This is on my mind because recently I've been reading two different texts that provide guidance on the subject of contemplation - the Buddhist work known as the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta, which I mentioned here, and the Spiritual Exercises of St Francis Loyola. The first originated in the 5th century BC and was transmitted orally until it was written down in the late 1st century BC. It describes the foundational practices through which the bikkhu (or monk) cultivates sati (or mindfulness). The latter dates from the 1520s and consists of a cycle of prayers and meditations that are completed over a four-week period and take the practitioner through a number of scriptural topics including Sin, the Life of Jesus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. What interests me here is that, although both are - I think fairly obviously - concerned with contemplation, they are very different in the specific nature of the contemplative practice they recommend.
The Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta describes the cultivation of a state in which one is fully grounded in the present - wholly focused in the here and now. The text examines four objects of contemplation that are involved in this process - body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities. But at the basis of them all is the continuous awareness of one’s own breathing.
There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out.Practitioners do not attempt to exercise control over their breathing. They simply direct their attention to it:
Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’ He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out calming bodily fabrication.’The awareness of breathing constitutes a kind of ground against which bodily sensations and mental events become visible. It provides a means by which those events can be watched as if from a position separate from them - not directly involved with them. As those events occur, they interrupt the focused consciousness of breathing and hence become objects to be observed rather than states with which the subject identifies.
The Spiritual Exercises, by contrast, do not lead practitioners to watch their own bodily sensations and mental processes as if from a distance. They employ the imagination in the production of objects of contemplation. So, for example, after the preparatory prayer which begins each exercise, the retreatant works on the 'first prelude' which involves ‘the construction of the place’ against which the object of contemplation is set:
[I]n every meditation or contemplation about a bodily thing, as for example about Christ, we must form, according to a certain imaginary vision, a bodily place representing what we contemplate; as the temple, or a mountain, in which we may find Christ Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, and the other things which concern the subject of our contemplation.But it may be that the object of contemplation is not ‘a bodily thing’:
[I]f the subject of meditation be an incorporeal thing, as is the consideration of sins [the subject of the first exercise], the construction of place may be such as if by imagination we see our soul in this corruptible body, as confined in a prison; and man himself, in this vale of misery, an exile among brute animals.And so the practice begins with the exercise of the imagination in evoking a place, either literal or figurative, as the ground against which the meditation may take place.
Following the prayer and first prelude, retreatants come to the second prelude, which involves the emotions. And, again, rather than watching any emotions that arise (as recommended in the Satipaṭṭhanā Sutta), they work on evoking the emotions appropriate to that day's object of contemplation.
[I]f I am to meditate concerning the Resurrection of Christ, I must ask for joy wherewith I may rejoice together with Christ rejoicing: but if concerning the Passion, let me ask tears, pains, and anguish, in order that I may suffer together with Christ suffering.Crucially, retreatants do not try to arouse such as feelings as joy or anguish for themselves. Rather, they request that the appropriate emotion be present to them - that it be bestowed upon them as they contemplate the particular scriptural episode occuring in the place that they have 'constructed'.
I've outlined these two approaches to 'contemplation' because I think there's a slight danger of our assuming that we already know what we mean by this term. But 'contemplation' is, in fact, an umbrella term for a wide range of practices, all of which involve some kind of disciplining of the attention but which vary considerably in terms of where that attention is directed and how it is manifest. It can be a focus on something immediate and present. It can involve the observation of the self from some 'deeper' place or some 'distant' point. It can be built upon the imaginative 'construction' of a place and a scene in the mind's eye. It can manifest as a focused request for some kind of experience or condition.
What then do we mean when we say that fishing is contemplative? What do those engaged in that practice contemplate? And what mental resources do they use in the act of contemplation?
Just wanted to quote from Walton about the benefits of practical experience: 'but these things are, indeed, too common to be spoken of; and an hour's fishing with an angler will teach you better, both for these and many other common things, in the practical part of angling, than a week's discourse.' Walton
ReplyDeleteI just finished writing a response to your beautiful post on 'why it doesn't come to me', and then I lost all that I had written. The fish escaped from the hook. I said your posts are becoming an abundant pond themselves.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was reading that post, and also this one, I kept thinking of Adorno's text on the essay as form. The essay packages original thought in the form of cultural commentary. Benjamin understood himself along these lines, as did Bloch. It moves within the sphere of cultural mediation, and it does so because certain things can only be said in this way. As certain things can only be said in stories - Kate quoted Bloch on this in the other post.
What is that which can only approached indirectly, in the form of the essay - and I would say our contemplative tradition can be seen in this light too? The vanishing point of signification cannot be grasped directly, it escapes the subject-predicate form of statement.
Maurice Bowra's reading of the poet acting like a kid in a candystore is one side of what was going on in the poem you quoted. The other was the impossibility of catching what it is you want to say. You can only move within its vicinity, and it may have caught you, unawares, before you know it, without you knowing, only retrospectively when you read back what you have written. here the poet has expressed an aspect of the human condition, the necessary striving for what can't be achieved - only in that negative movement itself. We see the other side, the inside as it were, of surprise in this poem, and in all contemplation.
This is not hopelessness, but quite the opposite. It locates hope in the unexpected, as Heraclitus says: if you do not hope for the unhoped-for, you will never find it.
The angler practices this aspect of contemplation in his 'art'. It is an art of waiting, an art of looking in the mirror, a training in the dialectics of hope and surprise, it teaches him or her that it is the angler who has to get caught, and that this sets you free. The fish and the word are one.