Meditation and its Limitations

Bruce Charlton wrote a piece recently about meditation  and how it is sometimes regarded as a panacea for the problems inherent on living in a body and with a mind, problems which we can sum up as those associated with the idea of duality, the sense that there is the 'me' and then there is the world, everything outside of our self. In meditation the split between these two things can be overcome as they are made, or seem to be made, one. Thus, suffering is banished and the one meditating knows peace.  

But is this the aim of life in this world? Are we here merely to escape being here, having learnt or gained nothing from the experience of duality? Does duality exist only to be destroyed or, if you prefer, seen as non-existent in reality? Assuming that we derive from the spiritual world of oneness and bliss why would we leave that world only to re-enter it the same as we left it? That makes no sense. If impersonal bliss is the goal, if the spiritual end is to lose all sense of self and be absorbed into oneness, there is no point in coming to Earth. No point in becoming aware of or valuing qualities of the good, the beautiful and the true, no point in love because all these things dissolve in pure oneness. Yes, even love which depends for its fulfilment and expression on the reality of the person. Universal compassion is not love and is a sorry substitute for it.

Through meditation we may escape the alienation and suffering to be found in the physical world of duality but we also escape the good which becomes an illusion of the unenlightened.

The only conclusion is that we come to this world in order to learn to be more than naked spirit. That means to have a personal relationship with God, the living God, and that means to be a person. Spiritual approaches that emphasise the impersonal aspect of deity are only half right. There is a part of God that is impersonal but this is an aspect of his overall Person not a higher part of it and we can know this because a theistic approach that sees God as personal includes whereas the impersonal approach excludes. What is included or excluded? Everything! It is creation and the reality of created beings. These have no reality in impersonal spirituality. Neither me nor you have any fundamental reality. And if you think about it how could the personal arise from the impersonal? The idea is that it comes about through faulty identification, as pure consciousness mistakes itself for the form it takes. But why should consciousness do this if there was no self to do this to begin with?

Those who pursue the path of impersonal spirituality seek to deny or destroy their personality, the sense of themselves as individual beings. Perhaps this is possible (it may not be, it may lead, if pursued rigorously, to complete destruction) but they have misunderstood their spiritual purpose. In a comment to his original post Bruce added that in meditation "What needs to happen is that the momentary impression of an all pervading and impersonal benign deity needs to transform and 'condense' into the person of God, and a personal relationship with God." This is a superb way of putting the matter. The impersonal state of bliss known in meditation is a bit like formless chaos on which cosmic order needs to be imposed to bring it into the clear light of day and give it cohesive and coherent form. For God is not just formless being, He is that plus personal reality. He is the All not the part. He includes for ultimately what is impersonal oneness but a particularly extreme form of separation, the separation of one part of life from the rest, of spirit from matter and of the One from the Many? We come to Earth to learn to reconcile and bring into harmony the polarities of life, of being and becoming, universal and individual. To effect a cosmic marriage not a divorce.

Spiritual Feelings

 I occasionally hear people talk about how 'spiritual' they are as in "I'm a very spiritual person". What they mean by this is rather different to what used to be meant. For one thing, you would never have said it of yourself. It's like saying I'm a good person and not even Jesus accepted that of himself (see Matthew 19:17). But it also shows a basic misunderstanding of what spirituality actually is.

Spirituality is not believing that life has a spiritual component to it. It is not even thinking that this component is the most important thing and seeking it out through various means. It is certainly not cultivating a beatific smile and "loving" everyone equally because we are all one. Or being a vegan or meditating. Spirituality is not about having spiritual feelings and looking to satisfy those. That, dear reader, is just another form of consumerism.

