A book which cost as much as a house: an illuminated vellum page from a late-fifteenth-century prayer book, depicting the Adoration of the Magi. (illustration credit 4.13)
iii. Spiritual Exercises
1.
Alongside setting alternative curricula for universities and emphasizing the need to rehearse and digest knowledge, religions have also been radical in taking education out of the classroom and combining it with other activities, encouraging their followers to learn through all of their senses, not only by listening and reading but also, and more broadly, by doing: eating, drinking, bathing, walking and singing.
Zen Buddhism, for instance, proposes ideas about the importance of friendship, the inevitability of frustration and the imperfection of human endeavours. But it does not simply lecture its adherents about these tenets; it helps them more directly to apprehend their truth through activities such as flower arranging, calligraphy, meditation, walking, gravel rak — ing and, most famously, tea drinking.
Because the last of these is at once such a common practice in the West and yet so devoid of spiritual significance, it seems particularly strange as well as delightful that Zen Buddhism should have anointed the tea ceremony as one of its most significant pedagogic moments, as important to Buddhists as the Mass is to Catholics. During chanoyu, as the ceremony is known, some of the same feelings that hover faintly over a typical English tea are refined, amplified and symbolically connected to Buddhist doctrine. Every aspect of the ritual has meaning, beginning with the cups, whose misshapen form reflects Zen’s affection for all that is raw and unpretentious. The slow way in which the drink is brewed by the tea master allows the demands of the ego to go into abeyance, the simple decorations of the tea hut are meant to draw thoughts away from concerns with status, while the steaming scented tea should help one to feel the truths lurking behind the Chinese characters written on scrolls on the walls denoting key Buddhist virtues like ‘harmony’, ‘purity’ and ‘tranquillity’.
The point of the tea ceremony is not to teach a new philosophy but to make an existing one more vivid through an activity which carries subtle sympathies with it; it is a mechanism for bringing to life ideas about which participants already have a good intellectual grasp and yet continue to need encouragement to abide by.
To take a comparable example from another faith, Jewish texts make repeated mention of the importance of atonement and the possibilities for renewal through the admission of sin. But within the religion, such ideas are not merely imparted through books, they are made vibrant through a bodily experience: a ritualized version of having a bath. Since the Babylonian exile, Judaism has advised its communities to construct mikvot — sacred baths each containing exactly 575 litres of clean spring water — in which Jews are to immerse themselves after confessing to spiritually doubtful acts, in order to recover their purity and their connection to God. The Torah recommends a full immersion in a mikveh every Friday afternoon, before the New Year and following every seminal emission.
The institution of the mikveh relies on a sense of renewal which secular bathers already know a little about, but lends it greater depth, structure and solemnity. An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.
A lesson about the meaning of life threaded into a tea party. (illustration credit 4.14)
2.
Religions understand the value of training our minds with a rigour that we are accustomed to applying only to the training of our bodies. They present us with an array of spiritual exercises designed to strengthen our inclination towards virtuous thoughts and patterns of behaviour: they sit us down in unfamiliar spaces, adjust our posture, regulate what we eat, give us scripts detailing what we should say to one another and minutely monitor the thoughts that cross our consciousness. They do all this not in order to deny us freedom but to quell our anxieties and flex our moral capacities.
This double insight — that we should train our minds just as we train our bodies, and that we should do so partly through those bodies — has led to the founding, by all the major faiths, of religious retreats where adherents may for a limited time abscond from their ordinary lives and find inner restoration through spiritual exercise.
The secular world offers no true parallels. Our closest equivalents are country hotels and spas, though the comparison serves only to reveal our shallowness. The brochures for such establishments tend to promise us opportunities to rediscover what is most essential to us, they show us images of couples in plush dressing gowns, they vaunt the quality of their mattresses and toiletries or boast of their twenty-four-hour provision of room service. But the emphasis is always on physical satiation and mental diversion rather than on any real fulfilment of the needs of our souls. These places have no way of helping us when the incompatibilities in our relationships reach a new nadir, when reading the Sunday newspapers provokes panic about our careers or when we wake up in terror just before dawn, paralysed by the thought of how short a span of life remains to us. Otherwise solicitous concierges, brimful of ideas about where we might partake of horse riding or mini-golf, will fall suddenly silent when questioned about strategies for coping with guilt, wayward longings or self-loathing.
Using a bath to support an idea: a Jewish mikveh in Willesden, north-west London. (illustration credit 4.15)
Religious retreats are, fortunately, somewhat more rounded in their attentions. St Bernard, the founder of the first Cistercian monasteries (organizations which in his day functioned as both retreats for the laity and permanent residences for monks), suggested that all human beings were divided into three parts, corpus (body), animus (mind) and spiritus (spirit), each of which must be carefully looked after by any decent hostelry.
