Durham University - Spirituality, Theology and Health Seminar

Here are the details for this Thursday's seminar,

Best wishes

Peter

 

Pentecost and Christian Mindfulness

Dear All

First of all, apologies for not posting anything on here for a month or so. I seem to have been busier than ever with university work and have just returned from a wonderful pilgrimage to Assisi - more on that anon.
For now I attach part of a talk I shall be giving at Durham University this Thursday for Prof Chris Cook's excellent spirituality and psychology seminar. More details on his website. I also attach a picture from Fr Vineeth's ashram of the season of Pentecost which we are about to enter. I pray that the Spirit of Truth will fill your hearts and minds in the coming weeks and months.

best wishes

Peter

Contemporary Mindfulness

When the molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn first developed his mindfulness courses at the University of Massachusetts in the late 1970s he was not so concerned with the metaphysical implications of Buddhist meditation practices as their clinical and medical efficacy. This novel notion of giving mindfulness meditation a sound clinical and experimental basis is what proved the essential catalyst for the subsequent explosion of mindfulness (See Boyce 2011, xii- xiii). Thirty years later the clinical evidence for the efficacy of these methods in treating illnesses as diverse as depression, cancer and eating disorders is overwhelming (even though latterly there is the inevitable counter-movement expressing the ‘dangers’ inherent in mindfulness). This, alongside courses such Kabat-Zinn’s own Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR) the eight week forerunner for many of the later mindfulness courses and the Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) developed at Oxford by Prof Mark Williams and colleagues have contributed to the success of mindfulness as we know it today.

          Kabat-Zinn himself defines mindfulness as ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgementally’ (1994:4). This ‘bare’ definition is supplemented by many practitioners with wider values drawing upon something closer to the Buddhist notions we began with. Thus Chozen Bays (2011) suggests that it is ‘deliberately paying attention, being fully aware of what is happening both inside yourself – in your body, heart and mind – and outside yourself in the environment... it is awareness without judgement or criticism’ (Boyce 2011: 3). She goes further to state that ‘when we are mindful, we are not comparing or judging. We are simply witnessing the many sensations, thoughts and emotions that come up as we engage in the ordinary activities of daily life.’ We could continue multiplying these varying definitions yet, following Mace, what becomes clear when we analyse these contemporary understandings of mindfulness is that there seem to be two directions in current usage. First, the desire, as Mace himself puts it, to concentrate on the ‘bare attention’ to observe, Buddha-like, the passing show of sensations, thoughts and emotion with no sticky entanglement. As neuro-biologists and scientists have become interested in the subject this ‘pure bare mindfulness’ (difficult as it is to isolate) has become the main source of their study. On the other hand, writers such as Chozen Bays above or Shapiro (2006) link the practice with wider connotations of ‘heartfulness’ (see above), compassion and the general teleological development of character.

          Esoteric though these debates sound I think they go right to the heart of the subject we are considering today: ‘How far, if at all, can mindfulness be accommodated into an established religious practice such as Christianity?’ And I think the answer will be (in typical philosophical fashion) – ‘it depends what sort of mindfulness you are talking about’. Let me explain further...

 

About Soul

I am delighted to announce that my friend and colleague, Tim Wainwright's 'About Soul' weblink is now live:

http://www.aboutsoul.org/


He writes:

'This project is a consideration of soul in the everyday lives of Londoners.

I will be uploading videos regularly over the next eighteen months, and versions of the work will be exhibited in various London venues starting in September 2016.

This is the last in a quartet of projects begun in 1993; the others were concerned with mind, body and heart.'