I was inspired to write this post because of a discussion with a young person who had been practising meditation for a few months. She said she had found great inner peace at first but could not now recapture this and was distressed by that fact. She wanted more than anything to get back to her calm and tranquil state. At the same time, she realised that her meditation had numbed her in certain ways. (That was not the word she used but she agreed with it when I suggested it). She had become more self-absorbed, less able to deal with the world. She even said she felt she had stopped growing as a person. I told her that this might be exactly why she had been pushed away from her inner peace. That peace was actually a sort of stagnation. We are here to learn not to retreat to a passive bliss in which we cut ourselves off from the external world. If that were the goal why be born at all? She had been doing a vaguely Buddhist sort of meditation, as so many do, and when I pointed out that in traditional Buddhism meditation was only meant for monks and practised within the context of a strict religious framework she expressed surprise. Wasn't it for everyone? I said that in my opinion meditation can do more spiritual harm than good if it is secularised and simply used as a psychological tool to find peace. This is because it can take you away from a proper awareness of God. He becomes simply what you yourself are inside. From there it is a short step to thinking that you yourself are God, the only God you need. This is an error made by many Western practitioners of Eastern-style religions or those who adopt their techniques without adopting a real religious sensibility. They don't usually put it as bluntly as that but that is what their attitude often boils down to.

True spirituality is one thing only and that is loving God. But this means real love and the real God, intuited in the heart and perceived through his creation. Then it means subordinating yourself and all your desires to this love. As long as your idea of spirituality involves you seeking some benefit for yourself, it is a worldly thing. Of course, motives are usually mixed but the emphasis must always be on the love of God. This is why mystics were often frowned upon. If you are a mystic seeking mystical experience for your personal bliss are you really that different to a materialist looking to fulfil herself through continual shopping?

Can Meditation Make You Self-Satisfied?

Yes, it certainly can and often does. Here's an article in the Daily Telegraph that goes into the hows and whys of that a little. It is something that is well-known in monastic circles, and spiritual directors have always warned novices about the dangers of inflation, as it's called, but as meditation has entered the mainstream, often repackaged as mindfulness, its potential problems have been neglected.

The principal problem arises from the disconnect that has come about between 'spirituality' and religion. People take to meditation and other spiritual practices with the desire to gain something. They are in effect simply transferring their desire for consumer goods to the spiritual plane but it's exactly the same process at work. Wanting something to boost your sense of self. It doesn't matter if you become a vegan, live a simple life reducing your needs to the minimum and all the rest of it. Everything depends on motivation. A greedy, lustful winebibber with a fundamentally decent heart is closer to God than someone who eats next to nothing, practises austerities and meditates 4 hours a day but whose heart is not open to their Creator. Meditation only works in the way intended when it is balanced by a proper spiritual focus by which I do not mean a desire to achieve spiritual goals or gain spiritual gifts but a true dedication to God. Many results can arise from meditation which can be confused as spiritual but they really only relate to the psychic or supernatural, terms which properly refer the intermediate world that exists between the material and the true spiritual, the world of magic, occultism and most forms of what are regarded as higher consciousness, that is to say, consciousness released from the immediate restrictions of matter but not from ego.

I meditated for 21 years and it gave me a sense of detachment from this world which had its pros and cons. I consider I derived benefits from the pursuit but I now tend to believe that meditation, a bit like Buddhism in its original form, is something that should be practised by dedicated monks in the context of a religion with its own proper disciplines and moral structure. It can be practised outside of that scenario but then you have to be a very well-motivated and spiritually self-organised person to avoid its pitfalls, many of which can be grouped together under the umbrella of spiritual narcissism. It can be very hard to retain a proper perspective about oneself and life in general if one is constantly looking for spiritual experiences. Still harder if one gets them.

If I could say one thing to all meditators it would be this. The true spiritual path is not about higher states of consciousness. It has to do with the sanctification of the soul. It is not so much about transcending the sense of self as bringing that into complete alignment with God. You are not a spiritual person if you receive spiritual gifts. You are on the way to becoming one (always by the grace of God) if you can forego spiritual pleasure and accept spiritual pain, should it come, by increasing your dedication to God.