Talk given at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas

Posted on February 5, 2011 by

The following was my contribution to a Buddhist-Catholic dialogue hosted by the Ch’an Buddhist community at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, near Ukiah, CA.

A VOW OF CONVERSATION

Thomas Merton always kept diaries. The reason was, I think, that he was a very fast reader; he would finish his obligatory, monastic lectio divina early in the day, and having nothing else to read, he would turn to writing a book for himself (Merton was also a fast writer).

Your diary is a lectio divina on your soul, but if you are a gifted writer, you will create a pagina (page) for others, a spin-off of the sacra pagina, the canonical Scriptures or the liturgy; you will also insert a page of your soul in between these sacred pages. A great diarist, having read the soul, writes about this self-lectio in such a way that intimate thoughts and feelings show their universal side and empower readers to read themselves while reading the diarist’s book.

The last, edited diary manuscript that Thomas Merton sent to his literary agent, Naomi Burton Stone, was entitled A Vow of Conversation.[1] Merton wanted the manuscript to be published no earlier than 1971, but when that year came, his voice had already been silenced by his untimely, accidental death in Bangkok, Thailand, on the 10th of December, 1968.

Looking through the Index of A Vow of Conversation, you find that references to Buddha or Buddhism are on only five of its 212 pages, but then, when you reach the end of the alphabet, you discover 21 pages that have to do with Zen or the great Zen scholar, D. T. Suzuki. Beyond these explicit references, Merton’s ongoing conversation with Buddhism is constantly implied in everything he says about his day-to-day life in the monastery.

In the opening entry of Merton’s diary, we can listen in on this implicit conversation with Buddhist monastic life.

January 1, 1964
Yesterday the year drew to a quiet curious end with an eclipse of the moon. The novices and I went out into the fierce zero cold and stood in the darkness of the garden while a last flake of light resisted for a long time the swallowing globe of dark. Then I went back to read Karl Jaspers’ book about Plato.
We have a Japanese fish kite made of red paper and Brother Dunstan stuck up some bamboo poles in the Zen garden. We will fly fish and streamers to celebrate the New Year.
The year of the dragon came in with sleet crackling on all the quiet windows. The year of the hare went out yesterday with our red fish kite twisting and flopping in the wind over the Zen garden. Today, a cold gray afternoon. Much snow. Woods, bright with snow, loom out of the dark. Totally new vision of the Vineyard Knob. Dark, etched out with snow, standing in obscurity and in a kind of strange spaciousness that I had never observed before.
The wide sweep of snow on St. Benedict’s field. I climbed the Lake Knob. Wonderful woods. Slid down the steep hillside in the snow. Tore my pants on barbed wire. Came back through the vast fields and drifts of snow. Peace![2]

A few days before Merton’s departure on his fateful voyage to Asia, Mrs. Stone sent him a letter about the manuscript; the letter contains a significant, Freudian slip, where she refers to the diary with the title “Vow of Silence,” rather than “Vow of Conversation.”[3]

It is often said that Trappist monks — Merton was a Trappist — take a vow of silence. This is not exactly true, but in Merton’s day Trappists were required to communicate with each other, outside of confessions or chapter meetings, only by means of an elaborate system of manual signs. Monks like Merton, of a loquacious and jovial nature, acquired great skill in sign language and could indeed carry on conversations, obeying the letter of the law of silence but not its spirit, or rather, obeying the spirit of a higher law, in accordance with which, monks are to live in a constant act of conversation.

We all know from experience, even the most loquacious of us, that conversation means more than just talking. It is first of all a relationship between two or more talkers, who agree on the tacit terms of a shared belonging and a shared process of living. I cannot converse with a person who, although perhaps physically present or on the other end of a telephone or Skype connection, does not share my mental and/or spiritual space and process. If the other is mentally somewhere else, or heading in a direction opposite or tangential to mine, we cannot engage in conversation. At most, we either talk at each other or past each other.