We shall be showing a video made from material collected for this project at our 'soul seminar' on 6th September at St Mary's and launching both the project and my 'Pursuit of the Soul'...

best wishes

Peter 

The Return of the Soul

Finally, I am pleased to announce that after three years of waiting 'The Pursuit of the Soul' will be published on 25th February by T & T Clark. I want to thank all at T & T Clark and Bloomsbury for working so hard to make this happen. We shall be having an official book-launch on 6th September at St Mary's including a presentation from the renowned Australian analyst and critic, David Tacey. However, in the meantime, I shall be presenting a seminar at the Marylebone Centre for Health and Healing this Wednesday evening on some of the main themes of the book. Details of this are on an earlier post. By way of a taster here are some of the key elements of 'soul language' with which I conclude both my book and the talk on Wednesday...

 

1. A Way of Seeing

Following Wittgenstein, soul-work can be described as a ‘way of seeing’ that releases liberating perspectives in our day-to-day existence. In Hillman’s words:

 

By soul, I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things rather than a thing itself. (RVP:x)

 

What I learn from Wittgenstein is that our grammar suggests that ‘the soul’ is an object, a little furry beast if you like, that we are all on the hunt to get. Philosophy, he writes (PI 109) is ‘a battle against the bewitchment of our understanding through the medium of our language’ (ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache). Rather than an entity soul is a perspective. Essentially a transcendental perspective on our selves.

As well as his critique of the ‘over-spiritualization’ of the self, Hillman, was an equally trenchant critic of the over-scientism and reductionism within contemporary approaches to the psyche. The past few decades, since Hillman started his writing, have seen a marked reduction in the significance of the spiritual and religious content of the psychological therapies. The same cannot be said for the empirical and pseudo-scientific approach. Indeed, in many respects, with the rise of quasi-neurological ‘explanations’ and ‘interpretations’ of the mind it seems as though this approach may have reached its zenith in recent years. Along with Wittgenstein, Hillman had a justifiable and deep-seated suspicion of the over-idolisation of psychology as a ‘science of the mind’ and was every bit as trenchant as Wittgenstein in challenging the unquestioning acceptance of this position. His own approach was to advocate a ‘third path’ between reductionism and idealism, theology and science, which gave him, he believed, the right to challenge scientific and medical models of psychology, especially psycho-pathology, for:

The science fantasy with its reliance upon objectivity, technology, verification, measurement, and progress – in short, its necessary literalism – is less a means for examining the psyche than for examining science. (RVP:169)

Thus the work of the analyst, pastor or care-worker, is to cultivate the ‘third position’ of the soul/ From this alert ambiguity the soul-maker helps us attune ourselves to the transcendent by drawing attention to our responses to the immanent. Uniquely, the soul-maker recognises the human person as the locus of intersection of the transcendent and immanent.

 

2. The Path of Unknowing

At the heart of the soul-project lies an essential unknowing. Hillman termed the Freudian desire to replace ‘It’ with ‘I’ the ‘strip mining of the psyche’ (IV:46) and his counter-move suggests an approach to the ‘unknown thing’ that gives space for the unconscious to breathe. In this respect the apophatic unknowing of the soul is simply letting the conscious know its place while the unconscious figurations reassert themselves. ‘Maybe’, suggests Hillman, ‘they know best what is relevant to the conscious personality, rather than the conscious personality’ (IV:46). Therefore contemporary soul-making will require as much ‘unknowing’ as it does ‘knowing’. This, of course, is nothing new to the Christian mystical tradition which has always placed ‘unknowing’ at the centre of its search for the self.

          Adopting a phrase of the 19^th Century English poet, John Keats, some recent commentators in the tradition of psychotherapy and counselling talk of this attribute as the need for ‘negative capablility’ in our pastoral interactions with others. Keats used the term to specify a key attribute of the poet which makes a person: ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ (Keats 1970:43).Robert French, a contemporary commentator, writes:

 

‘Thus, Keats’s poet is ‘related’ to the therapist, and indeed to many other ‘family members’: mother, teacher, priest, consultant, manager – anyone, perhaps, whose role involves responsibility for others. What links them is this ‘disposition of indifference’, which Pines called ‘aeolian’ after the aeolian harp: ‘ to show how the therapist’s mind can be stirred by the communication of the patient, and how, unselfconsciously, the therapist finds himself responding in depth to the patient’s hidden meanings’’ (French 2000:3)

