekida's description of the second form of samadhi is the closest I have found to describing the experience of Centering Prayer, but from the perspective of a different religious tradition.  In his discussion here, we're almost speaking the same language.  
 

Katsuki Sekida's Four Types of Samadhi | #1 Man is Deprived; Circumstances are Not Deprived

In Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, Katsuki Sekida discusses four categories of "samadhi."  Samadhi is one of those terms that gets used in different ways by different authors, and this often creates difficulty when discussing the concept.  In the modern Christian contemplative tradition, True Self / False Self language shares this problem.  Sekida uses the term in a very general way in which it may simply be taken to mean "mental absorption."  He then delineates between types of mental absorptions, or "types of samadhi."  

I find huge overlap in Sekida's descriptions and what I have experienced in my own practice of Centering Prayer.  More than any other Zen author, I feel like his language really speaks to my own, non-officially-Zen, experience.  

Sekida's categories of samadhi are:

1. Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived.
2. Circumstances are deprived; man is not deprived.
3. Both man and circumstances are deprived.
4. Neither man nor circumstances are deprived.

I'll take each of the categories in separate posts.  A preliminary note – when Sekida uses the word "man" here, he is talking about what he calls "a certain self-ruling spiritual power (which) dominates the mind."  This "man" is developed through Zen practice and thus is difficult to understand for those who haven't had the experience.  Here's how Sekida describes the first category of samadhi: "Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived":  

"The first category 'Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived' denotes a situation in which one's mind is absorbed in outward circumstances. A famous surgeon was once performing an operation that required great concentration. While he was working there was a sudden earthquake. The shocks were so severe that most of the attendants involuntarily ran out of the room for safety. But the surgeon was so absorbed in the operation that he did not feel the shocks at all. After the operation was over he was told of the earthquake, and this was the first he knew of it. He had been completely absorbed in his work, in a kind of samadhi.

We experience this kind of samadhi when we are watching a football game, reading, writing, thinking, fishing, looking at pictures, talking about the weather, or even stretching out a hand to open the door – in the moment of sitting down or stepping forward. In fact, we are at every moment absorbed in that moment's action or thought. There are various degrees of absorption, various periods of duration, and differences between voluntary and involuntary attention: the differences, for example, between our watching a football game (involuntary attention) and the surgeon performing the operation (voluntary attention). But we are almost always experiencing a minor or major condition of momentary samadhi, so to speak. When we are in this sort of samadhi we are quite forgetful of ourselves. We are not self-conscious about our behavior, emotions, or thought. The inner man is forgotten and outer circumstances occupy our whole attention. To put it another way: inward concern is absent; outward concern dominates...

Now, it is important to recognize the difference between true samadhi with self-mastery and the false kind of samadhi without it. In the first, even when the inner man is forgotten, he is not forsaken. The firmly established man is getting along well within, ready to make his appearance at any time. False samadhi lacks this self-mastery from the outset. There can be fighting samadhi, stealing samadhi, hating samadhi, jealousy samadhi, worrying, dreading, upsetting samadhi, but all without the guidance of self-mastery. These are not true samadhi as it is understood in Zen...

Not losing self-mastery but at the same time being involved in external conditions is the real meaning of 'Man is deprived; circumstances are not deprived.' In this state the inner man is simply inactive."

So, according to Sekida, full absorption in what one is doing, when the inner man is "ready to make his appearance at any time," is this first kind of samadhi.  Another way you could put it is that this kind of samadhi is absorption in the task at hand as directed by the "inner man" achieved through Zen practice.  

This full absorption in the task at hand is, it seems to me, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "Flow."

Thomas Keating's False Self

In his various discussions of Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating often uses the term "False Self."  This term has also been used by other writers including Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, etc.  Each author uses the term in a slightly different way.

For Keating, the False Self is created when we experience emotional trauma throughout our lives.  As we experience wounding in areas of our core psychological needs (for Keating, these needs are summarized in the categories of power/control, esteem/affection, and security/survival), we develop attachments to people, places, and situations that bring us comfort, and aversions to people, places, and situations that lead to discomfort in the light of these wounds. 

