Obedience means literally a thorough listening. In Latin, ob audire, “to obey,” means to listen thoroughly or, as the Jewish tradition says, “to bare your ear.” The ear locks have to be removed so that you can really listen thoroughly. That’s known as obedience in the Old Testament. In many, many forms, in many, many languages, the word for obedience is an intensive form of the word listening—horchen, ge-horchen; audire, ob-audire; etc.
In other words, obedience, doing what somebody else tells you, may be used as an ascetic means to get over that self-will, that always having your own ideas and your own little blueprints. It’s a means to drop all this and to look at the whole and to praise the whole, as Augustine says. But the decisive thing is to learn to listen, and very often doing somebody else’s will can be a hindrance to learning to listen; you just become a marionette pulled on strings. This is very important in the context of finding meaning, the context in which we see the mystical experience. When you find something meaningless you say that it is absurd. But when you say “absurd,” you’ve given yourself away—because the term absurdus is the exact opposite to ob-audiens. Absurdus means absolutely deaf. So if you say something is absurd, you are simply saying, “I am absolutely deaf to what this is going to tell me. The totality is speaking to me and I am absolutely deaf.” There is nothing out there that’s deaf. You cannot attribute deafness to the source of the sound. You are deaf. You can’t hear. So the only alternative that all of us have in any form of life is to replace an absurd attitude with an obedient attitude. It takes a lifetime to get just a little way in this.
What all this boils down to is that there is a lot more to life than just the phenomena. There is a whole dimension of life to which we have to listen with our whole heart, mind-fully, as we say. Mindfulness is necessary to find meaning—and the intellect is not the full mind. The intellect, one has to hasten to say, is an extremely important part of our mind, but it isn’t the whole mind. What I mean here when I say “mind” is more what the Bible calls the “heart,” what many religious traditions call the “heart.” As we saw earlier, the heart is the whole person, not just the seat of our emotions. The kind of heart that we are talking about here is the lover’s heart, which says, “I will give you my heart.” That doesn’t mean I give you part of myself; it means I give myself to you. So when we speak about wholeheartedness, a wholehearted approach to life, mindfulness, that alone is the attitude through which we give ourselves to meaning.
A technical term that is mostly used in the Catholic tradition and is a good term for this is recollection—to be recollected, to live recollectedly. It means the same thing as mindfulness, whole-heartedness, openness to meaning. Recollectedness is concentration without elimination (that is T.S. Eliot’s phrase), a paradox, because concentration normally limits. But if you can accomplish concentration without elimination, if you can combine the attitude of focusing on something and yet being totally open without horizons, then you have accomplished what recollection means. Then you have accomplished what all of monastic life in any of its traditions is after—recollected living, mindful living, deliberate living.
Thoreau, when he goes to Walden Pond, says, “I have gone into the woods to live deliberately.” That means recollectedly, in this sense. There are many forms of monasticism that are not catalogued or recognized as such, and they may be much more important than the others. The decisive thing by which you will recognize monastic life is that it is recollected life, mindful life, wholehearted life. It is through wholehearted living that meaning flows into our lives. That means that while we are engaged in purpose we keep ourselves open enough to let meaning flow into our lives. We don’t get stuck in purpose.
It may help us if we see that work in the narrowest sense is closely related to purpose. Work is that kind of activity that aims at a particular purpose, and when that particular purpose is accomplished the work as work ceases. Over against this is play. Play does not aim at any particular purpose. Play has meaning; play is the blossoming forth of meaning. You work until you have accomplished your purpose. You sweep the floor until it is swept. But you don’t sing in order to get a song sung—you sing in order to sing. And you don’t dance, as Alan Watts pointed out, to get somewhere; you dance in order to dance. It has all its meaning in itself.
Now we tend to think that the opposite of work is leisure. Leisure is not the opposite of work; play is the opposite of work, if you have to have a polarity like that. And leisure is precisely the bridging of this gap between the two. Leisure is precisely doing your work with the attitude of play. That means putting into your work what is most important about playing, namely, that you do it for its own sake and not only to accomplish a particular purpose. And that means that you have to give it time. Leisure is not a privilege for those who can take time for leisure. Leisure is a virtue. It is the virtue of those who give time to whatever takes time, and give as much time as it deserves, and so work leisurely and find meaning in their work and come fully alive. If we have a strict work mentality we are only half alive. We are like people who only breathe in, and suffocate. It really doesn’t make any difference whether you only breathe in or only breathe out; you will suffocate in either case. That is a very good pointer toward the fact that we are not playing off work against play or purpose against meaning. The two have to come together. We have to breathe in and breathe out, and so we keep alive. This is really what we are all after and is what all religion must be about—aliveness.