 

This attitude of ‘unknowing’ opens up new possibilities in our engagements with the people we care for. The British Object Relations analyst, Wilfred Bion, was aware of Keats’s dictum and tried to put it into practice in his interactions with clients saying:

 

‘Discard your memory; discard the future tense of our desire; forget them both, both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.’ (Bion 1980:11)

 

He suggested we must have the courage and humility to step into this ‘space of unknowing’ when we engage with others. A place that requires us to put aside our memories, our need to control, our need to define – all the whirring chatter of the ‘monkey mind’ – and allow ourselves to be present for the other before us:

 

‘When we are in the office with a patient we have to dare to rest. It is difficult to see what is at all frightening about that, but it is. It is difficult to remain quiet and let the patient have a chance to say  whatever he or she has to say. It is frightening for the patient – and the patient hates it. We are under constant pressure to say something, to admit that we are doctors or psychoanalysts or social workers to supply some box into which we can be put complete with a label.’ (Bion 1980:11)

 

As professional carers there is a pressure to be ‘the expert’ or the ‘wise one’ whereas often what is required is for us to have the humility to divest ourselves of our power position. To do this may challenge our very selves as well as our roles and make us question again why we do the work we do.

 

3. Ambiguity and Paradox

The contemporary soul-maker must live in the realm of ambiguity that is the soul’s true home. Whether with a client, facing a dream or working on the self, the demands of the soul require an openness to the ambiguity that lies at the heart of the human personality. Imagination, for Hillman, becomes the place where we uniquely play with the self in its efforts to overcome the straightjacket of the post-Cartesian ‘I’. For him, the world of Cartesian dualism allows ‘no space for the intermediate, ambiguous and metaphorical’ (RVP:xii). Rather it is the place inhabited by living subjects and dead objects. All affect is removed from the world around us. In Hillman’s writing, following as we have seen Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, this place of ambiguity will become populated by the world of ‘archetype’ and ‘daemones’. For Christian writers such as Stein (following Augustine and Aquinas) the ambiguity of the self is held in the tension of the Trinity, where Christ becomes the unity of apperception for the individual believer. The paradox of the Trinitarian vision thus reflects the paradox that lies at the heart of human personhood.

 

4. The Symbolic, Creative and Artistic

With Rank we saw that creativity must play a decisive role in any future ‘soul-psychology’. Likewise, with Hillman we see the importance he attached, as a post-Jungian, to the role of imagination and the symbolic. As he puts it in Revisioning Psychology:

 

Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections and imaginations... (the ego’s) trust is in the imagination as the only uncontrovertible reality, directly presented, immediately felt. (RVP:50)

 

For analysis goes on in the soul’s imagination and not just in the clinic for we let imagination speak for itself without interpretation. Or as my training analyst, Hymie Wyse, used to put it, in analysis the analyst must pray: ‘Lead us not into interpretation!’ The soul/psyche for Hillman is at root imaginal and myth is in the natural discourse of the soul. In an earlier work (Tyler 2013a) I stressed the links between the postmodern Jungian view of the symbolic with the premodern medieval understanding of the symbol. As a great medievalist/renaissance man, Hillman, like his mentor Jung, recognises the symbolic nature of the psyche and how the psyche really lives in the realm of the symbolic and mythic, for ‘the imaginal does not explain, myths are not explanations’. As such the symbolic utterings of the soul ‘are bound to ritual happenings; they are stories, as our fantasies are, which project us into participation with the phenomena they tell about so that the need for explanation falls away’ (MA:202). Hillman is here, I believe, pointing out an essential quality of ‘soul-language’ – that is, that it is a ‘performative’ rather than an ‘informative’ language (Tyler 2011).

For Hillman the symbolic is indicative of that mode of consciousness that ‘recognises all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical’ experienced through ‘reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy’ (RVP:x). The symbolic sources of the soul thus lie very close to the sources of creative and artistic endeavour and thus the pursuit of the soul will often manifest itself through these means.