This collection of attachments and aversions results in what Keating calls "emotional programs for happiness."

A young child overhears his father saying, "I wish he was more like his brother," which attacks his core psychological need for esteem/affection.  The incident then becomes buried in the boy's subconscious.  He may not even remember the incident in adulthood, but, on a subconscious level, part of him continues to want to imitate his brother to achieve his father's affection.  The "emotional program for happiness" of "needing to be like my brother" becomes a deep part of who he is.  As a result, he develops attachments to things that make him more like his brother, and aversions to things that make him different.  These attachments and aversions, at least in part, continue to drive his behavior throughout life.

On this model, each human being has a host of emotional programs for happiness running at the same time, each based on our unique traumas.  These programs create anxieties as we interact with the world, and may even conflict with each other.  

For Keating, the False Self is our wounded self; and our self that searches for things in the world to help us deal with those wounds. 

The solution, for Keating, is experiencing the "Divine Therapy" through Centering Prayer.  As we get deeper into our practice and become more open to the presence of God, these incidents are released from the subconscious and we eventually become healed of our traumas.  Keating calls this the Archaeological Dig.  The result might be what Keating would call our True Self, our healed sense of self that has our core needs fulfilled through the presence of God.  

For more on Keating and Centering Prayer, check out the Centering Prayer page of the site.  

The Path of Shinzen Young

A few posts back I quoted Shinzen Young on his understanding of Enlightenment and how it looks across religious traditions.  This is a podcast in which he recounts his spiritual path.  I especially relate to his realization of the universality of mystic experience (7:30 and following) which can be an important point of contact in inter-religious dialogue.  

Shinzen teaches mostly vipassana "mindfulness" meditation.

Salvation over Philosophy

The mystical writers are, in some sense, philosophers.  They are trying to understand the world as it is.  But they are generally concerned with "knowledge" only to the extent that it leads to what they deem to be "salvation."  The mystics are sometimes contrasted with the great Greek philosophers – the pure philosophers are concerned with only the head, while the mystics are concerned with the liberation of the heart and soul.

In Mysticism: East and West, Rudolph Otto compares the lives and thought of two representative mystics – Meister Eckhart of the West and Sankara of the East.  In his chapter Not Metaphysics but a Doctrine of Salvation, Otto discusses these two mystics in comparison to philosophers:

"Sankara is usually regarded as the greatest philosopher of India, and Meister Eckhart in the history of philosophy as the creator of an original philosophical system. Yet both are at bottom alike in that they are not so much philosophers as theologians. They are indeed metaphysicians, but not in the sense of the metaphysics of Aristotle or of the philosophical schools. Their impelling interest is not 'science' as a theoretical explanation of the world...Neither of them is concerned for 'knowledge' out of curiosity to explain the world, but each is impelled by a longing for 'salvation.' ...

The 'Being' of which they speak is to be a 'salvation.' That that Being is one, without a second, that it is undivided, without apposition or predicate, without "How" or fashion, these are not merely metaphysical facts but at the same time 'saving' actualities. That the soul is eternally one with the Eternal is not a scientifically interesting statement, but is that fact upon which the salvation of the soul depends."

The "Super-Meaning" of Life

Viktor Frankl believed that, beyond anything else, human beings crave meaning.  We can endure any what, he thought, as long as we have a why.  Without a "why," we are simply adrift in the world, and at best find some measure of satisfaction through distraction and entertainment.  But that is not living deeply, and a life without felt meaning ultimately leads to neurosis and depression.  

I, along with many others, agree with Frankl.  I think we desire meaning more than comfort.  I think the sense that our actions have real significance is a fundamental need of humanity.  

But, if we truly do need some sense of significance, where does it come from?

One option, probably the most popular in modern society, is the idea that meaning is fundamentally a human construct that we have the ability to superimpose on reality.  That is, we create our own meaning in the world.  We give ourselves a why.  It seems to me that without invoking some type of spiritual reality (i.e. God, a meaning-giver, etc.), if we want to hold on to some type of concept of meaning, this is what we are left with.  