Chapter Four: Alive in Body, Mind, and Spirit
Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being…. Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.... To be vital, awake, aware, in all areas of our lives, is the task that is never accomplished, but it remains the goal. Since we all know what it means to be alive in at least one area, we have some sense of what it must mean to be ablaze with the Holy Spirit in all of one’s life.
—From Music of Silence
The first question we need to ask ourselves is: What do we mean by spiritual? That is the decisive question. These are three terms that we deal with: body, mind, and spirit. All three terms are more problematic than we realize when we begin to think about them.
When somebody asks you, “Where’s your body?” you can point to it. As very little children you have already learned, “Where is your nose?” and then you put (with great delight from your mother) your finger on your nose, and then on your ears, and so on. We have been trained to know where our body is; we have not been trained sufficiently to realize that our body does not end with our skin.
So body, by and large, is not that much of a problem. Mind is more so, but also not too much, because in everyday parlance we just lump everything together that isn’t body, and that’s mind. So that’s fairly simple; if it’s not body, it must be mind.
But when it comes to spirit there are all sorts of ideas in the air, and we have to be very careful. A safe approach with words like that is often to go back to the roots of the word itself. Spirit means “life breath” in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. As far back as we can trace, people speaking about spiritual matters used a term which in everyday parlance means “life breath.”
That helps us, because I would suggest that what I mean by spirituality and by spirit is “aliveness.” Aliveness is of one piece with life as we know it—with the aliveness that you recognize when you are breathing and when your body is functioning.
But it goes beyond that. This aliveness has degrees. Don’t you know people who are more alive than other people? Most of us would say yes: So-and-so is really alive! Well, does so-and-so have a higher heart rate, or a faster pulse? Maybe, maybe not, but that kind of aliveness is not to be measured by your bodily functions. There is something else that we are talking about here. But it is an aliveness.
What kind of aliveness is it? What are we talki
ng about? Interestingly, sooner or later we arrive at the word mindfulness. In many spiritual traditions that word has been used, and you see, always then you are speaking about the mind again, but you are not speaking about the mind in its fullness. So this aliveness is a fullness of mind. However, we are immediately in danger of falling into a trap. Mind will then be spiritual, and body will be unspiritual. Many people fall into this trap, and this is a very dangerous trap because with mindfulness—that is, this aliveness—goes something for which we have no word, and which we should call something like “bodifulness.” But that suggests to you the opposite of slimness, and is not particularly helpful. What I mean by the word is a full, deep rootedness in our bodies.
Think of mindful people: They are rooted in their bodies. They are alive in their bodies. And it’s significant that we don’t have a word for that, that we just call it mindful. It indicates that there is something lacking; when a word is lacking in a language, there is some insight lacking—the insight that full aliveness is mindfulness and bodifulness, and it’s this full aliveness that we are talking about.
Think about a moment of greatest aliveness in your life, a moment of real mindfulness rooted in the body, a moment in which you were in touch with reality. Those are the degrees to which we are alive and spiritual in this world, the degrees of being in touch with reality.
T.S. Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” But we can stand reality in varying degrees, and the most alive ones of us have managed to bear more reality than the others. And what we want to do is become able to be in touch with reality, all of reality, and not to have to block out certain aspects.
The fuller our mindfulness becomes, and the greater we become alive, the more we realize how inadequate language is. So we have to do something, if we want to talk about it, that heightens language. And what is heightened language? The heightened possibility of language is poetry, and so I would like to share with you a poem by William Butler Yeats which hints at one of those moments. It sets religious experience in a context where you would not expect it.
Most of us have our real religious experiences when and where we least expect them; and in environments where we expect them, we are usually disappointed. This is an autobiographical poem (“Vacillation, IV”), and it happens to Yeats in a London coffee shop. This is how he describes it:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
So what happens? He doesn’t even say anything about his mind or his thoughts; he probably didn’t think a thing at that moment. His body blazed with this vibrant aliveness of mindfulness, which is so much more than thinking. His body blazed! And we have all experienced that, or something similar. He says, “It seemed, so great my happiness, / That I was blessed and could bless.” That he receives something that he calls blessed—significantly a religious term—and passes on. So something flows through him, and that is that spirit that flows through him.
T.S. Eliot says in “The Four Quartets,” also speaking about a peak experience: “music heard so deeply that it isn’t heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” You are the music. That means you vibrate with that music, and even though you might just be thinking of some flute music or piano music that you listen to, it’s the music of the universe that you are vibrating to. It’s the music to which this whole cosmic dance dances, and that flows through you—and that’s your religious moment. And in that moment you know that you are one with all. You are the music while the music lasts, simply that.
