Month: September 2014

In a recent book, The Power of Silence, Graham Turner tells the story of Ian Sutherland, sentenced to life imprisonment for a particularly horrific murder. One day in prison he picks up a book which keeps mentioning the Buddha. He begins to read more – and eventually learns that there is Buddhist monastery not far away. He gets in touch and one of the monks comes to visit him, as a result of which he begins to meditate daily.

Within a month he has stopped smoking and taking drugs, but it is a struggle trying to meditate. Silence does not exist in prison. During the day there is the constant Boom! Boom! of dance music, doors banging, keys jangling, staff shouting, bells going off when a fight breaks out … Even at two in the morning conventional silence does not exist.

Yet he perseveres, and slowly he becomes conscious of something positive happening inside him. ‘The ego is mighty,’ he says, ‘but I have a sense of what Buddhists call my inner self beginning to come to the surface, like a light shining through a window. The best way I can explain what I am trying to do in silent meditation is this: The sun, which is our inner being, our true self, is always shining, but for the moment there may be a cloud covering it. When you meditate you start to brush those clouds away. It’s like a war going on, and it’s going on even now. Every day is a battle. Sometimes the ego wins, sometimes my inner self. A few times I have almost thrown in the towel.’

With all the ups and downs Turner asks what, for him, has been the value of meditation. Sutherland replies, ‘The first thing is that I now accept that what’s happened in my life is down to me and nobody else. Before I could blame everything on other people – my mother didn’t love me enough and so on. It was always someone else’s fault. And the second thing is that I now know that there is a purpose to my life, which is to be the best possible human being I can be, and to treat everyone as I would want to be treated myself. I am facing up to things for the first time in my life. The mind stops, all thought ceases and you’re at one with God, the Great Spirit, or the Buddha.

‘It’s like the seed which lies within us. All we can do with that seed is plant it, water it, perhaps put a fence around it. For the rest, we have to rely on grace – and that is what meditation can help you find. This is the best thing I have ever done in my life.’

Once I had a home in Ireland, a hermitage on a cliff facing the ocean. Our local Catholic priest used regularly to invite me, as an Anglican priest, to preach at his Masses. But when he gave me the latest edition of the Catholic Church’s Catechism – a thick volume, analysing every mortal and venial sin – I had to throw it away.

I cast it off because to me it represented what the Church has become not what it is meant to be. It does not truly relate to the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus was critical of the rigid, legalistic moral code of his Jewish faith. He stated that there are only two commandments: to love God wholly, and to love one’s neighbour as one’s self. Under the Roman Emperor Constantine, however, his teachings were hammered into a theological and binding set of rules, which gave power to the Imperial Church as an institution.

Each of the major religions has been hijacked at one point or another in its history by such power structures. It has then fallen to the mystical element to preserve the core of their founder’s teachings. Thus in Islam we have the mystical tradition of the Sufi, in Judaism that of the Kabballah, in Christianity that of the Quakers, and of individual mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Dame Julian of Norwich.

Today, I find the writings of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, who is head of the Golden Sufi Centre in San Francisco, constantly inspiring. The inner journey can sometimes seem a lonely one, for, as he writes, ‘Every effort is required to walk along a path that is as narrow as the edge of a sword. Two cannot walk together, for it is the journey of the soul back to the Source.’ But he then adds, ‘From a spiritual perspective we are never alone; we are looked after more than we could ever know. The moment we turn towards Him, He takes us in His arms and provides us with everything we need.’ These words bring to mind Psalm 23: ‘Yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me.’

All the great mystics throughout history have conveyed the same essential message. We don’t need books of catechism or centralised power structures. What we need is silence. Unless we learn to stand still in the darkness, and listen, we shall not sense these presences which surround us. The ancient words resonate, reminding us of what we have to do: Be still and know!

We all need what Robert Frost called ‘time out for re-assembly’, time to face our doubts, our demons, our dreams and intuitions, and time to re-charge our batteries.

Robert Frost develops this thought further in his poem, The Armful:

For every parcel I stoop down to seize,
I lose some other off my arms or knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with, hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

Sometimes, in periods of being alone and reflective, when our meditation can go deep, we may realise that we have things we need to shed, that we have too many possessions, too many distractions and that we can simplify our lives. Indeed, with every decade it is valuable to take a personal inventory and say: Do I really need this? Is this what my life is about? We need to take time out, not just for re-assembly but also for re-assessment.

This happened to a man I know. He used to be the stage designer for a premier Repertory Theatre, turning out new sets every three weeks. One day, as he told me, he sat on a hillside and asked himself: Is this what I want to be doing for the rest of my life? And there came into his mind the image of soil. He gave up his job at the theatre, sold his car, bought himself a bicycle and became a jobbing gardener. What he earned was modest but adequate (he was lucky that he owned a small cottage where he could also grow his own vegetables, and he was able to rent one room to visiting actors or directors.) More importantly, he is among the most fulfilled and contented individuals I have ever met.

Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey, imagines a youngster setting out on life’s journey, and the great pressures put upon us by our family and by society’s expectations. As we learn to resist these siren voices, we may begin to hear another voice,

which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

When I was writing my first book on meditation, Inner Journey: Outer Journey, I originally wanted to call it ‘To The Within-God’. I had learned through the practice of meditation, that whatever we mean by God, he / she / it is not to be found ‘out there’. This is what Nietzsche meant when, in 1882, he famously pronounced God dead, and it is what the great mystic and preacher, Meister Eckhart realised centuries earlier when he wrote that ‘God is no thing’. As Jesus said, ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.’

Perhaps, instead of the word ‘God’ we might use Mother Julian of Norwich’s phrase, ‘the ground of our being’ or, following Eastern tradition, the Tao. Ultimately it is not words or names that matter but experience. St Thomas Aquinas was busily engaged on the last and greatest of his many works, the Summa Theologica, when one day at Mass he received such a revelation that he ceased writing. He refused to reveal the content of his vision, saying only that ‘in the light of what I have seen everything I have written is like straw.’ Three months later he died.

In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials the Professor says to Lara, ‘The stars are alive, child. Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purposes abroad. The universe is full of intentions, you know. Everything happens for a purpose.’ Perhaps all we can acknowledge with certainty is that we are part of something vast and mysterious, and that the best way to explore it is to go within.