On Trying To Be Buddhist

Dark Night - Again

I've been slow in getting back to trying to articulate my thought about difficulties in practice - what some Christians call the dark night of the soul.  My thanks to Bernie for his August 13th  remarks on the topic.  He says, in part, "But what I think Susan is overlooking is that there's a lot of stuff that goes on in meditation that's never written down anywhere. This is for two reasons. The first reason is that describing what happens in your meditation is usually not good for you or for the person that hears it. So much goes unsaid, let alone written down. The second reason is that the lore of how to teach students meditation is not written down in books."  He indicates that these are his last comments on the subject. 

Anyhow, I also discussed this with a Buddhist friend who has many years of experience, including long retreat.  She spoke of some pretty bad times (though not in detail - Bernie is very right about not discussing one's experience in detail.  I would add though, that some of the accomplished masters do commit them to writing often in so-called secret autobiographies.  However, such masters are guided by the wisdom they have attained - a totally different situation from those of us on the path.)  To continue - other friends have remarked about similar difficult experiences. 

Beyond that, in the writings of Dujom Lingpa there are several references to the difficulties that really committed meditators encounter.  So it's not that Buddhists have no problems.  I'm beginning to think that a key aspect of this whole question is how I conceptualize or frame it.  That is, when looking from the Catholic point of view, I see a unitary process named 'dark night.'  The term 'dark night' refers to something both well defined and complex, and it is described as something commonly encountered by people on the (Christian) spiritual path.  It is something that can be summed up in the one expression, 'dark night of the soul' - and most Catholics would understand what that refers to. 

In Buddhist practice, on the other hand, though difficult experiences occur, and there are similarly complex and difficult phases, they do not map to the Christian definition of dark night; there is not a one-to-one correspondence.  My original statement was that there seemed to be nothing equivalent to Christian spirituality's 'dark night' discussed in Buddhism.  And I wondered why.  Part of the answer would seem to be that those painful times that come under the heading of dark night for Christians do occur in the lives and practice of Buddhists, but are not conceptualized as a single process.  They are not seen as related or connected, to form one dynamic complex. 

What can I make of that?  I think I have to trust the wisdom on both sides - that the Christian view is really seeing a process that holds together, has its own particular and identifiable dynamic; and the Buddhist view sees the individual suffering, problems, challenges, but does not connect them in a parallel way.  The process named 'dark night of the soul' occurs in Christianity but does not occur in Buddhism. 

What is the root of this difference (assuming I'm right)?

I think it lies in how ego or self is dealt with.  In Buddhism the ultimate view is that self does not exist.  Insofar as Buddhism is ascetical, it is so in support of this reality.  In Christianity, self is usually seen as something to which one clings in downright opposition to God.  Asceticism in Christianity is aimed at controlling selfishness and self-will. (This is a gross over-simplification, of course - but hits one of the main points.)

As far as I can see, from my perspective as a Buddhist, an authentic spiritual path always moves toward the ultimate, inconceivable and unnamable reality, and therefore will always lead to loss of self, the illusory self that only exists within dualism.  One can not participate in that which is ultimate while holding to the limits imposed by self.  A great deal of Buddhist teaching and meditation methods are aimed, not so much at destroying the self, but at exposing its unreality - its emptiness.  In Christian meditative practice the same process happens: if meditation progresses far enough, the self begins to fall apart.  However, there is no teaching to prepare the practitioner, or to help him or her understand this dynamic.  What we Buddhists might call emptiness and find understandable, the Christian will most likely encounter as absence (of God).  This is inexplicable and very painful - especially as God is in himself, in his being, the goal of Christian practice.  And the core of the dark night lies in the pain of God's apparent absence - and a concomitant loss of savor in meditative practice. 

Of course dis-integration of the self is a very risky process - no doubt everyone who goes through it or even approaches its outskirts has their own particular difficulties.  Unresolved psychological issues require resolution, negative karmic accumulations have to be dealt with, and there are other problems at which I can only guess.  But for us Buddhists, the essential core of the process, encountering emptiness, is not unexpected - in fact, we are well prepared for it.  It is neither surprising nor unwelcome.  Even at its most dry and boring, it is recognizable and we have methods for working with it.  At the best, we can find in emptiness that at which we have been aiming all along.  This is what alters the experiences that constitute for Christians a 'dark night' into something much less troubling. 

Dark Night of the Soul - What Is It?

Bernie Simon comments on my previous entry in his blog, The Careless Hand. 

