Tag Archive for: Thomas Merton

FOLLOWING YOUR INTUITION

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This summer, I went out to Northern California to attend a silent retreat for a week at the Spirit Rock Center.  There was a lot of guffawing from friends and family back East, about me being silent for a whole week.  I am a talker! A shamelessly fast talking flamboyant one at that….at times.  But I wanted to deepen my daily meditation practice, shake off the daily dust that was gumming up the works in my mind.  Image

Have you ever had that experience with records (yes, I’m dating myself), where something almost invisible to the naked eye gets caught in the grooves, the needle gets stuck, and you keep hearing the same few lines again and again?  Well, the daily little things of life were like those mites, stanching the flow of my inner voice, so I was only hearing it in bits and pieces. Hard to trust a voice with the annoying habit of repeating itself mid-sentence, with occasional volume amplification.

There were some persistent “gut feelings” I had been experiencing regarding major decisions on a particular work issue and the direction of a couple of close relationships. And it should be noted that I am an intuitive type, who has often acted on the sheer intensity of my perceptions. Still I wasn’t clear on how to respond.

In other words, I wasn’t sure if I could trust my intuition. I mean, what is intuition exactly?  Carl Jung said that intuition was “perception via the unconscious.”  He called it the right-brained ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning (left-brained activity).

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Checking one half of your brain at the door while making some of life’s most important decisions doesn’t seem, well, logical, right?

Well, not so fast. This is only partially correct.  They are different ways to know things and many kinds of knowledge. The knowing I was seeking was not why moths are attracted to light or why is it that my washing machine is shrinking everything lately, but self-knowledge and perhaps with that, wisdom.

All the great spiritual traditions, as well as the latest findings in the areas of neuroscience, have consistently demonstrated that awakenings or the ability to “see” clearly, occur during long periods of meditation and consistent daily meditation over a long period of time.

Thomas Merton, a 20th century Contemplative who sought to bridge Western and Eastern philosophies, said, “Without realizing it, life without (daily) meditation desensitizes us so that we can no longer perceive grace, listen to our inner voice, or receive intuition.”

After about day 3 into my retreat, sitting and walking and working in silence, my own innate capacity to glean right action was reawakened, reactivated. Through the task of ‘just’ being present in every moment (simple but not easy), clarity bubbled up naturally, without effort. The solutions I had struggled for meant great change and serious vulnerability for me. (Perhaps this was part of the reason for my reticence in looking deeply?)

This is what I “know.” We all have this intrinsic ability.  While we learn much about the world around us by others, this we discover experientially. Intuition is a combination of empirical data and a heightened sense of observation.  And while speculation and deduction have vital roles in many of our everyday decision making process, so does intuition.

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Abella Arthur said, “Intuition is like a slow motion machine that captures data instantaneously and hits you like a ton of bricks”. She called it, “Cutting through the thickness of surface reality.” It is the Sherlock Holmes approach to mindfulness. Others can share their opinions or guide us, and they can be valuable. Yet we do have the ability to know valid solutions to problems and decision-making. Our direct intuition will rarely fail us if we are tapping into a reservoir of experience combined with a conscious awareness. Trust yourself.

In the words of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (6th BCE), “At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NUN TUCK (A LENTEN JOURNEY)

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It’s been a year this week since I began this little exercise called “Nun Tuck’s Almanac.”  I can’t believe it, it started off fast and furious with posts almost everyday and gratefully, much traffic.  Then life did it’s little John Lennon thing, you know the “Life happens while you are out busy making other plans” thing as it is wont to do, and so this little venture has been gradually being whisked out to the fringe of my daily activities.   

But whenever I am away for a week or a wee bit more, I miss this kind of spiritual writing and more importantly, thinking about the essence of who we all are, attempting to draw out with the use of language, feelings and understandings  that we all share deep down where the heart resides.  In addition, it continues to be my pleasure to share what little I know about world religions. Islam seems to be the one most people want to learn about and there is no surprise there, world events rapidly unfolding as they are.       

Birthdays and anniversaries of various kinds are great milestones for us to take stock.  And we Christians (Unitarian ones included!) are in the first steps of our annual Lenten journey; another invitation for us to engage in more self-reflection and to employ discipline, not as a punishment, but rather as a tool that chips away at the excesses, compulsions, and indulgences that lead us away from our truest selves. 

