Sunday 20 March 2005

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the anime DearS. One day the main character works in a video shop and finds a section dedicated to indecent movies made by his homeroom teacher. For most of us, the situation is less clear-cut.

Learning from the misguided

I was looking up "meditation" on Google. Strangely enough (j/k) my own little introduction to the topic was not on the first page! I did look a little at the first entries. I quickly noticed that the authors had a different religious / spiritual background than I. Does this mean that I must either disregard their writing or give up my own understanding?

No. Meditation is not a religion, or even (by default) a religious act. Meditation is ... not quite a science, but a body of knowledge based on reported experience. It has most likely a lot to do with how the human brain functions. Whether you are a Hindu or a Catholic or an atheist, your brain probably works in roughly the same way. At least for the first several decades...

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For instance, I don't believe that there are literally auras or chakras of light or energy. Does that mean I think people are liars or deluded fools when they claim such things? Not really. Or at least not more than I think people are kooks when they salute the flag. A child can see that a flag is just a piece of cloth, which could not care less whether you show it respect or not. Even so, a goodly number of otherwise sane people would be willing to suffer grievous bodily harm on behalf of a flag. There are no mystical properties in the flag, but the human mind is mysterious indeed.

Or to take a less controversial example, I certainly don't believe that the sun rises and sets. It's the earth that rotates. Even so, I don't just suffer people to talk as if the sun was traipsing along on a daily journey; I even speak that way myself. It is only when people present elaborate explanations about how the sun is pulled in a chariot drawn by particular animals, that I put my foot down. Why? Because in its basic form, the illusion of the rising sun perfectly describes our experience, it makes it easy to talk about and understand.

Ironically, the author of the no.2 meditation site according to Google (Jim Malloy) actually explains that people tend to perceive best in one of three ways: Seeing, hearing and "sensing". (His word, not mine, but I know exactly what he means because I'm one of the "sensing" people. It is not feeling as in emotion, and not tactile. It is more like the way you always know your body - even if your eyes are closed, you are never in doubt about whether you are standing or sitting or lying, where your hands are and so on. Spatial, directional, dimensional but without any image. Great for keeping complex programming structures in your head, incidentally.) Therefore not all people are able to visualize in the literal meaning. Perhaps if I literally visualized auras instead of just sensing them, I would be more likely to believe that they were literal energies. As it is, I take it metaphorically. When people start to get very detailed, I close my mind, because I know they are only describing their personal reality, not the shared one. (That's why different traditions cannot agree on the colors of the auras, presumably.) But on the most basic level, I can and do learn from them.

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Then there are the pagans, wiccans etc. By default these are enemies of Christianity, so as a Christian I should fight them, shouldn't I?

Back when Christianity was a new faith, paganism was the default. Except for Jews, of course. Both Jews first and then Pagans persecuted and killed Christians eagerly. Later the roles were reversed, a you may remember. In the contact zones between the religions, Christ was often accepted as just another god, and a fairly nice one. The Norsemen had this attitude, for a while, and it is still widespread in Hinduism.

By and large the Christians have turned out to be a lot less sympathetic than Christ, and so it is small wonder that many modern men and (especially) women have joined the opposition. Apart from those who have actually suffered at the hands of supposed Christians, there are others who find the Christian sexual ethics to be too restrictive, and those who feel that Christianity ignores the feminine spirituality in favor of a purely masculine one. You don't hear often in church "Our Mother, who art in Heaven"! And yet many people for personal reasons feel much more comfortable with a mother than a father watching over them.

Be that as it may, I don't have much personal enthusiasm for paganism and nature religions in general. That doesn't mean I can't learn from the people who belong there. I don't just mean learn cookie recipes or programming tricks, but also inner knowledge. The human soul is not so easily changed: I can recognize myself for a long stretch of roads I have not taken.

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I have also found some of the holy scriptures of competing religions to be quite interesting. The Bhagavad-Gita, for instance, although it can get bogged down in details for entire chapters, has some quite interesting statements, and the Dhammapada is quite a pleasure in a good translation.

Conversely, not a few of the times I pick up the Bible, more particularly the prophets of the Old Testament, I am greeted with threats of death and destruction, ruin and doom. Woe betide you! Behold, I will fall upon you and you shall know that I am the LORD when the enemy slaughters you like pigs and I don't lift a finger to help. Uhm. Way to go to create an impression. I have still not found out whether this happens most of the times because God really is that much displeased with me – He has reason to, but I thought He was supposed to be at least as forgiving as I am – or whether the Bible simply is packed with threats of death and doom. Perhaps both. But I can easily see why people quietly drift to the competition. Especially to the cuddly New Age versions where nothing bad really happens ever.

Be that as it may, I personally think the competition is misguided. It's a safe bet they think the same about me. But I have the advantage that I can learn from the misguided. My hero in that regard would be Johan Oscar Smith, founder of the evangelical movement often called "Smith's Friends" (because, face it, "the Christian Church" is not a very original name). He would, he claimed, listen and learn even from a drunkard on the street. Perhaps not the worst idea, since many people hereabout stay eerily superficial until they've had a few drinks. Only then do they dare to open the secret doors of their soul. That's pretty misguided, I'd say. But even if they are too lost in their own world to learn from us, we can learn from them. To take the advice of the Bible, this time: "Try [or test] everything, hold onto the good." Certainly good advice, even for those who think us misguided and the most wretched of all people.