I have said that monastics are mandated to observe a higher law, in accordance with which they are to live in a constant act of conversation. Keep in mind that when speaking of ‘conversation’, the phrase ‘constant act’ is redundant. ‘Conversation’ comes from the Latin verbal noun conversatio and ultimately from the verb conversari, which is what they call a ‘frequentative verb’, one that denotes a repeated action. In everyday use, conversatio meant going about in the same place and with the same company. You can tell how easy it was to move from this Latin usage to that of the French and English word: you keep company with a certain group of people and you frequently engage in conversation with them.

In monastic usage, conversatio meant associating with monks and interacting with them in the monastery. Actually the word meant more than this, and on account of its larger meaning, it became the central vow of monastics in the Rule of Saint Benedict. I shall quote the Rule from the translation given in the volume, Benedict’s Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict.[4]

Here is the key text from chapter 58, paragraph 4: “When the decision is made that novices are to be accepted, then they come before the whole community in the oratory [the place of daily community prayer and of silent, individual prayer] to make solemn promise of stability, fidelity to monastic life and obedience.”[5] Here you have the three Benedictine vows, the first and the third each being expressed with a single word, which in English is a cognate of the Latin: stabilitas and oboedientia. The middle vow is a phrase that includes our key term, ‘conversation’: promittat de… conversatione morum suorum. I give you a literal rendering: “Let the novices make a promise about… conversation of their own mores.”

The meaning of the vow is not immediately clear. My translation of it is surely more arcane than the original Latin, but actually I am following the principle of strict ‘formal equivalence’ that the Holy See is now imposing on translators of Roman Catholic liturgies and papal instructions, perhaps with the intent of making the translations suitably arcane. What about the word ‘mores’? This is a straight-out Latin word, actually a plural, which the American Heritage Dictionary[6]  defines as follows: “1. The accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular social group. 2. Moral attitudes. 3. Manners; ways.” Which of these three definitions is applicable here depends on how you interpret the other term, ‘conversation’. But first it depends on that possessive pronoun, ‘their own’, referring to the novice or novices, and so we are pointed toward definitions 2. and 3.

It seems, from the formula of monastic promises, that each novice is bringing his or her own moral attitudes, manners, and ways into conformity with the accepted customs and traditional usages of the monastic social group. The Benedict’s Dharma translation of the Rule seems to convey this idea in its phrase, “fidelity to monastic life.” The only problem is, the Latin conversatio, like the French-English ‘conversation’, does not mean ‘fidelity’. Monastics in Saint Benedict’s day (the early sixth century of the Common Era) always understood conversatio in connection with the verb it ultimately derived from, which is convertere, ‘turn round, turn in the opposite direction, turn back, whirl around’, and then, in Christian writers, ‘change, alter, refresh,’ and of course, ‘convert’. The frequentative form of the verb, conversari, suggested the idea of continuing to do, over and over again, what the root verb was about. Keep on turning, keep on changing, refresh every day, and so on.

I think the abbot who did the translation for Benedict’s Dharma wanted to give the same meaning to the second vow as to the first and the third. Certainly, the vow of stability suggests lifelong fidelity to the traditional customs and usages of the persons living in this particular monastery; you could say that its meaning is static and horizontal. ‘Obedience’ also seems static (do what you’re told, no more and no less) and vertical (the abbot gives the orders, and the monks carry them out without delay). The middle vow, however, has to mean something dynamic, not static, and horizontal, not vertical, or in other words, “Change and refresh your moral attitudes, your manners, and your ways in a lifelong conversation with your fellow monastics’ customs and usages.”

This same chapter 58 of the Rule opens with the phrase, Noviter veniens quis ad conversationem (there’s that key word again), which you can translate, “When someone newly arrives to join in the conversation, don’t make it too easy for them to get in.” Not only the abbot but also the elder monk who is put in charge of the novices should use careful discernment; they should also be good at “winning souls,” that is, gaining the novices’ attention and confidence.

Saint Benedict gives the novices plenty of time to decide whether and when to make their solemn promises of monastic vows. The actual duration of the time is immaterial; in the sixth century, life was short and a full year was enough, while in the twenty-first, at least five years are needed. Whoever the novice is, and whatever the larger context of his or her petition to enter the monastery, the monastic elders must be discreet, and both the elders and the novices must exercise discernment.