He says:

"My opinion on this is that Buddhists have similar experiences. They just receive greater prominence in Christianity because of the emphasis that St. John of the Cross places on them. The goal of Buddhism is to see things as they are. But before you do that, you have to give up your attachment to them. There's a gap between the giving up and the realization and this is sometimes painful. This gap is the "dark night". I don't think there's anything mysterious about it."

I think Bernie is right in what he says as far as it goes.  But the real mystery for me is the difference in intensity and suffering between Christians and Buddhists.  St. John is not speaking of something that "is sometimes painful."  He is talking about anguish, extended mental pain that he says is "truly beyond all description." 

He writes in chapter six of book two of The Dark Night,

"1. The two extremes, divine and human, which are joined here, produce the third kind of pain and affliction the soul suffers at this time. The divine extreme is the purgative contemplation, and the human extreme is the soul, the receiver of this contemplation. Since the divine extreme strikes in order to renew the soul and divinize it (by stripping it of the habitual affections and properties of the old self to which the soul is strongly united, attached, and conformed), it so disentangles and dissolves the spiritual substance - absorbing it in a profound darkness - that the soul at the sight of its miseries feels that it is melting away and being undone by a cruel spiritual death. It feels as if it were swallowed by a beast and being digested in the dark belly, and it suffers an anguish comparable to Jonah's in the belly of the whale [Jon. 2:1-3]. It is fitting that the soul be in this sepulcher of dark death in order that it attain the spiritual resurrection for which it hopes.

"2. David describes this suffering and affliction - although it is truly beyond all description - when he says: The sighs of death encircled me, the sorrows of hell surrounded me, in my tribulation I cried out [Ps. 18:5-6]. But what the sorrowing soul feels most is the conviction that God has rejected it, and with abhorrence cast it into darkness. The thought that God has abandoned it is a piteous and heavy affliction for the soul. When David also felt this affliction he cried: In the manner of the wounded, dead in the sepulchers, abandoned now by your hand so that you remember them no longer, so have you placed me in the deepest and lowest lake, in the darkness and shadow of death, and your wrath weighs on me, and all your waves you have let loose on me [Ps. 88:4-7]. When this purgative contemplation oppresses a soul, it feels very vividly indeed the shadow of death, the sighs of death, and the sorrows of hell, all of which reflect the feeling of God's absence, of being chastised and rejected by him, and of being unworthy of him, as well as the object of his anger. The soul experiences all this and even more, for now it seems that this affliction will last forever."

This is heavy stuff, and I have to say I just don't find this in the biographies I've read of the masters in my own tradition, or other Tibetan Buddhist lineages.  This is what has puzzled me in the past. 

There is one thing I may have missed.  I know that Buddhists who make long retreats - ones that last months, or years - experience difficult times.  But do their difficulties resemble what St. John writes of?  I don't know.  But if they do, this parallel hasn't made it into the literature.  In Christian writings, in contrast, in the lives of saints and such, it's all over the place.

References:

St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul -

translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD

translated by by E. Allison Peers

Reading Merton - The Inner Experience

In the past few weeks I've been reading Thomas Merton's 'last' book, The Inner Experience. It's his last because it was published in 2003, thirty-five years after his death.  Evidently the full manuscript - a re-write really, of an earlier book - was among Merton's papers, but for a number of reasons, it was awhile before it could be published. 

Well, anyhow, I got it because I read somewhere that it was the most extensive and personal thing that Merton ever wrote about his own spiritual experience and his understanding of the processes of prayer and meditation. 

It's very much old-style Merton - not entirely a good thing.  His best writing, in my opinion, is in the autobiographical material - that always has a freshness about it, even when the ideas and feelings he's describing are rather dated.  They're his feeling, his thoughts - and that is very real.  The Inner Experience, though based on his own prayer life, is more theoretical - and it is marked by Merton's usual disdain for 20th century American culture and worldly attitudes.  However, not too many people write on this topic at all - so it's valuable and interesting for that. 

For me it has the added interest that it helps me to add a few pieces to an old (to me) puzzle.  I've wondered for many years about the so-called "dark night of the soul" that one reads a great deal about in Christian writings, but of which there is almost nothing in the equivalent Buddhist material.  Why not?  Don't Buddhists experience anything like this?  Are the meditative practices and processes of development so different in the two forms of spirituality that what is a major and perhaps essential phase in one is entirely absent in the other?  It seems so at times.  In mulling over The Inner Experience I am finding some clues. 

[to be continued]