 

5. The Relational and Libidinal

Soul-making is at heart a relational process. In Rank’s words, analysis is ‘an art of love’ and the relationship between the soul-seeker and soul-maker is at the heart of the matter. The Platonic tradition always emphasised the role of eros in this relationship. In contrast to Hillman, who sees the Christian tradition as suppressing the role of eros, I would rather argue that thinkers as diverse as Merton, Stein and Wittgenstein present an embodied Christian view of the self that maintains the transcendent through relationship with the bodily and libidinal. The soul is found not in flight from the body but in the very embrace of its ambiguity and libido. This is not surprising. For, despite Augustine’s famous suspicion of ‘concupiscence’, there were sufficient alternative (neo-Platonic) strands of early Christian anthropology in writers such as Evagrius and Origen to preserve alternative narratives of the soul in the Christian tradition. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Tyler 2011), the medieval traditions of the theologia mystica with their Dionysian emphasis were sufficient to keep this tradition alive. Despite Hillman’s caricature of Christianity as a life-denying and anti-libidinal locus (and he is of course not alone here) I would argue that this is far from the case and there are sufficient traces of this alternative relational and libidinal anthropology in the Christian tradition to allow a future Christian anthropology, open to the possibilities of the libidinal, to flourish. The future of the soul lies in the libidinal and relational. 

 

The Christian Sannyāsin: The Third Age and Christian Life.

Dear All

I am just putting the final touches to my chapter on Consecrated Life after our wonderful conference in Bangalore at the beginning of the month. I have already shared the beginning of the chapter and here are some extracts from the end and my discussion of the Christian and Hindu/Indian views of the 'end of life' - old age and renunciation.

All good wishes

Peter

 

In his earlier essay of 1924, The Fourfold Way of India, written when he was in his early sixties, Tagore makes a strong contrast between the Western and Eastern approaches to life. ‘In Europe’, he writes:

 

We see only two divisions of man’s worldly life – the period of training and that of work. It is like prolonging a straight line till, wearied, you drop off your brush. (p.498)

 

For, as he points out, ‘work is a process and cannot really be the end of anything’ and yet ‘Europe has omitted to put before man any definite goal in which its work may find its natural termination an gain its rest’. India, on the other hand, ‘has not advised us to come to a sudden stop while work is in full swing’ (p.499).  And this is where the account of the third and fourth stages of life differs so markedly from the dominant narrative currently apparent in the West – that we prepare ourselves for work (schools and universities being the places to acquire the necessary skills for a life of work), we work (the most important part of our life) and then (if we are lucky) we ‘retire’, or as Tagore puts it ‘drop off our brush’ to fill the final years watching day-time TV or visiting the grandchildren. By contrast what he presents us in the third and fourth stages of life is the deliberate and calculated move to renunciation which is enshrined in the Indian tradition…

 

As we have seen, even in Tagore’s own writing on the four-fold stages of life there exists a tension and contradiction often reflecting his own mood and attitude to his own life at the time of writing. When he got around to writing about the phases in the late Religion of Man, being nearly seventy, he felt able to give due weight to each of the phases and their importance in individual development. Yet, as a young man, writing in 1892 in his early thirties and a decade after the Sudder Street revelation we began this chapter with, he makes an interesting remark referring to the final stage of renunciation – the sannyasi:

 

If by nature I were a sanyasi, then I would have spent my life pondering life’s transcience, and no day would have gone by without a solemn rite to the glory of God. But I am not, and my mind is preoccupied instead by the beauty that disappears from my life each day; I feel I do not appreciate it properly. [1]

 

And a year later:

 

There are two aspects to India: the householder and the sanyasi. The first refuses to leave his home hearth, the second is utterly homeless. Inside me both aspects are to be found. [2]

 

And I think it is in this ‘creative unity’ that Tagore expressed in his life we find the ‘coincidence of opposites’ that I think could best characterize the ‘Christian sannyāsin’.