I've never been satisfied with this idea.  To me, it just seems to make meaning arbitrary, and arbitrary meaning, at least in my mind, is just as good as no meaning.  Take the following two statements:
 

"My main purpose in life is to drink soda."

"My main purpose in life is to raise my son well."

If I'm just creating my own meaning in the world, either one of these is equally valid.  It's my choice.

But one of these statements intuitively feels more correct.  If I had a son and subordinated raising him well to my soda habit, most people would say something is drastically wrong.  Most would say that I'd be missing out on a life filled with more meaning (giving my best energies to raising my son), for one with less meaning (drinking soda).

Another way to think about meaning is the idea that it is something we discover.  That it is an inherent part of reality, an actual part of the universe that we find.  This, it seems to me, gives the concept of meaning some actual weight, some depth.  Meaning becomes real and not simply a product of our minds.  And I think the only way to leave this idea open as an option is to invoke some type of spiritual worldview.  

Frankl was mostly concerned with helping people find meaning in their own lives and circumstances.  And that's, mostly, what we need.  The abstract question "What's the meaning of life?" is less important than the question "What's my meaning in life?".  But, as Frankl seems to say, if there is such a thing as my meaning, it seems that it must be a function of the meaning of life.  

Frankl calls this ultimate meaning of life its "super-meaning."  For Frankl, the super-meaning will be forever beyond our grasp as finite humans.  Our task is not to bear the meaninglessness of life, but to bear the fact that we can't fully understand its ultimate meaning. 
 

"This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic."

– Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

The idea that there is a "super-meaning" – an Ultimate Meaning of Life – even if we can't fully understand it, seems to allow us to hold that the meanings we find in our own lives are an actual part of reality and not merely a creation of our imaginations.

Shinzen Young on Enlightenment Across Traditions

As I start the blog, my posts are a little random.  Part of that is because I am building the Spiritual Practice pages and my thoughts are bouncing across traditions.  Part of it is because I'm simply posting quotes that I have found interesting for a long time and am finally putting them in one place.  This is one of those quotes.

I've had this interview from Shinzen Young bookmarked for about a year and have come back to it several times recently.  I was introduced to him through the Buddhist Geeks website, which I link to frequently.  

In the interview, Shinzen talks about the Enlightenment experience as he interprets it from his background.  He also has a really interesting statement about how this experience is talked about differently among those from other traditions.  Here he talks about what he thinks the "common denominator" is in the experience:

"The salient feature that is characteristic of enlightenment that’s independent of the tradition, whether it’s Christian, Buddhist, Moslem, Hindu, Sikh, Native, Atheist, etc.—the common denominator is that 'shift in perception of I-amness.' However, depending on a person’s background, and also how a person interprets the experience, the language that’s used to describe what is realized may be very different.

Buddhists formulate the shift in perception of I-amness as 'there truly is no self. Within a lot of Hinduism the very same experience is described as discovering the True Self in a way that implies it’s a thing – the Witness, the True Observer, Pure Consciousness, etc., etc. You might think just based on the language that the Buddhist formulation and what many of the Hindu’s talk about are unrelated or perhaps even opposite experiences.

It can get even more confusing when you read the classical texts in the original language they were written in. The Buddhists say enlightenment is to realize there is no Atma, which is interpreted as self-as-thing. Most Hindu teachers say enlightenment is to find the Atma, which is interpreted as the True Perceiver, or the Nature of consciousness that’s in some way behind all the appearances. So one says find the true Atma and the other says there truly is no Atma. You might think they’re talking about completely different experiences but as far as I can see they’re using different descriptions in talking about the same thing.

When you meet the Hindu babas and the Buddhists masters and you talk and interact with them, you get the same body language and you get the same vibe. It seems the same re-engineering of the human has taken place in both cases, but the language they use to describe this sounds antithetical.