With these two virtues, ‘discretion’ and “discernment’, I come to another important term in the monastic vocabulary: discretio, which translates both English words. The opposite of this is praesumptio, which means presumption or taking things for granted. This is the vice of those who are indiscreet and undiscerning, who take for granted their own understanding of how things are or ought to be. Discretio is enormously important for monastics: it governs their practice of other monastic virtues, like humility and silence, and it guides even their practice of the vows of obedience and stability. Over the course of many years in the monastery, one’s practice of these static vows may degenerate into rigidity; against this degeneration, discretio brings into play the dynamic virtue of the middle vow, conversatio, making it the key to authentic monastic practice.

Within the Benedictine tradition, we have a rich treasure of hagiographical texts that elaborate on Scriptural themes and re-narrate Bible stories through the events and inner experiences of monastic saints. One of these is Romuald of Ravenna, the patron saint of the Camaldolese. His story was told, with parsimony although not with much historical accuracy, by Peter Damian, doctor of the Church, also a Benedictine hermit born in Ravenna. For Peter Damian, Romuald was to be considered the ‘adoptive father’ of the monks of his community at Fonte Avellana, an austere brotherhood that combined the Benedictine Rule with a return to the spirit of the Desert Elders of Egypt.
Peter Damian’s narrative is a study in contrasts and a call to growth for both individual monks and communities small and great; commentators often see in his hagiographical writings (i.e., lives of saints) a project for reforming the whole church. His story of Romuald’s growth in virtue and spiritual realization begins with an image of him as a novice.[7]

[After a few months in the monastery, the abbey of Sant’Apollinare in Classe,] Romuald began to realize that some of the monks were strolling down the broad path to perdition, while his heart was set on the narrow gate that leads to life. Romuald knew he had to follow his heart, but this did not seem possible at Sant’Apollinare. “What should I do?” he asked himself, and a thousand thoughts beat upon his soul like the waves of a winter storm.
With hard words Romuald presumed to denounce the easy ways of the monks, and he exposed their faults through repeated references to the Rule. But the more he insisted, the less attention they paid to him. “After all, he is only a young novice,” they said. In the end their tolerance was exhausted, and they could bear his reproofs no longer. They set about plotting to kill him.
Romuald was accustomed to rise early, before the monks got up for their nightly vigil, and when he found the doors of the church locked, he would say his prayers in the dormitory. Now the dormitory was on the second floor of the abbey and looked out over the cloister. At the devil’s prompting, these sons of Cain decided that the next time Romuald started reciting his prayers in the dormitory, they would throw him headlong over the railing to the pavement below.
Hearing them discuss this plot, one of the brothers warned Romuald. So he shut the door of his mouth and began to pray to his Father in silence, in the secret chamber of his heart. And thus he was safe; he avoided being cast down bodily into the cloister garth, and he kept the monks’ souls from falling into the abyss of mortal sin.[8]

A later chapter in Peter Damian’s story shows us another Romuald, no longer a presumptuous novice but a discreet and discerning elder, an ex-abbot, for he was briefly forced by the teen-age emperor Otto III to accept the crozier of his home abbey. He renounced the office, and from then on he was just Master Romuald, exercising no ecclesiastical jurisdiction but rather instructing monastics and lay people with his gentle and disconcerting charism.