The latter phase of life has increasingly become in the West a conflict and struggle with Death as we slump in the sofa after a life of hard work. Hermann Hesse, the Swiss poet, saw the art of life as the art of befriending death and as Tagore famously put it, Death is simply the lowering of the lamps as the dawn approaches…

Where I think writers like Tagore are valuable is that they remind us that this final stage moves beyond the purely psychological. For as the outer forms die we move into a new place. A poetic place beyond the psychological and even the theological. As Pope Francis says, a new child is born as we are called out of the caves of our comfort zones (p.45). In the Indian tradition the Sannyāsin ‘owns no place and no person and has to be by definition a solitary wanderer’ (Thottakara p.561). The Christian, in contrast, by virtue of their consecration to Christ, remains in service to the world even though they do not identify with the world’s goals and aims.[3] As Perumpallikunnel points out (Mystical Experience, p.680) the Indian sannyāsa is one of renunciation without restriction, the emphasis is on the individual relationship with God mediated by the guru and we find there is little emphasis on the communitarian prayer such as the Eucharist as found in the Christian tradition. Yet, in spite of the differences it is possible to see both Indian sannyāsa and Christian consecrated life as two aspects of the final encounter and relationship with the ultimate goal of human life – our encounter with the limit of human mortality and the embrace of Sister Death. Thottakara calls it ‘the Yoga mind’ that integrates apparently bi-polar realities and he mentions Fr Francis Vineeth CMI, founder of the Vidyavanam ashram near Bangalore, as an example of a modern sadhu ‘who tries to awaken the religious-spiritual consciousness of the sadhakas and develop in them a soul culture that is deeply rooted in the age old principles of Indian spirituality and in the immensely rich Christian spiritual traditions without at the same time negating the positive values of matter, body and this world’ (p.558). At heart what Indian sannyāsa and Christian consecrated life have in common is that for both renunciation, whether of the world or the ego, must be connected with love and surrender to the creator.[4] In this way both Indian and Christian traditions embrace on the threshold of the infinite.

 

‘Child, don’t you know who calls you lovingly?

Why this fear?

Death is just another name for what you call life,

Not an alien at all.

Why, come then and embrace her!

Come and Hold Her Hand!’

(R. Tagore, Endless Death)[5]

 

---

[1] Letter to his nephew, 15^th June 1892 from Shelidah, reprinted in Glimpses of Bengal: Selected Letters by Rabindranath Tagore, ed K. Dutta and A. Robinson, London: Macmillan, 1991.

[2] Letter to his nephew, 7^th February 1893, ibid.

[3] Although as Thottakara notes in recent years both Buddhists, Hindus and Jains have taken to more communitarian models of sannyasin imitating in many ways Christian monastic models of service to the world, the poor and downtrodden (p.562).

[4] It is interesting that the entry to the final stage of sannyāsa in Indian tradition is accompanied by a renunciation ceremony. The Christian tradition of consecrated life has no such ‘vow’ or ‘ceremony’ to mark this final phase – perhaps it might be something that could be developed?

[5]Translated by K. Dyson in I Won’t Let You Go: Selected Poems. Glasgow: Bloodaxe, 1991, p.74. ‘When a sannyasin dies, no funeral rites are performed; there is no mourning’ (Thottakara p.572).

Events at the Marylebone Centre for Healing and Counselling

Dear All

Please find attached some of the exciting programme at Marylebone for the New Year. I hope to see some of you there.

Kind regards

Peter

 

India Dialogue Visit - January 2016

Dear All

Please find attached below a report on my recent eventful visit to India. Many thanks again to all who made my stay so memorable.

