This Week

Last week we made a first cut at seeing how meditation can be understood as a secular approach to finding ‘the ground of being’ in its manifestation as ‘the ground of us’. Following Blondel’s assertion that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is therefore a step towards ourselves

This week we will move on to summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” in looking more closely at Teilhard’s secular approach to ‘meditation’.

The Secular Side of Meditation

We noted last week that the very idea of ‘meditation’ conjures much negative association with the more empirical among us- seen as a decidedly right-brained excess of emotion requiring disdain for ‘life as lived’, disconnection from social life and ultimately self-centered. Teilhard’s example from last week, however, shows how the act of meditation can be understood as a clearer look at ourselves, or as he puts it, a “clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Teilhard’s example can be expanded into a straightforward, secular roadmap for this process:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

“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.”

Here Teilhard explores the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears. How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have constructed as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”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.”

What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, recognizing which ones move us forward, and which hold us back, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that which lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’? Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Acknowledging our powerlessness

“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”.

This is a difficult step for most of us. Whatever skills we have learned, tactics that we have developed and beliefs that we have forged, we have no control over the basic person we are or the energy of cosmic becoming that incessantly flows into us.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

“My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” “In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

 This step is even more difficult. Beneath the trepidation of the many actions required of us in our daily lives is the fear of their consequences. Will we be able to successfully deal with the consequences of our decisions without the armors of ego, self-centeredness and emotional distance? Are we even able to predict the consequences of our actions, much less survive dealing with them? Ultimately, in spite of our professions, families and friends are we not alone?

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

“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.”

How do we dare believe that whatever is at the source of our being, it is nonetheless on our side? How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into us at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into being? How do we dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in ourselves? How can we begin to recognize and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that we can be carried onto a more complete possession of ourselves?

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about the first four steps. The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them. The essential Teilhard insight is that the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself. A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Thus this line of thought, that a search for the ground of being of the universe entails an understanding of the ground of our being, while finding a stronger (if somewhat unfocussed) voice in religion, is not mute in the empirical processes of science.

An example of this voice can be seen in the similarity between these five steps and the very successful but deliberately secular “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western secular thinking. Psychology itself, as we will address next week, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.