Once, while he was reading the Lives of the Desert Elders, Romuald came upon the passage about the brothers who used to fast in their hermitage from Monday through Friday, and then on Saturday and Sunday would come together for common meals, at which a greater variety and quantity of food was served. So from then on, for fifteen years or so, Romuald followed this practice without interruption.
But [his disciple] Peter, [the former doge of Venice,] long accustomed as he was to a rich diet, found this regime of fasting too heavy, and his health was failing. So he went and humbly cast himself at Romuald’s feet. Romuald made him stand, and Peter, with great embarrassment, revealed his need for a more generous diet. “Father,” he said, “I do want to do penance for my sins, but with my heavy build, I can’t get by with half a loaf of dry bread.” Romuald, moved by paternal compassion toward Peter, gave him another quarter loaf from his own supply of bread.
Thus he held out a hand of mercy to a brother who was failing on the way, so that with renewed strength, he might more easily follow the path he had chosen.…[9]
Regarding total fasting—eating nothing all day—although he himself often practiced it, he absolutely forbade it to his disciples. “If you want to grow continually in your monastic commitment,” he said, “then the best kind of fasting means eating every day and feeling hungry every day. If you practice fasting with discretion, what seems hard at first will become easier.” Romuald had no use for monks who started out doing heavy penance, and then weren’t able to keep it up.
About staying up at night to pray he was very cautious. What he did not want anyone to do was to stay up and then fall asleep at dawn, after the night vigil. He had no patience for those who couldn’t stay awake in the morning. If someone confessed he had gone back to sleep after the Vigil of Twelve Psalms or worse yet at sunup, Romuald would not let him sing Mass that day.
“Better to sing one Psalm with feeling,” he said, “than to recite a hundred with a wandering mind. But if you haven’t yet received the grace of singing from your heart, do not give up hope. Be constant in your practice, and one day He who gave you the desire for the prayer of the heart will give you that prayer itself.
“When your heart’s intention is fixed on God, it will keep lit the incense of your prayer, and the wind of distraction will not put it out. Do not worry about stray thoughts; they may come and go, but they will not take your attention away from God.”[10]

So Romuald is now the very model of Benedictine discretio, for he sees spiritual practice in terms of quality, not quantity, centered above all in the heart. This is also the Middle Way, on which Buddha Dharma invites us to walk.

By way of conclusion: Romuald enacts the central Benedictine vow in a dynamic way, through conversation with his fellow monastics. His presumptuous fault-finding while a novice at Sant’Apollinare in Classe was not a genuine conversation: Romuald was talking at the monks, not with them. By experience, especially by the experience of his own and others’ weaknesses, he becomes a compassionate teacher. The skill that he learned over many years as a monk is what Saint Benedict called “The good zeal that monks ought to have,” the title of Benedict’s next-to-last chapter in his Rule. In earlier chapters he has warned against what here he calls the “zeal of bitterness,” the harshness of zealots who presume to judge others and set themselves up as superior in virtue to them. Let me quote the whole chapter:

Just as there is a bad zeal of bitterness that separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal that separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life. This, then, is the good zeal that monastics must foster with fervent love: They should try to be the first to show respect to the other (Romans 12:10), supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or mores, and earnestly competing in obedience to one another. You are not to pursue what you judge better for yourself, but instead, what you judge better for someone else. To your fellow monastics show the pure love of siblings; to God, reverence and love; to your abbot, unfeigned and humble love. Prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may Christ bring us all together to everlasting life.[11]

NOTES

1. New York: Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1988.
2. Ibid., p. 3.
3. Quoted in her preface to the published diary, p. vii.
4. Edited by Patrick Henry (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001); the translation of the Rule is the work of Abbot Patrick Barry, OSB. My citations of the original Latin text will be from RB 1980: The Rule of Saint Benedict In Latin and English with Notes, edited by Timothy Fry OSB (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981.
5. Benedict‘s Dharma, p. 204.
6. Fourth Edition, 2006.
7. I have translated this and other texts and commented upon them in Thomas Matus, The Mystery of Romuald and the Five Brothers: Stories from the Benedictines & Camaldolese (Big Sur: Hermitage Books, 1994).
8. Matus, op.cit, p. 177.
9. Ibid., pp. 185-186.
10. Ibid., pp. 187-188.
11. RB 1980, pp. 292-294.