Kind Regards

Peter

 

My visit to India began in Bangalore with a plenary address at the International Conference organised by Vinayasadhana (The Institute of Formative Spirituality and Counselling) at Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (DVK) – a theological institute run by the Carmelites of Mary of Immaculate (CMI). The conference celebrated the end of the Year of Consecrated Life initiated by Pope Francis in December 2014 and its title was ‘Consecrated Life in the Globalized Era: Catholic, Ecumenical and Interreligious Perspectives’, coordinated by our genial host, Fr Saju Chackalackal CMI, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. I was asked to comment on the psychological dynamics of consecrated life and took as my title, ‘The Awakening of the Heart: Psycho-spiritual reflections on Consecrated Life’. Drawing on themes from the Bengali Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, and from Western writers including James Fowler, Carl Jung and Robert Johnson I looked at consecrated life from the perspective of the human life cycle. To conclude I drew on recent reflections on the life of the Indian sannyasi from the writings of Fr Augustine Thottakara CMI and Fr Kurian Perumpallikunnel CMI, with the latter of whom I was delighted to share my plenary session so that an interesting dialogue developed. Some of the talk has been placed on this blog already and it is hoped the rest will appear in an edited volume of the proceedings from the conference later this year. Notable speakers at the conference also included Prof Kees Waaijman from the Titus Bradsma Institute in the Netherlands and Prof Franco Imoda SJ, President of AVEPRO at the Holy See and former Rector of the Gregorian University in Rome and Swami Sadananda. All of whom contributed interesting insights to a fascinating event.

          After the conference in the congenial surroundings of DVK I travelled to Vidyavanam Ashram on the outskirts of Bangalore at Bannaghatta National Park. This Christian Ashram in the Indian tradition was initiated by the 81 year old Fr Frances Vineeth CMI. Fr Vineeth was present in the ashram throughout the week and I was privileged to record a series of addresses, meditations and interviews with him which I hope to work on in the coming months to prepare an article assessing the work of this remarkable pioneer of Hindu-Christian dialogue. During my stay Fr Vineeth spoke with eloquence and passion about the influence of the Hindu scriptures on his life and thought, the foundation of Vidyavanam and the life of the Christian sannyasi. I was accompanied by Fr Jose Nandhikkara CMI, another keen worker on Hindu-Christian dialogue and along with the other ashramites we enjoyed days full of yoga, meditation, discourse and a chance to enjoy the beauties of the Indian natural world.

          At the end of the week I returned once again to DVK to form part of the ‘jury’ for the public defence of Dominican PhD candidate: Fr Vinoy Thomas Paikkattu OP. Fr Vinoy is one of 100 Indian Dominicans (refounded from the Irish Dominican province – we had many friends in common) and his thesis was entitled: ‘To be Human, to be Relational: An Analysis of Aquinas and Wittgenstein for a Philosophical Anthropology’. I had not conducted a public doctoral defence in India before and the hall was crowded with family, friends and fellow students. I was enormously impressed by Fr Vinoy’s sang froid in front of such public exposure and was secretly grateful for our more private British system of closed doctoral vivas as I am sure I would not have stood it as well as he did. We awarded him a distinction for his excellent thesis and defence.

          As my time in India drew to a close I had one final surprise. On my last evening I met four young Tibetans from the nearby Sera monastery at Mysore who had risked life and limb, giving up their homes and families, to trek across the high Himalayas so that they could practise their religion and studies in peace in India. They asked if I could spend my last morning in Bangalore teaching them something of the Christian mystical tradition. Not surpisingly, I took as my ‘sutra’, Teresa of Avila’s ‘Interior Castle’ and with Fr Mathew Chandrankunnel CMI we engaged in an interesting discussion on this ‘honorary Tibetan’ discussing the ‘seven levels of consciousness’ in her writing and its similarity to Tibetan models of thought. Themes I hope to explore in future writings.

          I left India with a sense of having been lucky to meet some outstanding practitioners of dialogue and with plenty of material to work on in the coming months. I am very grateful to all the kindness and help shown me by the staff and students of DVK and Vidyavanam and am looking forward to future collaborative work between DVK and St Mary’s Twickenham in the form of conferences, publications and visits.

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti!