Rule of St. Benedict | Intro

As part of my work on the site, I recently spent time researching the history of the Christian monastic tradition from the Desert Fathers to present day. This series on the Rule of St. Benedict stems from that research. For a broad overview of the Christian contemplative tradition, see this page. In the post–”Fathers” period, the Rule of St. Benedict stands out as an important document which shaped how Christian monasticism would develop. The Rule is still used by many monasteries today as a broad starting point for what monastic life should look like.

Very little is known about St. Benedict. Our primary biographical information about him comes from a single source – St. Gregory the Great (Pope 590-604). From this source we gather that Benedict lived in sixth-Century Italy, became a renowned holy man, and eventually established a large group of monastic communities. His Rule describes an orderly way of life – a “school for the Lord’s service” – the community being led by an Abbot, who stands in the place of Christ as overseer of souls. The Rule is practical, describing how to welcome visitors, hours of spiritual practice, performance of manual labor, and discipline for wayward monks. While specific enough to establish an actual community, the Rule is also general enough to be adapted as various monastic communities would develop in different contexts. You can pick up a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict in English for a couple bucks.

Whatever You Know Is Just Words

“Whatever you know is just words,” said Sanatkumara, “names of finite phenomena. It is the Infinite that is the source of abiding joy because it is not subject to change. Therefore seek to know the Infinite.”

– The Chandogya Upanishad

The Experience of Time in a Poustinia

“In the poustinia time goes very quickly, and an hour is a lifetime and a lifetime is an hour.”

One way to think about our experience of time is as a measurement of how much change takes place – in our surroundings, in our thought. Slow things down, lock yourself in a room without access to your typical distractions, and see what it does to your experience of time. “An hour is a lifetime and a lifetime is an hour.”

The solitary Catholic retreat house I go to for individual retreats places a copy of Poustinia in every cabin. In Doherty’s words, it’s a place I go “to enter the great silence of God.”

Poustinia | Hunger for Silence, Adapting Old to New

“Let the one who goes there be always truthful about his motives and not go there simply to have a good sleep or a day away from the tensions of life. Let him go there to enter the great silence of God, and to pray. If one enters for any other reason, however well rationalized, the poustinia will not be a blessing upon him; it might be a curse…

Thus the phenomenon of the Western poustinia will slowly unfold itself. As the apostolate grows in wisdom and grace we might be sent people who really wish to live as close as possible to the Russian ideal. Then again, perhaps this ideal is gone. It is too early to say. But I think that this hunger for the silence of God, this passivity of the silent soul, is going to come back…

I personally do not know how to adapt from the old to the new. But God does.”

Poustinia | Pilgrims of the Absolute

“The more I try to explain the poustinia and the Russian idea of it, the more I find myself floundering. I find it an exceedingly difficult task because what I speak about is so very foreign to the Western mind of today, especially to those on the North American continent. Yet I know that the poustinia is one answer, at least, for this Western culture which depends so much on cerebration and intellectualism, and has a need to sift everything through the mind and examine everything with almost scientific precision.

If there is anything that can help to rectify the defects of such a mentality it is precisely the poustinia experience of the Eastern spirituality. For it is neither Eastern nor Western but simply Christian. It is the eternal hunger of men for God whom they seek, whether they know it or not, as pilgrims of the Absolute.

Every man is a pilgrim on the road of life. Some, and there are more than we know of, are like the poustiniki, truly seeking the Absolute: God!”

Poustinia | There is But One Tragedy

“There is but one tragedy: not to be a saint.”

Poustinia and Poustinik

Poustinia is the Russian word for “desert.” It is also used in Russian Orthodoxy to refer to a place where a solitary goes to seek ongoing silence and solitude before God. A solitary monk who lives in a poustinia (usually a simple, small structure) is called a poustinik. In Russia, a poustinik typically lives on the outskirts of a town and is available for the townspeople to come, meet, and ask for direction or specific help – even for things like lending a hand in the field during harvest season. The poustinik is a spiritual director of sorts, and also makes him or herself available for the practical needs of the community.

Catherine Doherty, founder of Madonna House in Canada, wrote a classic book about the concept of poustinia, simply called Poustinia.

Practice Becomes Established

“Practice becomes firmly established when it has been cultivated uninterruptedly and with devotion over a prolonged period of time.”

Either/Or

At any given moment we can choose to live as saints. As “not-selves,” with a posture of openness and “giving to” the world.

Or we can live as selves, with a posture of taking and “how does this benefit me?”

One mode of being leads to authentic happiness and fulfillment. One mode leads to being ever-frustrated, empty, and unfulfilled.

It takes work to live as a saint. It is not our natural mode of being. But we do have the choice in each moment.