The Christian mystics will often talk about the soul merging with God. Based on the words alone you might think that what they’re describing is quite different from the Hindu or Buddhist adepts. As far as I can see it’s part of the same re-engineering of the human. For example when St. Theresa of Avila talks about merging with God she says 'it’s like water and water.' But then she also says 'the self-forgetting is so profound it seems as though the soul no longer exists.' When a Roman Catholic in the sixteenth century says, 'when you merge with God it seems like your soul doesn’t exist anymore,' it is an extraordinary statement.

St. Theresa’s description of the contemplative path not only passed the test of orthodoxy, it has become orthodoxy! It is the standard map in the Roman Catholic tradition of the Christian meditative and contemplative path. So we can see that the Buddhist no-self model can be interpreted as akin to some of the things that St. Theresa says.

So a dramatic and permanent shift in the perception of identity is what to look for if you want to spot enlightenment across various spiritual traditions worldwide. Somehow it shakes the normal identity either in the sense of seeing there’s no thing called a self, or in the sense of identifying with a Pure Consciousness that is other than one’s mind and body, or in the sense of merging with one’s Source."

I tend to agree with Shinzen in that although mystics from different backgrounds speak in drastically different ways, they are undergoing the same type of spiritual transformation.  In Shinzen's words, they give off "the same vibe."  

For more from Shinzen Young, check out this post. 

 

I Want to Be Ready

Even though I have ended up, in a sense, outside of this tradition, I still really enjoy a lot of the Christian "spirituals."  You don't have to agree with all of the theology in a song, poem, or piece of art for it to be spiritually edifying.  I'd like to find similar artists from other religious backgrounds as well...

Covet no silver, covet no gold.

Edging Toward Enchantment

I love Richard Beck.  From a progressive Christian standpoint, it just doesn't get any better than his blog Experimental Theology.

He's currently doing a series on "Enchantment" and "Disenchantment" in the modern world generally, and within the Christian faith in particular.  As part of the series, he discusses practices that "edge us towards enchantment," or, you could say, edge us towards "the experience of God in the world."  

This is just a link to one of his recent posts about the act of audibly praying and how it can have the effect of "hallowing" a moment.  

Just something that resonates with me a lot.  Check out his blog for more in the series...
 

Siddhartha Review

In Siddhartha, we follow a spiritual seeker through his wandering, Enlightenment, and finally, through his entrance back into the world.  The seeker, Siddhartha, is placed in the time of The Buddha and actually meets The Master himself, hearing his teachings first hand.  Surprisingly, Siddhartha chooses not to become a disciple of The Buddha, but instead attempts to attain the Ultimate Goal on his own.  Siddhartha finds what he seeks and then returns to civilian life, living among ordinary people as an "enlightened one."  Throughout, the reader finds themselves immersed in the world of Hindu and Buddhist thought.  

Overview:  The book is divided into two sections.  In Part One, Siddhartha seeks and attains Enlightenment, and in Part Two, he re-enters the world.

Part One:  Siddhartha begins his journey as part of his society's upper class, a Brahmin.  Echoing the life of The Buddha, Siddhartha seemingly has everything he could want – wealth, beauty, and power – but finds himself discontent with the best life has to offer:
 

"Within himself Siddhartha had begun to nourish discontent. He had begun to feel that the love of his father and the love of his mother and even the love of his friend Govinda would not forever after delight him, soothe him, satisfy and suffice him. He had begun to surmise that his venerable father and his other teachers, that these wise Brahmins had already conveyed the majority and the best part of their wisdom, that they had already poured out their plenty into his waiting vessel, and the vessel was not full, the mind was not satisfied, the soul was not calm, the heart was not stilled. Ablutions were good, but they were water, they did not wash away sin, they did not quench spiritual thirst, they did not dissolve fear in the heart. Sacrificing to the gods and invoking them was excellent – but was this all? Did sacrifices bring happiness? And what was the nature of the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not the Atman, He, the Sole One, the All-One? Were not the gods representations, created as you and I, subject to time, transitory? Was it therefore good, was it right, was it a meaningful and supreme act to sacrifice to the gods? To whom else was one to sacrifice, whom else was one to venerate, besides Him, the Only One, the Atman? And where was Atman to be found, where did He abide, where did His eternal heart beat, where else but within one's own I, deep inside, in what is indestructible, borne within every individual?"

