Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core was also a manifestation of the ‘immortal spark’ which connects us to the universal agent which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’ was introduced during the Axial Age.  While this recognition may well bring us closer to a ‘Secular Understanding of God’, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.  Today’s post will begin to address this.

 Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God.  One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding ourselves and this core, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice.  As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to our ‘secular’ approach.  As we will see, however, paralleling Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well for a method for the experience of God as it did for the definition.

We’ll start with the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, who closely followed Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘ground of being’.  Teilhard described in his book, “The Divine Mileu”, his own experience of meditation which is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions, and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

  “And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.

   But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.  At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.

   And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.

   What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?  It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion.  And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

  We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.

   But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.

   My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.

   Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature.  Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart.  In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.

   Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss.  But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.

  This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.  Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.

   Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us.  But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikelyhood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

  At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars.  And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                                                      “It is I, be not afraid.”

In this short but very personal description of the journey into ourselves, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a personal relationship to the ‘ground of being’ that we call God.

The Next Post

This week we began to explore the undertaking of the missing piece of our exploration: the connection to God.  Next week we will look into Teilhard’s journey in some detail, and examine it for its secular components