Thomas Merton, a well-known modern mystic and Trappist monk, spoke these words which have been resonating or more aptly, percolating with me for a  time now: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.  The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace.”

OK, wow and ouch.  No one has categorically summed me up so succinctly before…you can just put a ribbon on it and there you go.  The three words in particular that shout out in neon to all those with an addiction to doing  to PAUSE or HALT or STOP are “FRENZY” and “VIOLENCE” AND “NEUTRALIZES”.  

As Mark Nepo in “The Book of Awakening” writes, “Merton wisely challenges us not just to slow down, but, at the heart of it, to accept our limitations.  We are at best filled with the divine, but have only two hands and one heart.  In a deep and subtle way, the want to do it all is a want to be it all, and though it comes from a desire to do good, it often becomes frenzied because our egos seize our goodness as a way to be revered.” 

So when I ask myself what is at the root from my seemingly inability to say no to another great cause, event, another tug on my time and resources (even while the endeavor may be a great one), it is the sneaky ego. People who have difficulty saying no, often say that it is because they don’t want to let anybody down.  So then I ask question, why don’t I want to let anybody down? Is it because  I don’t want anyone to think I am less than this wonderfully compassionate human? 

Being compassionate enough is (in cases of the activist) probably more than enough.  Saying no to one more thing is self-compassion and self-care, which allows one to walk in the world PRESENT to it.         

Pray daily for all the worthy causes out there that you would like to grow and flourish in their goodness, but devote your time to the one or two that speak most closely to your soul…for today.  The old adage to ‘do one thing and do it well’ applies here.  Wherever I cannot bring my entire being, I am not there.      

What a remarkable gift I have received on this birthday edition of Nun Tuck, to take a day to reflect on my pursuit of the good, to choose to pour my energy into the redemption of my own heart, and then I can perhaps help the rest of the world a little more effectively, and that is to say, more peacefully.

Blessed be.

SAINTS ARE SINNERS WHO KEEP ON TRYING

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I admit it; I am enamored with saints.  I am fascinated with those who have reached the pinnacle of spiritual freedom, unity with God.  Regardless of their religious traditions, these are men and women who are deemed “scientists of holiness.”  We can learn from them. They are not only guides to the grail of enlightenment but they teach us how to live in a practical and substantive way that can enrich our everyday living. 

Saints never think of themselves as such.  Each has had their own personal demons to face down.  It is in choosing not to run away in the million ways we humans do, but utilizing their trials and struggles for personal growth and focusing on the inner life that they demonstrate another dimension of human potential.  Recovering a bit of the asceticism that has always been the foundational gristmill for spiritual advancement can help us tremendously.  What I mean by this is we don’t need the severe self-denial and austere lifestyle of a Gandhi or a Buddha or a St. Francis, but to give up the current wave of entitlement, to be able to say no to our temptations on occasion, is freeing.  We become able to resist our own compulsive consumption.   

People need to experience God, not be told about God.  Living examples, being very much in the world, do that by inspiring the lives of others.  These are not “feel good” pseudo-spiritualities or for the spiritual elite, but for everyone. Our experience of the Divine informs the self and yet continually needs to be balanced with community.   Reaching out to others is both a natural progression and a means for necessary connection. Indeed, those with spiritual depth often understand social service to be as important, if not more important, than the more traditional activities of preaching and teaching. 

Saints would probably also scoff at the idea of them being mystics, though that is what they are.  Yet mystics are not so mysterious, rather I’ve heard them described as “ones who see into the depth of things through the fissures and fragments of our human experience”.  With single-minded purpose, these friends of God (or to the ALL that IS) are granted a special way of seeing, a heightened awareness of a presence or absence. 

Casting the mystical net wide as the awareness of some sort of ultimate reality that transcends all religions; religion can unify instead of divide.  We can recognize that different traditions can learn from one another, if one if grounded in one’s own tradition and open to another. Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, all can enrich each other’s practices.  For instance, Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk, was influenced by the teachings of Zen Buddhism.