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

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on Mystical/Unitive Experience

“To study the nature of this experience is rather a difficult matter. All that one can hope to do is to set down a few general impressions. It is a type of experience which is not clearly differentiated into a subject-object state, an integral, undivided consciousness in which not merely this or that side of man’s nature but his whole being seems to find itself. It is a condition of consciousness in which feelings are fused, ideas melt into one another, boundaries broken and ordinary distinctions transcended. Past and present fade away in a sense of timeless being. Consciousness and being are not there different from each other. All being is consciousness and all consciousness being. Thought and reality coalesce and a creative merging of subject and object results. Life grows conscious of its incredible depths. In this fulness of felt life and freedom, the distinction of the knower and the known disappears. The privacy of the individual self is broken into an invaded by a universal self which the individual feels as his own.

The experience itself is felt to be sufficient and complete. It does not come in a fragmentary or truncated form demanding completion by something else. It does not look beyond itself for meaning or validity. It does not appeal to external standards of logic or metaphysics. It is its own cause and explanation. It is sovereign in its own rights and carries its own credentials. It is self-established (svatahsiddha), self-evidencing (svasamvedya), self-luminous (svayamprakasa). It does not argue or explain but it knows and is.”

– Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life

The Goal of Meditation

Swami Sarvapriyananda (Vedanta Society New York) on The Goal of Meditation.

Samsara as a Succession of Opportunities

“The formulation of the theory of samsara or rebirth is no proof that the Upanishads are pessimistic. Life on earth is the means of self-perfection. We have to undergo the discipline of samsara in our efforts towards the higher joy and the complete possession of spiritual truth. That which gives zest to life is the supreme motive of the joy of self-conquest. Samsara is only a succession of spiritual opportunities. Life is a stage in spiritual perfection, a step in the passage to the infinite.”

An aim in life of perfecting the soul gives zest to our actions, even in old age. Most people, even as they are near death, know that they are unfinished works. Hence the idea of samsara, reincarnation, or in the Catholic tradition, purgatory. We need more perfecting.

Edwin Bryant on The Relevance of the Bhagavad Gita

The following audio is from a talk given by Dr. Edwin Bryant (Rutgers University) at the Global Bhagavad Gita Conference in October 2020.

Meditation as Defragmentation or Right Ordering

I have sometimes thought of my meditative practice as a time of “defragmentation.” When a computer defragments, it re-organizes itself, putting files in the right spots to clear up space and become more efficient. It becomes rightly ordered.

Head Bowing

“Human beings, although created in the image of God, are animals with animal instincts. There is, despite our divine dignity, nothing singular about our wanting to eat, drink, and sleep, nor anything distinctive about the forces that incite us to learn, play, and reproduce. It is not otherwise with ceremonial head-bowing. Konrad Lorenz, the eminent modern naturalist, left a vivid record of a fight between two timber wolves, one enormous and old, the other smaller and young.

The wolves began by moving in circles around each other, fangs bared. Snaps too fast for the eye eventually followed: jaw met jaw; lips started to bleed. Gradually the older wolf slowly maneuvered the younger up against a wire fence, where he stumbled in the metal netting. The old one instantly leaped upon him. But then the unexpected and incredible happened. The tumult of the two gray furies suddenly ceased even though both continued to growl angrily, the elder in a deep bass, the younger in a higher tone suggestive of fear. Standing shoulder to shoulder, pressed against each other in a stiff, strained attitude, the two animals faced the same direction. But while the muzzle of the older wolf was up against the neck of the younger, the latter turned his teeth aside and instead offered to his enemy the unprotected bend of his neck, the most vulnerable part of his body. Within an inch of the tensed muscles that covered the jugular vein, the fangs of the stronger threatened the life of the weaker. Whereas during the initial frenzy both opposed each other with their impervious teeth to the fore, at the end the defeated beast exposed its defenseless throat to a lethal bite. Rarely does a battle between two wolves come to death, this because, when one wolf begins to dominate, the other is always able, without fleeing, to arrest the violence. This is done by suspending attack and offering the neck. With jugular exposed, field of vision restricted, and jaws turned aside and so useless, the weaker wolf surrenders; and the stronger, instead of taking advantage of a defenseless opponent, is stayed, its aggression inhibited. The encounter, after some minutes of tense stillness, with death a muscle contraction away, soon ends: the victor strides off, the loser slinks away. The act of bowing the head, of offering the neck in dire straits, is somehow programmed into a wolf's genes, as is the merciful response to it…

…We can understand why people bow their heads in prayer. It is because, before the divine, they know themselves to be defeated animals. Despite the story of Jacob at Bethel, there is no wresting with God, if by that is meant a real contest of power. “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:4, NRSV). Omnipotence has no opposition. The human beast can accordingly do nothing but surrender, that is, incline neck and ask for clemency – and then hope that God will respond not as Achilles but as the wolf, with compassion.”