And that is now the expression of a profound belonging. So when you are looking for your peak experiences, or your religious experiences, as you are scanning your memory, forget about all the other things you have thought here that sidetracked you—like “my body never blazed,” or “I don’t like music” and all the rest. But the one thing that you cannot dispense with is to ask yourself, “Where did I for one split second know that I belonged, and know it in my bones, that I was one with all, and all was one with me?”
That’s the essence, and that is a way of knowing. It’s the ultimate way of knowing, not limited to thoughts, not limited to feelings, not limited to any other way of knowing. And that is common sense—common sense in the deepest sense of the word. It is a knowing that goes so deep that it is embodied in our senses and has no limits to its commonness. Everything is included: By your own bliss you know the bliss of everything there is in the world, because in that blissful moment you have reached the heart of the world—spiritual knowledge—if you want, commonsense knowledge. The term spirit has been so misused that I would be perfectly happy to drop it completely, declare a moratorium on the word spirit, and use always the term common sense. In contemporary parlance, that says it much better. It makes sense; it’s connected with the body through the senses; it’s common, limitlessly common.
And common sense is a basis for doing, a basis for action. In common sense, action and thinking are closely connected. So common sense is more than thinking. It is that vibrating aliveness to the world, in the world, aliveness for the world, for our environment. And it’s a knowing through that belonging, and so a basis for doing, because to act in the spirit is to act as people act when they belong together. We all belong together in this “earth household,” as Gary Snyder calls it so beautifully, and to live a spiritual life means to act as one acts in one’s own house where one belongs.
All morality that was ever developed in any tradition in the world can be reduced to the principle of acting as one acts toward those with whom one belongs. And the differences between the different codes of morality are only the limits that we draw for belonging: “These are the ones toward whom you have to act morally, and the others are ‘the others,’ outside.” And when you really live with common sense, that has no limitations; you live out of a morality that includes everybody, and therefore you behave toward everybody as one behaves when one belongs. That is what Jesus meant when he said “the kingdom of God”—and any other term of that sort that you get from any religious tradition will fit in here.
Common sense rightly understood is authoritative. The question of authority is extremely important in this context of religion and spirituality, but the term authority has to be rightly understood, and it’s usually misunderstood in our time. Even when you go to the dictionary, and open it up to the word, you will normally find as the first meaning of authority something like “power to command.” That’s not the original meaning of authority. The original meaning is “a firm basis for knowing and acting.” We use it in that way, too; if we want to know something about our health, we go to a doctor who is an authority. If we want to do some research, we go to an authoritative book. We look for a firm basis for knowing and acting.
And now you can understand how we get the power to command, particularly if you reduce it to a smaller sociological scale in a small community—a family or a tribe or a village. There may be a person who proves over and over again to be a firm basis for knowing and acting. You go to this old woman if you want to know how to heal your wounds—or if you want to know whether we should wage war against this other village or not—and she always gives you the right answer. So now, because she is a firm basis for knowing and acting, you put her in an authority position and give her power to command. That’s how it came about, and that’s how all our authorities can be traced back to having come about.
But the moment a person is put in authority, they normally do not like to let go of that power, even though they may no longer be a basis for knowing and acting. And that is how we get authoritarian authorities. The real genuine authority is so firm that he or
she can afford to build you up; actually that is the only appropriate use for authority, to build up those under authority. The authoritarian authorities do not have this basis, and therefore have to keep everybody down in order to keep themselves up, and that is how you can distinguish. It’s the litmus test for distinguishing between authoritarian authority and genuine authority: If they build you up, they are genuine; if they put you down, they are authoritarian. It’s very simple.
When you really go back to what Jesus Christ set in motion that is still reverberating through the world, it is an authority crisis. He was the kind of prophet that did not say, “I speak to you in the name of the highest authority, and here I come with authority to you.” He always appealed to the authority of God in the hearts of his hearers, and that is how he built them up. That’s why people said, “This man speaks with authority, not like our authorities.” And that got him into trouble; both the religious and the political authorities had to clamp down on him because anybody who makes people stand on their own two feet is dangerous for those authoritarians. They then put him out of the way, but that kind of spirit, because it is the ultimate spirit, could not be killed, and still goes on today.
One more point I would make: If our aliveness is rooted in the body, what happens when we die? We don’t have to wait until we die: What happens when we get decrepit? That’s really what most of us are far more afraid of than dying. Dying is probably relatively easy; everybody has at least managed it somehow. But to live with this decrepitness, that’s really awful, when body and mind begin to fall asunder, as T.S. Eliot says. What do we do then?
The Way of Silence Page 4