It is not the visions or miracles attributed to those regarded as saints, during their lives or posthumously, that should be the reasons for  reverence.  In fact, that kind of thinking leads to idolatry rather than the harder working of following by example.  It is the spiritual practices and articulated paths that are to be learned from.

That is not to say that we should disregard profound and unusual human experiences. It’s just that without a conscious effort to seek out these mystics, both past and present, their voices quickly become drown out by the difficulties of daily living, the heroes who win World Championships and are given parades, and the Hollywood stories of celebrities.  In an effort to reclaim the saint, human foibles and all, we are being re-called to something larger than ourselves.

A Brief Overview of the Sunni Sects

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Following my last post on the difference between the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, I have decided to delve a little deeper into the wide variation of belief (and practice) within the sects of these branches of Islam, starting with the Sunnis.  

There are four major schools of thought within the Sunni population. The  most widespread of these are the Hanafi.  There are considered the most moderate of Islam, preferring an abstract fairness over legal rigidity.  They have been around since late 700 CE. Their practices are used in the governments of Jordan and Egypt.   

Of the more conservative sects of the Sunni are the Maliki.  Their beliefs are based on the literal word of the Quran, the Hadith (traditions and sayings of the Prophet), and legal precedents drawn from decisions in Medina only (the first settlement of a Muslim community), with emphasis on the decisions of the very first Companions of the Prophet.  (From the 80o’s CE). 

Somewhere between these two are the Shafi’i.  Al-Shafi’i (800’s ) was an extremely important jurist in Islam as well as a poet and a revered holy man.  His memory remains forever popular with the poor of Cairo, among whom he is buried.  People still stick supplications to his tombstone and his tomb is considered to have the power to cure sickness, although this is contrary to strict Islam.  He favored logic and only wanted the hadiths reduced to only those sayings of the Prophet with a provable origin.  Less liberal than Hanafi but less conservative than Maliki, many of the Shafi’i reside in Syria, Malaysia, and Indonesia.  This is the fastest and largest growing sect.

The last major sect originated in the 800’s, it was originally called Hanbali (from a scholar of the same name).  However, due to its extreme nature, it almost died from neglect until in the 1700’s when an Islamic scholar, Abd-al-Wahhab brought back this ultra conservative, authoritarian brand of Sunni Islam, now know as Wahhabi.  It does not resemble any of the above “denominations”.  They are extreme Puritans. It was Wahhabism that fueled the ferocious power on which ibn Saud built his kingdom.  It is the official religion of Saudi Arabia.  Ironically, they allow for complete freedom in commercial matters-something that Muhammad was utterly against.  Wahhabis are in exact juxtaposition to Hanafism, which emphasizes good works and exterior acts over interior convictions as the true manifestation of faith.  In addition, Wahhabis are opposed to all other approaches to Islam, especially Sufism.  Not surprisingly, Osama Bin Laden was raised in the Wahhabi tradition.

A few brief words about Sufism.  There are Sufis in both the Sunni and Shi’a communities.  They are the Islamic mystics and their history has been a rich tapestry of people and literature and ideas which have played a considerable role in the development of the religion of Islam.  The word Sufi comes from the name of the rough woolen clothing worn by the mystics (an ascetic practice).   Like the Christian mystics, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, or Thomas Merton, they too aspire to a complete union with God (tawhid).  As well, they belong to orders (as the Catholics have the Franciscans, Carmelites, and Jesuits).  These are called tariqa or dervishes.  Each has practices or clothing particular to their order. You may recall the whirling dervishes; they are the Mevliv tariqa.  The famous poet and mystic Rumi was a whirling dervish.    The Wahhabis have outlawed Sufism, killing many of them and desecrating their cemetaries, especially those that contain walis, the saints of the Sufis.     

The next post will deal with the Shi’a sects and the importance of this knowledge in understanding the history of the diverse Muslim nations.

Book of the Day: The Sufi Path of Life, the Works of Rumi by William Chittick

Quote of the Day by the poet Rumi:  “Load the ship and set out.  No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor.  Cautious people say ‘I’ll do nothing until I can be sure.’  Merchants know better.  If you do nothing, you lose.  Don’t be one of those merchants who won’t risk the ocean.”