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The Feminine in Hinduism — Syllabus

Posted on December 8, 2010 by

The following is the Syllabus of the course I am to teach here in Berkeley, at one of the theological schools that collectively form the ecumenical consortium GTU (Graduate Theological Union). The school that hired me is the Jesuit School of Theology, which actually is a department of the University of Santa Clara.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will offer a two-pronged approach to interreligious dialogue: a) reading primary sources in the Vedas, especially with regard to the Divine Mother image of the deity, and subsequent tradition and b) reflection on them in the light of lived experience. The course will emphasize the ecclesial nature of interreligious dialogue (see Vatican II, Nostra Aetate), and will examine this dimension in Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s non-dual experience of the Absolute (advaita) through her service to the poor and the dying destitute as she lived a practical and contemplative form of interreligious dialogue. Her mystical experience and her positive relationship with Hindus and others will be compared with the life and teaching of a contemporary Hindu woman mystic, Anandamayi Ma. Students will recognize the interplay between faith and culture in addressing the theological and/or pastoral issues that emerge in the Hindu cultural context. Students will be invited to share, and reflect upon, their own interreligious connections. Lecture/Discussion. One-page reflection for each class meeting except the first, plus a final paper. This course fulfills the requirement for course credits in inter- religious dialogue and history of religions.

COURSE GOALS
The students will read, study, and critically reflect upon, the interfaith context and relations of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Anandamayi Ma, and others, in the light of the Catholic Church’s view of, and relationship with, these faiths and their adherents. The students will explore how people today, in contact with persons of faith belonging to various traditions, can through dialogue deepen their own life of faith and spiritual journey.

COURSE MATERIALS: Daily required readings will be posted on Moodle (40-60 pages); a bibliography will be provided, plus the following:

Thomas Matus. Ashram Diary: In India With Bede Griffiths. Washington D.C.: O Books, 2009. ISBN 978 1 84694 161 0

Thomas Matus. Yoga and the Jesus Prayer. Washington D.C.: O Books, 2010. ISBN 978 1 84694 285 3

I—A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE CHURCH’S ATTITUDE/RELATIONSHIP with regard to other faiths and spiritual traditions. Dialogue as an ecclesial practice and as a personal commitment, in the spirit of a critical fidelity to Catholic tradition, as expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, especially Nostra Aetate. In what way, and to what degree, have Hindu sacred texts become part of twentieth-century Western culture? [Read Nostra Aetate; understand how interreligious dialogue is integral to the Church’s mission, in service of the faith that does justice].

II—THE UNCLEAR AND INDISTINCT CONCEPTS OF BOTH ‘RELIGION’ AND ‘HINDUISM’ in the context of the Church’s own efforts to affirm her own, and Christ’s, ‘uniqueness’ [Read selections from Zaehner, Hinduism; Panikkar, The Vedic Experience; reflect on the range of texts held as sacred by Hindus as well as on so-called ‘heterodox’ traditions in India: Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism; see also Dominus Jesus and subsequent debate].

III—HINDUISM AS A WAY OF ‘SEEING’ (DARSANA): image and word in Indian religious traditions as compared to Christianity; the feminine image of God in Hindu Texts and in the Christian revelation [Read from Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in Hinduism; Hawley and Wulff, Devi: Goddesses of India; Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother; Panikkar, The Vedic Experience].

IV—THE WEST AND CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO RECENT HINDUISM: the social condition of women in India and female voices of Hinduism in today’s context, against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century Hindu revival [Read from Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons. Reflect on the renewal of Hinduism through the Brahmo Samaj, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and the founding of the first Hindu ‘religious order’; Sri Aurobindo; Ramana Maharshi and the quest for the Self; read from Zaehner, op.cit.; Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo; Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi; Lipski, Anandamayi Ma].

V—GURU AND DISCIPLE: The non-hierarchical transmission of India’s civilization and spiritual teachings through lineages of gurus; the new lineages established by Anandamayi Ma and other recent gurus [Read from Lipski, Anandamayi Ma; reflect critically on cultural and spiritual transmission in the West in general and in the Catholic Church in particular; reflect also on the changing image of a ‘guru’ in modern Hinduism and in the West].

VI—SANNYASA AND YOGA, or ‘Renunciation’ and ‘Integration’ as inherent elements of the inner dynamic of Indian spirituality [Read passages from the Bhagavad Gita and from Ashram Diary; examine the historical and spiritual link between sannyasa and yoga, and between Hinduism and Buddhism].