In the tradition of St Bernard, Catholic retreats continue even today to provide their guests with comfortable accommodations, extensive libraries and spiritual activities ranging from the ‘examen’ — a thrice-daily survey of the conscience, carried out alone and in silence (usually with a lighted candle and a statuette of Jesus) — to sessions with counsellors who have been specially trained to inject logic and morality into believers’ confused and corrupted thought processes.
Although the specific lessons taught therein may differ markedly, Buddhist retreats embody an equal commitment to the whole self. After hearing of one in the English countryside specializing in seated and walking forms of meditation, I resolved to see for myself what benefits might be derived from a course of spiritual exercises.
At six in the morning one Saturday in June, some 2,573 years after the Buddha was born not far from Kapilavastu, in the Ganges river basin, I sit in a semicircle with twelve other novices in a converted barn in Suffolk. Our teacher, Tony, begins the session by inviting us to understand the human condition as it is viewed through Buddhist eyes. He says that most of the time, without having any choice in the matter, we are dominated by our ego, or, as it is termed in Sanskrit, our ātman. This centre of consciousness is by nature selfish, narcissistic and insatiable, unreconciled to its own mortality and driven to avoid the prospect of death by fantasizing about the redemptive powers of career, status and wealth. It is let loose like a demented dynamo at the moment of our birth and does not incline to rest until we breathe our last. Because the ego is inherently vulnerable, its predominant mood is one of anxiety. It is skittish, jumping from object to object, unable ever to relax its vigilance or engage properly with others. Even under the most auspicious of contexts, it is never far from a relentless, throbbing drumbeat of worry, which conspires to prevent it from sincere involvement with anything outside of itself. And yet the ego also has a touching tendency constantly to trust that its desires are about to be fulfilled. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material
acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping’, or upādāna in Sanskrit.
The Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, 1708: a resting place for the body, mind and spirit. Each zone of the monastery was assigned a different part of the self to heal. The body was to be looked after by the kitchens and the dormitory, the mind by the library and the spirit by the chapel. (illustration credit 4.16)
Nevertheless, as Tony now explains, this sombre picture of one part of ourselves does not have to define all that we are, because we are endowed too with the rare ability, reinforceable through spiritual exercises, occasionally to set aside the demands of our egos and to enter into a state of what Buddhists call anātman, or egolessness, during which we can take a step back from our passions and think about what our lives might be like if we were not burdened by the additional and painful need to be ourselves.
It is a sign of the Western bias towards the intellect that it comes as a surprise to be told that we should begin the business of setting aside our egos not primarily through logical argument but rather by learning to sit on the ground in a new way.
As Tony specifies, our capacity to reorient our priorities will critically depend on our ability to stand up, shake our limbs loose for a minute and then rearrange our bodies in the Vairocana seven-point meditation posture. For a group of novices this is, inevitably, something of a struggle, since many of our bodies are no longer quite so young, and all of us seem afflicted by the self-consciousness that naturally results from contorting oneself in one’s socks in front of strangers. A certain amount of giggling and even the occasional fart ensue as we strive to imitate Tony’s position, which is reputed to be the same one adopted by the Buddha and his disciples as they meditated under a sacred Bodhi tree in the eastern Indian state of Bihar twenty-odd centuries ago. The instructions are precise: our legs must be crossed, our left hand must rest on top of our right in our lap, our spine should be straight, our shoulders lightly stretched, our head inclined forwards, our gaze directed downwards, our mouth slightly open, the tip of our tongue touching the roof of our mouth, our breathing steady and slow.
(illustration credit 4.17)
To answer our longing for calm, Western consumer society has over the last fifty years refined the concept of sunbathing; Buddhism has taken over a thousand years to perfect the art of meditation. (illustration credit 4.18)
Gradually the group falls into line, and the room grows silent save for the hoot of an owl in a distant field. Tony guides us to focus on the unremarkable yet rarely remarked-upon fact that we are all breathing. In our first steps towards mastering the ānāpānasati (‘mindfulness of breathing’) meditation, we recognize the extraordinary challenge posed by sitting quietly in a room and doing nothing other than existing — we apprehend, in other words, the draconian grip which the priorities and projects of our egos have on us. We take note of our tendencies towards distraction. As we strive to attend only to our breathing, we sense our conscious minds shooting this way and that on their customarily frantic itineraries. We realize how absurdly difficult we find it to take even three breaths without being seized by an anxiety-charged idea, and extrapolate from that how uncommon it must be for us to inhabit any experience without becoming enmeshed in the tendrils of our ātman.
