Down the side of Hannah Betts' article were 4 best gurus for meditation. Now, be careful here, meditation isn't just lighting candles and tapping on a Tibetan bowl and thinking beautiful thoughts, meditation is a distinct science and not to be confused with a spa day. Meditation has been practised for millennia and transcends the everyday. Buddhists train themselves to meditate, Sadhus practise with austerity, Monks spend years concentrating their thoughts on one thing alone so just by waving a few incense sticks around and shutting your eyes and stopping you aren't going to achieve immediate enlightenment. We may, as her article indicates, sleep better, feel better and our skin may improve but the real deal is a commitment to a daily practice which connects the individual meditator with a tradition of meditators, both past and present. For access to this capital of peaceful practice, it is good to fall in with the right people, to make sure that the traditions of the practice you are about to become a part of have this connection. After all, if you were going to put your money in a bank, you would want to make sure that it was safe wouldn't you? So take care to find your teacher and make certain that they will support you on the way. Make certain too that you will respect your teacher or your meditation so much that you will commit to it. Your teacher commits to you so you should try to commit to your teacher or your tradition.
Rocky Road (or the medical dictionary syndrome)
ReplyDeleteThanks for another thought provoking and fun philosophy group!
I am going to have another stab at articulating a concern I tried (and failed!) to express last night.
George, in Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, on reading through a medical dictionary discovered he was suffering from every disorder in the book apart from Housemaid’s Knee! Obviously he wasn’t but in his mind he recognised the symptoms in such a convincing and plausible way that he was persuaded of his desperate plight.
This is an all too familiar scenario; plausible and elegant explanations particularly of a very general nature, are very compelling.
Theories and ideas that purport to explain great swathes of uncertainty and which seem to “fit” so comfortably onto our experience of the world, are very seductive.
But we have to beware of the spectre of speciousness…
The history of science is littered with explanations that seemed convincing at the time but were superseded by contradictory alternative that became the new facts or truths.
Perhaps the most obvious of these heroic shifts is the once firmly held belief that the Sun orbits the earth (geocentricity). This theory seemed to fit very comfortably our experience as we regarded the sun “rising” and “setting”. In fact our experience seems to contradict the theory that now holds sway with nearly everyone - that of the earth orbiting the sun (heliocentricity).
My point is that a theory or explanation that “fits” our experience isn’t necessarily true although of course it might be.
In the case of the Guna model that explains life in terms of a journey consisting in an essential interplay of the three “energies” (Satwa, Rhaga, tamwa) it certainly seems to fit our experience very neatly. We were all finding examples of how it seemed to comply with our everyday experiences.
But how do we know it’s true? How do we know we are not just George giving a theory or explanation truth status because it fits our experience?
I think there are only two possible replies to this question: Firstly one might say that, whether or not the Guna model is true, it doesn’t really matter - if the account works for you and helps you to get through the day then that’s good enough.
The second response is to say that the Guna account is not the sort of account that is capable of proof. Unlike George’s plight and heliocentricity, both of which could be proved or disproved in a generally acceptable way, the Guna model, in common with all religious accounts, is protected from denial or confirmation by the lofty and impenetrable walls of the “F” word - “faith”!
Faith, trust and fidelity are in fact what binds relationships and society as a whole together…the unconditional, unquestioning acceptance of the word of another is the essence of key relationships in life: infant and parent, the elderly and infirm and the carer, partnerships both personal and professional, domestic animals and their minders etc etc…
However, Faith and philosophy are not good bedfellows! In fact I’d go further than this: they are antagonistic and incommensurable rivals… Faith kills enquiry dead and effectively covers its eyes and ears refusing to acknowledge the question. To question faith denies faith. Philosophy, on the other hand, simply is the question. It asks “what” and it asks “why”. To deny the question denies philosophy.
David
Can't wait to get my teeth into this one! but it will have to wait until tomorrow because I am in London today sculling about doing jobs. Interesting though, Pope John Paul wrote an encylical on Faith and Reason where he has philosophy sitting at the table with reason and faith, philosophy works its own magic and doesn't dictate, just suggests and questions us. xxx
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