VII—SYNCRETISM AND INCULTURATION: ‘Syncretism’ as intrinsic to Hinduism in general. Hindu worship of Jesus. Was Blessed Teresa’s ascetical practice and Christian devotion in the Indian context a form of ‘inculturation’? [Reflect on translated passages from Germani, Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta; Matus, Ashram Diary; reflect on the practice of ‘Oriental techniques’ in the West: Matus, Yoga and the Jesus Prayer].

VIII—NON-DUAL EXPERIENCE AND THE SERVICE OF THE POOR: Blessed Teresa’s life as a comment on Abhishiktananda’s and Bede Griffiths’ understanding of Vedanta and Christian doctrine; did she attain an authentic ‘non-dual’ experience of the Absolute, and is her experience a form of ‘syncretism’? [Read from Germani, Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta; Abhishiktananda, Saccidananda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience; reflect on the difficulties of connecting Hindu and Christian thought at the conceptual level].

IX—NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR AN EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH TO HINDUISM through the practice of contemplative virtues and active service. [Read from Germani, Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta; Matus, Yoga and the Jesus Prayer; understand how a Christian’s opening to Hinduism can lead to absorption of Hindu elements into one’s global vision as a Christian].

X—VARIOUS THEOLOGICAL HYPOTHESES on Hinduism and other traditions in relation to human salvation by, through, and in Jesus Christ [no class session, but these questions and hypotheses must be examined by reading from one or more of the following authors: Karl Rahner; Jacques Dupuis; Jules Monchanin; Abhishiktananda; Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother].

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Techno-logic and the Chilean miners

Posted on October 15, 2010 by

While the thirty-three miners (actually, one of them was Bolivian) were being hoisted up to the surface from the mine chamber, where they had been trapped for 69 days, I had my computer on and connected with the live feed from Chile through ABC News. I was doing other things, but I could glance over and watch, as each one came out of the 21-inch-wide capsule that transported them.

Human skill accomplished their liberation, just as the medical and other skills of health professionals had preserved their physical and psychological well-being during the weeks the exit hole was being drilled and the equipment was being constructed. Techno-logic explains all the physical aspects of this accomplishment.

It would not be human, nor would the miners and their rescuers be honored, were we to stop here and not consider the imponderable dimensions of this historical event. In one news cycle it played itself out, and today’s internet-press postings speak of other things, both important and frivolous.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” said the poet T.S. Eliot in two of his works (Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets). We cannot bear the reality of those 17 days after the mine collapse, during which no one above knew they were all alive, and they did not know whether or how they would be looked for by potential rescuers. The men prayed briefly every day; perhaps the more devout among them prayed constantly in the quiet of their souls.

I do not have to speak, nor do I wish to speak, of “God’s hand” guiding miners and rescuers toward this successful conclusion. But I have to see in them and in their rescue a sort of “eucatastrophy” — a word that J.R.R. Tolkien used to characterize the ending of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, a person of faith, chose not to mention God in the book, but let the narrative (which he insisted was not an allegory of anything natural or supernatural) show its ultimate meaning through the ending: the catastrophic collapse of evil power through the weaker force of the good.

It is not necessary to name an evil entity (like Sauron, or the reign of Mordor, or the magic of the ring of power) in the causality of the miners’ entrapment. Enormous lacks were there, sins of omission if you wish, like lack of security in the mines, or the very fact of basing so much of the economy of Chile and the world upon copper and gold, the metals that the men down there were sent to extract. The men themselves were weak, some physically and some psychologically (just ordinary “Hobbits” one might call them). Their ultimate fate was sealed — literally — in stone, and Murphy’s law prevailed for the most part. But the evil ending of the story was upended and catastrophically reversed through the archetypal and perinatal symbolism of the narrow passage and the emergence into light: rebirth and resurrection.