The purpose of our new seating position is to open up a modest distance between our consciousness and our ego. As we feel ourselves breathing, we notice that our physical beings have rhythms which play out without reference to our ego-led desires. The otherness of the body is one aspect of a vast realm of anātman which the ego does not control or understand and to which Buddhism now seeks to introduce us.
(illustration credit 4.19)
Because it is the ego’s habit to try to exploit and use as an instrument all that it encounters, it is unaware of the body except insofar as it is useful to its projects for sensory gratification. It is latently resentful of and appalled by its fragility. It does not want to think of the strange ways of the liver or of the mysterious doings of the pancreas. It orders the body to stay faithful to its tasks, hunched over the desk with back muscles clenched into a state of obedience and anxious expectation. Yet now, suddenly, the ego is being asked to cede control to nothing more distinguished and productive than the act of breathing, that background process of inhalation and exhalation which has been going on largely unnoticed and unappreciated since our birth. Taken aback, it experiences some of the same confusion that a king might feel upon being forced, due to unexpected circumstances, to spend a night on a hard bed in a humble inn.
With all our attention directed towards our breathing instead of the ego’s demands, it starts to give up some of its claims on consciousness and lets in data which it ordinarily filters out. We become aware of things, both internal and external, that have nothing to do with our usual concerns. Our consciousness shifts from a focus on breathing to an awareness first of our limbs, then of the skeleton that supports us and the blood that is continuously moving within us. We become alive to the sensitivity of our own cheeks, the small stirrings of air in the room, the textures of our clothes against our skin.
Later in the morning, we go outside for another spiritual exercise called a walking meditation, pioneered by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. We are instructed to empty our minds and wander the landscape without asking anything more of it than to observe it, freed for the moment of those ego-dominated habits of ours which strip nature of its beauty and give us a misleading and troubling sense of our own importance in the cosmos. Under tutelage, we proceed at a camel’s pace, our consciousness untroubled by any of our ego’s customary ambitions or chidings — in a state as much prized by Buddhism as it is reviled by capitalism, and known in Sanskrit as apranihita, or aimlessness — and thereby become newly attuned to a thousand details of our surroundings. There is a shaft of sunlight filtering through the trees, in which minuscule particles of dust are dancing. There is the sound of running water coming from a nearby stream. A spider is making its way across a branch above us. Buddhist poetry is dominated by records of similar encounters with just such tiny facets of the world, which reach our senses only after our egos have loosened their grip on our faculties.
‘Coming along the mountain path
I find something endearing
about violets’
reads a poem by the Zen poet Bashō. Working our way through the undergrowth, we become disinterested surveyors of our own existence, and hence ever so slightly more patient and compassionate observers of the planet, its people and its small purple flowers.
(illustration credit 4.20)
3.
The specifics of the exercises taught at Buddhist and other retreats are perhaps not as significant as the general point they raise about our need to impose greater discipline on our inner lives.
If the predominant share of our distress is caused by the state of our psyches, it seems perverse that the modern leisure industry should seek always to bring comfort to our bodies without attempting simultaneously to console and tame what the Buddhists so presciently term our ‘monkey minds’. We require effective centres for the restoration of our whole beings; new kinds of retreats devoted to educating, through an array of secularized spiritual exercises, our corporeal as well as psychological selves.
iv. Teaching Wisdom
Ultimately, the purpose of all education is to save us time and spare us errors. It is a mechanism whereby society — whether secular or religious — attempts reliably to inculcate in its members, within a set span of years, what it took the very brightest and most determined of their ancestors centuries of painful and sporadic efforts to work out.
Secular society has proved itself ready enough to accept the logic of this mission in relation to scientific and technical knowledge. It sees nothing to regret in the fact that a university student enr
olled today on a physics degree will in a matter of months be able to learn as much as Faraday ever knew, and within a couple of years may be pushing at the outer limits of Einstein’s unified field theory.
Yet this selfsame principle, which seems at once so obvious and so inoffensive in science, tends to be met with extraordinary opposition when applied to wisdom; to insights related to the self-aware and moral stewardship of the soul. Here, remarkably, the defenders of education, who would ridicule the notion that a class of freshly enrolled physics students ought to be left to work out the theory of electromagnetic radiation on their own, will declaim that wisdom is not something that one person can ever teach another.
This prejudice has so subsumed the teaching of culture as to have more or less stamped out the ambitions of Mill and Arnold, as well as the magniloquent hopes of Rilke, who in the last line of his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ surmised that it was the ultimate wish of all great artists to admonish their audiences, ‘Du musst dein Leben ändern’ (‘You must change your life’).
It is to religions’ credit that they have never sided with those who would argue that wisdom is unteachable. They have dared directly to address the great questions of individual life — What should I work for? How do I love? How can I be good? — in ways that should intrigue atheists even if they find little to agree with in the specific answers provided.
Religion for Atheists Page 8