5 posts tagged “spiriuality”
"I was filled full of everlasting assurance, powerfully secured without any pain or fear. This experience was so happy spiritually that I felt completely at peace and relaxed; there was nothing on earth that could have disturbed me. But this lasted only for a short time, and then I was changed and I began to act with a sense of loneliness and depression and the futility of life itself, so that I hardly had the patience to continue living. No comfort or relaxation now, just 'faith, hope and love', and truly I felt very little of this. And yet soon after this our blessed Lord gave me once again that comfort, so pleasant and sure, so delightful and powerful, that there was no fear, no sorrow, no pain, physical and spiritual that could bother me. And then again I felt the pain; then the joy and pleasure; now the one and now the other, again and again, I suppose about 20 times. In the time of joy I could have said with S. Paul: Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ; and in my pain I could have said with S. Peter: Save me Lord, I am perishing. This vision was shown to teach me to understand that some souls profit by experiencing this, to be comforted at one time, and at another to be left to themselves. God wishes us to know however that he keeps us safe at all times, in sorrow and in joy."
"...the need to have continuity from generation to generation...as far as I know, no one has invented a means of handing it on by means of books alone. It's the personal transmission that is most powerful from someone who embodies the message or the experience. So the Christian tradition is not really in books or doctrine or even dogmas, although these are helpful as pointers. The Christian tradition is the *experience* that Christ Jesus had of the Father...as the loving presence. ...there needs to be a training or a place you can go or people you can go to who have the experience and can communicate it..."
and
"The problem is that people get stuck in their journey and don't move beyond the external symbols to the mystery they are meant to communicate. So some people resolve that by walking around it, the real secret is to go through them, using them according to the...but moving beyond them and thus being lifted up on the experience of many people so that one can move into this contemplation of life, the contemplative dimension of life. It is not a rejection of one's tradition, but a moving beyond it, in other words, one's *fulfilling* one's tradition in the most sublime manner as one moves to this common bonding with all spirituality that has reached a certain level of transformation and can transmit that experience without words, since silence is the greatest teacher."
- Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
Ran across this blog post and I quite enjoyed it. Especially the part where he refers to Watts saying that the entire symphony is meant to be enjoyed by the musician and the audience. It's not a race to see who can get the highest. :)
"In practising spiritual disciplines as well as in trying to acquire faith, most of us are like monkeys. We do not understand the saint's inner state, and we are trying to attain it by the mere mimicry of its outward signs. We copy his actions and ideas, but because they do not really mean anything to us the task is an unproductive drudgery. For example, a monkey might, with some accuracy, describe an orchestra as a collection of people who blow through metal and wooden tubes, thump upon the skins of pigs, and scrape the entrails of dead cats with lengths of horsehair. We, of course, can give a fuller and more intelligible description of the work and nature of an orchestra because we understand its true meaning, which is music. But to a monkey music means nothing; it is simply a succession of noises produced by blowing, thumping, and scraping. Yet because the monkey is envious of human accomplishments, he may readily be persuaded (until bored) to imitate human actions that mean nothing to him, to go through the motions of playing a trumpet or a violin with results far from meaningful and musical. A human being, too, can learn and master all the techniques of music and yet never be an inspired musician.
So too, the moral splendour, the interior peace, and the spiritual power of saints and mystics are things which millions of us would like to possess. But it avails nothing to ape the exterior actions or even the interior ideas of such inspired persons unless we understand the meaning which these ideas and actions express. Apart from knowledge and appreciation of this meaning, our efforts to be like the great ones are so many attempts to produce the cause by the effect, to make the tail wag the dog. Now the meaning which saint and mystic express in idea and action is God. They think and act as they do because they are in a special way possessed by this life which is God, somewhat as the heart and mind of a dancer are possessed by the music which he interprets as bodily movement.
The idea of God is itself no more than an interpretation of the mysterious reality whereby the saint is moved and possessed; it is a life, a being, translated into a form of thought as one might try to represent a colour by a shape, striving to interpret beauty of tone by beauty of line. Such interpretations are the genesis of all religious doctrine, both metaphysical and moral; they are the instruments and techniques for expressing the divine meaning. But in the hands of so many persons they become like musical instruments in the hands of monkeys; they lack all inner significance to those who use them and those who watch them so used. The one hopes that this process of imitation will somehow make him a saint and a possessor of eternal life, though he knows not the true nature of these ideals. The other stands by in sheer bewilderment at so much activity without meaningful result.
Christian faith and practice have lost force because the enormous majority of Christians, both devout and nominal, do not know what they mean. Let it be said at once that such knowledge is not a matter of mere learning, of philosophical and theological acumen. Indeed, the theologian has often just as little grasp of the meaning of his religion as anyone else. He knows ideas; he knows the relations between these ideas; he knows the historical events--the story of Christ--upon which these ideas are based. He knows the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Atonement and can describe them with accuracy. But because he does not know, or even apprehend, what they mean, having no consciousness of union with God, his description of them--while correct as far as it goes--is as uninformative and lacking in significance as the monkey's description of an orchestra.
This theologian does not fail to grasp the meaning of his religion just because he is a pure academician without interest in its practice. For his practice, as much as his thought, is imitation. Monkey-fashion, he imitates the actions of the Fathers and the saints along with their ideas, attributing the fact that he does not become a saint to not imitating hard enough."
Alan Watts
Behold the Spirit
Written in 1947