With a spiritual desire that can't be quenched by the things of the world, or even his traditional religion, Siddhartha, again echoing the life of The Buddha, leaves his security behind to become an ascetic religious seeker – a shramana.  

As Siddhartha develops as a shramana, mortifying his passions and harshly disciplining his body, he eventually finds his way to The Buddha himself and encounters his teachings.  Although Siddhartha finds little wrong with The Buddha's teachings, he realizes that the teachings themselves are not what he is looking for.  No body of teachings can ever encompass what the Buddha experienced – Enlightenment.  
 

"To no one, o most Venerable One, will you be able to speak and convey in words what happened in the hour of your enlightenment! The teachings of the enlightened Buddha encompass a great deal, they teach much, how to live righteously, how to avoid evil. But one thing the teachings, so clear and so venerable, do not contain: they do not contain the secret of what the Exalted One himself experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands."

Siddhartha thus leaves The Buddha and his community to seek Enlightenment on his own.  The Enlightenment eventually comes, seemingly from nowhere, and the experience is described in a manner similar to Satori.  

Part Two:  In Part Two of the novel, Siddhartha returns to civilian life, working for a simple merchant and falling in love with a beautiful woman, Kamala.  As he begins his re-entry into normal living, Siddhartha "plays with life."  He has the ability to engage in relationships, in business, in pleasure, without gaining his life from these things:
 

"'He always seems only to play at business, it never gets into his blood, it never rules him, he never fears failure, losses never bother him'...If he had profits, he pocketed them with equanimity; if he met with loss, he laughed and said: 'Oh, my goodness, this has gone very badly!'"

But after some time, Siddhartha is again overcome by the world, becoming attached to the things he had once freed himself of:
 

"Belongings, assets, and wealth in the end had captured him, this was no longer play, these were no longer frills, rather they had become a burden, and he was chained to them."

Siddhartha has re-entered Samsara, and is unable to keep himself from being overtaken by it.

The remainder of the book narrates Siddhartha's continued relationship with Kamala, his reunion with Govinda (his friend as a youth), and his ongoing spiritual struggle.


Reflections:  Siddhartha was kind of an odd book for me.  I thought Part One was brilliant and immediately immerses the reader in Hindu (and to an extent, Buddhist) thought.  I would have loved it if Hesse expanded more on the "Enlightenment experience" of Siddhartha.  He seems to be describing what is often spoken of as "Satori," a kind of transfiguring of reality in which everything is "as it should be," or everything is "as One":
 

"Blue was blue, river was river, and if the one and the divine also lay concealed in the blue and in the river and in Siddhartha, it was just the nature and meaning of the divine to be yellow here, blue here, there sky, there forest and here Siddhartha. Meaning and essence were not somewhere behind things, they were inside things, in everything."

Part Two, in which Siddartha re-enters the world, eventually becoming engrossed in what he had once left behind, was kind of confusing to me.  When he initially comes back, I thought it was a good picture of how one who has become "unattached" can then live a regular life, but from a different view – engaging in the things of the world, but remaining inwardly detached from them.  But Siddhartha seems to alter between states of "re-finding" his enlightenment, and then losing it again, and I am unsure how to interpret the ending of the book.

Personal Takeaways: I think my biggest takeaway from Siddhartha is a question: Can someone who experiences Enlightenment, or perhaps a monk who believes they have reached the Unitive Stage (say St. John of the Cross), be again captured by the things of this world?  I'm not even sure that it makes sense to speak of a person who has reached this stage and would make that claim (I tend to think that Enlightenment or the Unitive Stage are best thought of as archetypes – ideals to strive for), but this is the question that stays with me after this book.  I feel like my experience is very back and forth.  At times I have felt tastes of what I feel are the fruits of contemplative practice, more peace with life as it is, less attachment, less striving.  But then I'll get caught up again.  This is what I see from the character Siddhartha, and in the novel, he has already achieved Enlightenment.  It just makes me wonder...

