Meditation through prayer?

As some of my read­ers will know, I have been increas­ingly inter­ested in the Bud­dhist tra­di­tions. Over the last 18 months, I have read a lot about this phi­los­o­phy; learned about med­i­ta­tion; and increased my med­i­ta­tion prac­tice from about 15 mins every few months, to about 1 hour every day.

Last Sun­day, I was lis­ten­ing to Radio National’s “The Spirit of Things” pod­cast while gar­den­ing. The pod­cast I lis­tened to was an old one, from the 3rd of June, 2007. Halfway through the pro­gram, the pre­sen­ter dis­cussed a medi­ae­val mys­ti­cal text called “The Cloud of Unknow­ing”. This book has been used by the World com­mu­nity of Chris­t­ian med­i­ta­tion, an organ­i­sa­tion I did not know any­thing about until last week. Rather than re-write about the cen­tral mes­sage of this book, let me quote from the Podcast:

“You have first a Cloud of For­get­ting, which means for­get all the thoughts that have to do with your own per­sonal life, in fact do what Jesus said, leave self behind. That’s the Cloud of For­get­ting, because all our per­sonal thoughts are ego thoughts, are in a way a veil, a cloud between us in God. We’re so caught up in our own thoughts that we can­not see beyond the real­ity of God that com­pletely envelops and pen­e­trates us, we can’t see that.

But then when you go on, you then come to the Cloud of Unknow­ing, and the whole idea is that God can­not be known ratio­nally. Our brains are much too lim­ited. We are very proud, quite rightly, of our achieve­ments of the mind, but they are noth­ing com­pared to God, and we can­not con­ceive of God. So it is the cloud of Unknow­ing is com­ing to that accep­tance that God is more than we think, that God is lim­it­less, can­not be caught, hence the Cloud of Unknow­ing. And it’s also to go back to what I said to Jung, it’s going from the ratio­nal knowl­edge of the mind, into the intu­itive knowl­edge of the heart where you actu­ally know intu­itively. So it is a way of let­ting go. Of one way of know­ing and enter­ing another way of know­ing. In my book, I explain that very much in brain terms. But it is the early desert fathers, very much talked about mov­ing from the mind to the heart, which is exactly what The Cloud of Unknow­ing is say­ing again.”

Hav­ing just read a num­ber of books on Bud­dhism , I was flab­ber­gasted to find so many sim­i­lar­i­ties between the mes­sages in ‘The Cloud of Unknow­ing’ and some of my recent reads (such as ‘Bud­dhism for busy peo­ple’). In both cases, there is an argu­ment that we must let go of our ‘mind’ / ego in order to reach spir­i­tual real­i­sa­tion. In both cases we are told to stop the inces­sant chat­ter of our brains, and to move our atten­tion to our cen­tre: our heart.

At the end of the pod­cast, I was left won­der­ing: Is there really that much dif­fer­ence between a bud­dhist monk and a chris­t­ian monk in a monastery? Are they not using sim­i­lar tech­niques (mantras and med­i­ta­tion for the bud­dhist; prayer and reflec­tion for the chris­t­ian) to achieve a state of high con­scious­ness and spir­i­tual enligthenment?

For the first time in my life, I looked at some of the tra­di­tional prac­tices of life in a monastery with a very dif­fer­ent eye. It no longer seems like the prac­tices of indi­vid­u­als that are try­ing to pun­ish them­selves. Instead, I started to under­stand that the prac­tices of some of these priests are designed to achieve the same level of detach­ment and accep­tance sought after by med­i­tat­ing Buddhists.

Am I going too far? I am a total ama­teur at com­par­a­tive reli­gion, so this post will look pos­i­tively child­ish to any­one who is well versed in these top­ics. But as a child that won­ders in amaze­ment at the sim­plest dis­cov­er­ies, I have enjoyed the expe­ri­ence of dis­cov­er­ing new inter­pre­ta­tions to some sim­plis­tic ideas I have held on to for a long time.

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