– Dale Allison, The Luminous Dusk

Siddhis

The blog tends to be slightly or sometimes well behind where I am currently reading. I have several more series to do from within the Christian tradition, but am mainly reading in Vedanta and Yoga right now. As I have been reading more in the Vedanta and Yoga traditions, the concept of Siddhis (“miraculous powers” attained through meditation – see link for previous post) has been more on my mind.

Various teachers in the Yoga tradition put more or less weight on siddhis, with Patanjali himself seeming to view them as superfluous to the yogi’s true goal (see Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras 3:37). In general, I lean toward the belief that a fascination with siddhis and the like is a distraction from the contemplative quest. Nevertheless, reports of these types of things do surround the contemplative traditions as a whole.

The purpose of this post is to briefly document my own modest experience in this area:

When I first began seminary, I took a Spiritual Development class. One of my assignments was to spend multiple periods of two hours in prayer. There were no further instructions than simply to be in prayer for two hours.

During these periods I would pray for people I knew. Sometimes, I would inexplicably be presented with a powerful image while I was praying for an individual. In one case, as I was praying for a particular friend, I was presented with an image of the state of Washington. As far as I know, there was no prior link in my mind between this person and the state of Washington. The experience of the image itself could best be described as a “vivid stamp in the mind’s eye.” Hard to describe, but clear and unmistakable to me at the time.

As it happened, this friend (a former college roommate) called me soon after one of these prayer periods. He was in the military and at a point in his training when they were determining where he was going to be stationed next. He told me a few of the options: I remember New York being on the list along with several other states. He did not mention Washington as a possibility.

During our conversation, I told him “You are going to be stationed in Washington.” I then told him about the image I received while in prayer. He told me that Washington wasn’t an option, and the choice wasn’t up to him anyway, so we just left it at that.

A few months later my friend called me to tell me that, contrary to the options that had initially been presented to him, he was going to be stationed in Washington. He spent the next several years of his life there. At the time, both coming from an Evangelical perspective, we took it as a confirmation from God that this was where he was supposed to be.

I also had a similar experience around this time where an image was presented to me while praying for a friend which later seemed to be meaningful to the individual.

I don’t know what to make of these things, and of course coincidences happen and sometimes we interpret things in hindsight, drawing meaning where perhaps there was none to begin with.

But it’s also possible that we are connected in ways that we don’t understand. People, matter, time. We still really don’t know the first thing about how Reality works. And the deeper we go, the stranger and stranger things get.

So that’s my brief experience with Siddhis.

Apophthegmata Patrum | Abba Moses: "Go Sit in Your Cell"

“A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him, ‘Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you all things.’”

This will end the series of quotations from the Apophthegmata Patrum. “Go sit in your cell and your cell will teach you all things” seems, in large part, to sum up the ethos of the Desert Fathers.

Apophthegmata Patrum | Asking to Hear a Word

“A secular man of devout life came to see Abba Poemen. Now it happened that there were other brethren with the old man, asking to hear a word from him.”

Oftentimes, people of surrounding cities would come to see the desert monastics and “ask for a word.” The monks served as spiritual directors of sorts. Richard Beck recently wrote a post about this dynamic in the Russian tradition.

Apophthegmata Patrum | Longinus: If You Have Not Lived Rightly With Men

“One day Abba Longinus questioned Abba Lucius about three thoughts saying first, ‘I want to go into exile.’ The old man said to him, ‘If you cannot control your tongue, you will not be in exile anywhere. Therefore control your tongue here, and you will be in exile.’ Next he said to him, ‘I wish to fast.’ The old man replied, ‘Isaiah said, “If you bend your neck like a rope or a bulrush that is not the fast I will accept; but rather, control your evil thoughts.”’ He said to him the third time, ‘I wish to flee from men.’ The old man replied, ‘If you have not first of all lived rightly with men, you will not be able to live rightly in solitude.’”

This saying reminds me of the thoughts of Meister Eckhart, quoted in Dangerous Mystic:

"I was asked, 'Some people shun all company and always want to be alone; their peace depends on it, and on being in church. Was that the best thing?' And I said, 'No!' Now I see why. He who is in a right state, is always in a right state wherever he is, and with everybody. But if a man is in a wrong state, he is so everywhere and with anybody."

Solitude doesn’t guarantee anything. It doesn’t guarantee a change in character. Sometimes it can just be escapism.