Overall, I think the main value of Siddhartha is gaining an understanding of some of the major themes of Hinduism and Buddhism in narrative form.  It's a short, engrossing read, but one you'll want to take your time with.  

Zen, Satori, and Mescaline

I lied.  I'm not done with Huxley yet.

Currently I am developing the Zazen page for the site and have been re-reading a lot of Zen authors.  One particular author, D.T. Suzuki, is especially interested in the experience of Satori, which is sometimes referred to as "non-dual awareness."  For Suzuki, the eventual experience of Satori is the only reason for practicing Zen.  If one was assured they would never attain this experience, Suzuki would probably tell them not to bother with Zen.  

"Satori may be defined as an intuitive looking into the nature of things in contradistinction to the analytical or logical understanding of it. Practically, it means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistically-trained mind. Or we may say that with satori our entire surroundings are viewed from quite an unexpected angle of perception. Whatever this is, the world for those who have gained a satori is no more the old world as it used to be; even with all its flowering streams and burning fires, it is never the same once again. Logically stated, all its opposites and contradictions are united and harmonized into a consistent organic whole. This is a mystery and a miracle, but according to the Zen masters such is being performed every day. Satori can thus be had only through our once personally experiencing it.

Its semblance or analogy in a more or less feeble and fragmentary way is gained when a difficult mathematical problem is solved or when a great discovery is made, or when a sudden means of escape is realized in the midst of most desperate complications; in short, when one exclaims 'Eureka! Eureka!'"

– D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddism

The experience, sometimes called Satori, sometimes called Kensho, sometimes called "Enlightenment," comes suddenly and completely.  Zen is sometimes referred to as the path of "sudden Enlightenment" as opposed to other schools of Buddhism in which Enlightenment (whatever we mean by that term) comes gradually.  Thus one may practice Zen for years and years without truly understanding the goal, until one day it miraculously appears, as, again, Suzuki conveys:
 

"The coming of satori is not like the rising of the sun gradually bringing things to light, but it is like the freezing of water, which takes place abruptly. There is no middle or twilight condition before the mind is opened to the truth, in which there prevails a sort of neutral zone, or a state of intellectual indifference. As we have already observed in several instances of satori, the transition from ignorance to enlightenment is so abrupt, the common cur, as it were, suddenly turns into a golden-haried lion."

There is debate about whether the state spoken of above can (or should) be induced by the use of certain chemicals.  The current debate is mainly over a chemical called psilocybin (see the two part podcast by Buddhist Geeks Meditation on Mushrooms and Psilocybin: A Crash Course in Mindfulness for more).  In the past, Aldous Huxley famously documented his experience on mescaline.  He believed that certain chemicals, mescaline being one of them, could induce states of consciousness that the mystics experience.  Here he describes looking at a vase of flowers while on the drug:

"The other world to which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers – a fullblown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

'Is it agreeable?' somebody asked. (During this part of the experiement, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

'Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,' I answered. 'It just is.'

Istigkeit – wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart like to use? 'Is-ness.' The Being of Platonic philosophy – except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what the rose and iris and carnation signified was nothing more, nothing less, than what they were – a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like 'grace' and 'transfiguration' came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss – for the first time I understood..."

– Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Being-Awareness-Bliss.  That sounds nice.  It's unclear whether we can identify Huxley's experience with Satori, but the descriptions are clearly in the same ballpark.  

Some authors like D.T. Suzuki place a ton of emphasis on Satori.  Other famous Zen authors including Philip Kapleau and Shunryu Suzuki have a place for Satori in their thought, but don't put nearly the same emphasis on its attainment.  

But it is interesting to read accounts from people who have had this experience, or something like it.  

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

Thomas Keating and the Divine Therapy

Thomas Keating has a very influential psychological model through which he interprets Centering Prayer.  He calls it "The Divine Therapy."