Wearied news media have tried to forget this imponderable sign-value of the rescue, because the persons and market forces that direct the media cannot bear the reality that the event patently projects upon the conscience of anyone who will gaze at its light. The miners will keep their sunglasses on for a few more days; the techno-logic of our culture will keep its gaze turned away, as usual. A minority of persons will utter the G-word and explain thereby the event, and I will bear with their God-talk, which as a person of faith I sometimes use myself.

But I want to bear this “very much reality” and will try to do so through silent contemplation of the simple fact of thirty-three men who suffered no harm from their entrapment and did no harm to one another while awaiting liberation from it.

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Neuroscience, Consciousness, Music

Posted on October 8, 2010 by

A comment on a blog post by Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist (http://okaysteve.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/i-dont-know-so-maybe-im-not):

The main difference between Matt Segall and myself, is that he may, as you say, labor under a misunderstanding of the current accomplishments of neuroscience, while I must admit, not just to misunderstanding, but to ignorance. I do not grasp neuroscience, therefore I am an ignoramus (Latin, actually first-person plural, meaning “we are unaware”). Yet I know a few things, enough to know my ignorance and to question convictions and certitudes, mine and your own, which, pardon my bluntness, are more dogmatic than scientific.

You, Steve, set out to “convince” Matt and your other readers “that neuroscientist’s [sic] are actually doing a fantastic job at figuring out the nitty gritty of consciousness, that it resides solely in the brain, and that it can be explained solely through brain activity.”

I shall indeed take the time to read some of the sources that you indicate, and perhaps they will dispel some of the clouds of ignorance that obfuscate my awareness. In the meantime, I do perceive, in this trying to “convince” people, the evangelical posture of an ardent believer in the fantastic job and the current doing of it. But were I a scientist, I should not be so confident that the job has already been done, and that neuroscience has reached the point at which one can employ the most unscientific of adverbs, “solely”: solely in the brain, solely through brain activity.

Science, in my modest understanding, speaks the language of mathematics; scientific knowledge gives us quantities, not qualities. I only ask the scientist not to deny to the knowledge of qualities the title of true knowledge, especially in three areas that are of particular interest to me: music, love, and mysticism. Set aside the third, if you wish, but leave me at least music.

A developing area of study is that of musical cognition, and here neuroscience and evolutionary biology can shed amazing light on the musical experience. Human musical expression has evolved enormously, alongside science and often in dialogue with it. I cannot say that the music of Bach and Mozart is “better” than that of Toru Takemitsu and Sofia Gubaidulina (two favorites of mine), but certainly the music of the latter two has “evolved” in complexity/consciousness from the earlier maestros.

Gubaidulina’s concertos show their debt to Mozart’s perfection of musical form; she sometimes quotes Bach. Yet she speaks a musical language that addresses my membership in twenty-first-century humanity, although I cannot tell how this is so. I can analyze her forms and her counterpoint (music has, after all, strong affinities with mathematics); you could analyze the firing of my neurons with her music in my ears. But a way of knowing is there for me, which neither my formal analysis nor your brain scans can pin down.

There is an endless excess in human knowing to which scientific measurement can never mark an end-point. All knowledge is approximate; scientists elude this messiness of human knowing and the fuzziness of human logic by reducing observed data to number. I know that “fuzzy logic” is being studied by computer scientists; I am vaguely aware of chaos theory. But both disciplines still need the math.

Music has its math side, like all knowing, but it has another and ultimately inexplicable side that will never be reduced to numbers because it is constantly expanding (I don’t say, “progressing”). Gubaidulina’s struggle with the interactions of tempered and non-tempered tuning (e.g., her recent orchestral work “Light at the End”) starts with Herz-numbers (cycles per second) but takes us into a realm that is numberless and that corresponds with the “potential infinity” of human consciousness, while suggesting that another music, now being written or yet to be written, will go beyond hers, great as it is.

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The Feminine in Hinduism

Posted on September 10, 2010 by

This coming January, I’ll be giving a course here in Berkeley, with the title, “The Feminine in Hinduism”. Here is a short reading list:

Raimundo Panikkar (ed. and transl.). The Vedic Experience, Mantramañjarī: An Anthology of the Vedas… London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977.

Gloria Germani. Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta: Una mistica tra Oriente e Occidente. Milano: Paoline Editoriale Libri, 2000.

Alexander Lipski. Life and teaching of Sri Anandamayi Ma. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977.

Jacques Dupuis. Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002.

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Yoga and the Jesus Prayer

Posted on July 6, 2010 by

A week ago I returned here to Incarnation Monastery in Berkeley, and the next day received the author’s copies of Yoga and the Jesus Prayer (O Books). This is my latest book, but not entirely new. Although totally rewritten, it contains the core material from Yoga and the Jesus Prayer Tradition: An Experiment in Faith, published in 1984 by Paulist Press.

People have been looking for this out-of-print book for years now, and copies have been put up on on eBay and Amazon for ridiculous prices: 70 or 80 dollars. Now for just $22.95 ( or even less, with Amazon’s discount) you can read my comparison of Tantric Yoga and Greek Orthodox mysticism, or better said, my parallel reading of the tenth-century yogis of Kashmir and a Byzantine saint from the same period, to see where their respective experiences may converge.

In this new edition I also share some of my personal experience of yoga practice and meditation as a disciple of the disciples of Paramahansa Yogananda and later as a Christian monk in Big Sur, Italy, and India.

During the retreat I gave the weekend before last, at the Camaldolese hermitage in Big Sur, I drew on this book, focusing on the theme of kundalini awakening as a fire sacrifice. We meditated together, with the help of a simple breathing practice taught in the ancient Vjñana-Bhairava Tantra, and at the center of our meditations was the sacrifice of Jesus, made present in the daily Mass celebrated with the monks.

Cover of the new book (O Books)

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Yoga and Sacrifice (Big Sur retreat)

Posted on June 23, 2010 by

The Hermitage known as “New Camaldoli” is on the Big Sur coast just south of Lucia, on the way to Hearst Castle. The Hermitage is very different from the Castle, which is a tourist attraction that exhibits fragments of Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture.

You could say that New Camaldoli has more in common with Shantivanam than with Mr. Hearst’s hideaway, even though the monks who pray and work there are in the lineage of the Medieval saints Benedict and Romuald, transmitted through the Renaissance-era monks Ambrose Traversari and Paul Giustiniani.

New Camaldoli lives from a real, not imaginary past. Like the Ashram in southern India, the Big Sur Hermitage challenges our present with prophetic hope, grounded in the Genesis promise. Both witness to a cross-cultural present, in view of a future inter-spirituality, whose outline can be sketched from lines that lead back to Bible and Gospel, as well as to the sages of ancient India.

Jules Monchanin, Swami Paramarupyananda, foresaw a reciprocal Advent of the Church in India and of India in the Church. He knew that the new birth in which this Advent was to culminate had to include Yoga, but he wrestled with doubts about the classical Indian texts on Yoga. As a young disciple of the yogi-guru Yogananda, I struggled with doubts about Church dogmas and structures. But when I realized that she was a mystical body and a mother-guru, who welcomed me into her embrace, I found Monchanin’s prophetic hope a source of comfort and insight.

In these years since I joined the monks in Big Sur (forty-eight years this Friday), God’s grace and my own study and practice of Yoga have led me beyond his and my doubts. This weekend, I shall share some thoughts on Yoga with a group of retreatants in Big Sur. Usually the Hermitage offers only silent, individual retreats, but a few times a year, a facilitator from Big Sur or Berkeley offers moments of group reflection and meditation on a specific theme.

“Yoga and Sacrifice” can trouble us like “Church and India”: for many people, Hindu or Christian or whatever, Yoga liberates the human spirit from sacrificial religion, that is, from ritual purity and deontological morality. If we pay attention to the Gospel, we find that Jesus also offers liberation, as when he teaches that love of God and neighbor contains and transcends “Law and Prophets” and when he tells us to leave our sacrifices and first go seek reconciliation with anyone who has something against us, and only then to make our offering to God.

Now I am going to upload a short video on YouTube, sketching out the retreat theme. Come join me there: do a search for thomasmatus, and click on the latest upload.

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