In this model, during Centering Prayer, God takes a role similar to a psychotherapist.  Over time, as we experience deep rest in the presence of God, we begin to encounter emotional traumas that we have been holding within.  As this material from our unconscious is "released," we are able to address these incidents with God's help.  Here, Keating describes the process by which he believes we can become "purified":

"The second purpose of the Divine Therapy is the process of purification. In the ongoing course of the treatment, we are gradually made aware of the dark side of our personality and of the repressed emotional trauma of a lifetime. To state the issue in another way, we are made aware over time of whatever in us is opposed to the image and likeness of God in which we were created. The affirmation of our basic goodness, as sublime as it truly is, is only half the story. At the same time as these affirmations are going on, the Divine Therapist, proportionate to our desire to be healed of our false selves, is taking away the support systems that keep the false self firmly in place.

Through external circumstances, but mostly through reducing our attachment to our emotional programs for happiness and our over-identification with our group, God regularly interrupts these delightful spiritual consolations with lengthy periods in which we confront the emotional wounds of a lifetime. Thus, in daily life we are likely to perceive how we project our frustrating emotions on other people so that we don't have to feel them ourselves. Or again we may indulge in various kinds of compensatory activity in which we try to manipulate other people or events to hide from ourselves painful emotional traumas that we may have been subjected to in early life and from which we are continuously running away through one means or another.

The Divine Therapy, through the intensification of our experience of God and the deep rest that occurs from spiritual consolation, loosens up the residue of the painful emotional traumas. In early childhood, in order to escape emotional pain, we are likely to repress these traumas into the unconscious. God gently, but with incomparable skill, brings these emotional wounds and painful truths about ourselves to our attention both during prayer and in the course of daily life.

The Divine Therapeutic process normally takes years to negotiate. It is something like an archeological dig."

– Thomas Keating, On Divine Therapy

Thus Keating believes that through the ongoing practice of Centering Prayer we can become healed of our emotional wounds.

For more on Centering Prayer, Keating, and the Divine Therapy, see the Centering Prayer page.  The following is also some brief audio of Keating.  Much of his recorded work has also been made available for free on the Contemplative Outreach Youtube Channel.  

Centering Prayer, TM, and Emotional Struggle

As I continue building the Centering Prayer and TM pages for the site, I am struck by a couple things.  First, I think it's really interesting to see how people bring their own paradigms to the experience of TM.  Some people seem to talk about it strictly as a relaxation technique.  Some speak about their own creativity being tapped and released.  Some experience physical health benefits and see it as a way to a better physical condition.  And some interpret their experience in terms of spirituality or religion and their connection to God – however they want to define that word. 

Another thing I am struck by is the lack of any talk in TM about emotional struggles that may stem from periods of deep meditation.  Everything is framed in positives.  If there is a spiritual journey involved in TM, it seems to be a straight incline up to "bliss-consciousness."  That sounds nice.

In Centering Prayer, and in the Christian contemplative tradition as a whole, the spiritual journey is one of ups and downs, filled with many sunny days, but also "dark nights."  It is a painful process for the soul to become unattached to all that is not God.  A trial by fire.  Listen to how several authors in the Centering Prayer movement talk about the struggles involved in the practice:
 

"I call this third moment in the circular movement of Centering Prayer 'the unloading of the unconscious.'  'Unloading' refers to the experience of psychological nausea that occurs in the form of bombardment of thoughts and feelings that surge into our awareness without any relationship to the immediate past.  That lack of connection with the source of painful thoughts or feelings is what identifies them as coming from our unconscious...Having carried this emotional pain for twenty or thirty years (or longer), the evacuation process may be extremely painful..."

– Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God

"...we are used to thinking of spiritual transformation as an ascent.  The effects of a spiritual practice, we expect, are to make us calmer, more able to cope, more filled with equanimity.

The Divine Therapy model, however, suggests a different scenario: that the ascent is inextricably bound to a descent into the ground of our own psyche (this would be the principle of kenosis viewed from a psychological standpoint).  Thus, periods of psychological ferment and destabilization are signs that the journey is progressing, not that it is a failure.  As a practice of meditational prayer loosens repressed material in the unconscious, the initial fruits of spiritual practice may not be the expected peace and enlightenment, but destabilization and the emergence into consciousness of considerable pain.

One woman in our group in Maine experienced this process particularly vividly.  After only a few weeks of regular practice of Centering Prayer, she found herself increasingly tense and irritable, and frequently went home from meditation to pick a fight with her husband.  She was tempted to quit, but with the encouragement of the group she stayed on and cooperated with the process.  What was happening (rather quickly in her case) was that a brittle control – keeping everything at a superficial level of "niceness" – collapsed almost immediately in the face of her immersion into contemplative silence.  She found herself fact to face with a deep guilt about what was in fact her second marriage and a terror that God would punish her and her husband with cancer.  Needless to say, "resting" in such a God was not a tranquil experience!  But with a good deal of courage she has been able to face these feelings, work through them, and re-establish a relationship with both her husband and God on a deeper, freer level.

In my own practice of this prayer, I have learned by repeated experience that the "reward" for a period of committed sitting is often the emergence of a patch of pain long buried and several days of emotional turmoil.  Keating calls it "the archaeological dig."  As trust grows in God and practice becomes more stable, we penetrate deeper and deeper down to the bedrock of pain, the origin of our personal false self.  The results are often personally horrifying, but again, says Keating, this does not mean that the spiritual journey is a failure, but that it is doing its job."

– Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

"...we should expect recurring difficult periods as he leads us into deeper and deeper freedom through a more thoroughgoing purification."

– Basil Pennington, Centering Prayer: Renewing an Ancient Christian Prayer Form

"The whole process is an ongoing interior purification, indeed a kind of purgatory.  First when one begins to practice this kind of prayer regularly it may seem peaceful, but after a while, as the unconscious begins to unload, one is bombarded with thoughts to such an extend that one may think the practice is a complete failure and definitely not meant for you.  This is where it is tempting to give up and revert to more 'meaningful' kinds of prayer.  This following passage from The Cloud sounds a lot like this interior work of purification, although it is not couched in such direct terms:

How wonderfully is a man's love transformed by the interior experience of this nothingness and this nowhere.  The first time he looks upon it, the sins of his whole life rise up before him.

At times the sight is as terrible as a glimpse of hell and he is tempted to despair of ever being healed and relieved of his sore burden.  Many arrive at this juncture in the interior life but the terrible, comfortless agony they experience facing themselves drives them back to thoughts of worldly pleasures.

He who patiently abides in this darkness will be comforted and feel again a confidence about his destiny, for gradually he will see his past sins healed by grace...Slowly he begins to realize that the suffering he endures is really not hell at all, but his purgatory.

And finally there will come a moment when he experiences such peace and repose in that darkness that he thinks surely it must be God himself.

The problem, of course, is trying to get people not to give up too soon, when the going gets really tough.  When our imagination seems to have so much going on in it and the very use of the sacred word seems completely futile, we may feel we couldn't possibly be praying.  This could indeed be the 'hell' that the author of The Cloud describes above.  For those who are able to persevere, however, the reward is the healing of so many of these pains.  Nevertheless, it certainly does take commitment to the journey."

 – Murchadh O' Madagain, Centering Prayer and the Healing of the Unconscious

Personally, my initial experience of Centering Prayer was like finding a whole new way to view reality.  It was unbelievable.  I remember thinking the exact words: If I practiced this twice a day, I would be invincible.  But since the initial experience, there have certainly been ups and downs.  Even when I am very consistent in my practice (and my own consistency comes and goes), it certainly doesn't always give me days filled with love, joy, and peace.  Sometimes, in fact, I seem to experience more anxiety/worry/"darkness" than I had before.  

According to those who have been on the path far longer than I, this is the shape of the journey.

I have yet to find anyone from the TM community talk in these types of terms (psychological anxiety, "dark nights," etc.), but it would be interesting to hear the perspectives of those who practice TM about this.  

Ever Feel Like You Just Can't Get Over Your Own Vanity?

Me too.

Part of any type of spiritual path is deconstructing your own pride, ego, vanity.  There's just so much of it...

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.