why this ancient practice still matters
How does the word ‘tradition’ make you feel? Perhaps it provides a sense of belonging and connection. Maybe it speaks of something grounded and stable, offering a sense of continuity in a world that is always changing. Maybe it conjures up another feeling, such as the one associated with receiving a book of second-class stamps from your Great Aunt every Christmas (one of my wife’s least favourite traditions as a child, but one she enjoys reminiscing about now).
The importance of tradition
A little while ago we received an email from a member of the practice community saying:
Something that’s struck me as important is how rooted in tradition the School of Contemplative Life is. The practice of meditation emerged as a way of coming to know and understand God at the heart of all things, which requires (or delivers) a shift in perspective from a mechanistic universe to one that’s soaked in divine love.
These words chime beautifully with a theme that comes through very clearly in many of the emails we receive: just how important and reassuring it is to know that to practice this way of meditation is to participate in an ancient tradition; and that this ancient way of silent prayer doesn’t just benefit us individually, but benefits all people, all beings.
The Cloud of Unknowing wisdom teachings
With these two things in mind (that we practice within an ancient tradition, and the wisdom and healing effects of the practice radiate out), I’d like to remind you of some wisdom-teachings from the anonymous 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing:
The Cloud author is very keen to draw out the ethical implications of meditation.
He teaches that the mystery we call God cannot be grasped by thought, but can be thoroughly known by love. And that this knowing through love, leads to love.
The Cloud author describes the practice of meditation (what he calls ‘the work of contemplation’) as the humblest thing a person can do, a practice which helps open us to the gift of contemplation, the gift of seeing clearly, seeing that we and all creation are one in the oneness of God, a realisation he speaks of as being oned.
As we are shown our essential oneness, something extraordinarily important happens, for each of us, and for the world: we begin to stop seeing others as rivals and threats. We increasingly see our common humanity, that our lives, that all life, is the radiance of God. It goes without saying that this awareness is of vital importance for our world today.
In Chapter 2 of the Cloud, the author writes that, ‘All people living on earth are marvellously helped by this work in ways you do not know.’ He sees the practice of meditation as contributing to everybody’s well-being, essential not only to the unity of all, but also to maintaining that unity, with its effects radiating out throughout the dynamic, interconnected cosmos.
In the silent depths of meditation, the strong sense of a separate self that is derived from and sustained by the noise of our thoughts, falls away. Our sense of separation from God and from each other falls away. We increasingly encounter others as not-separate – not-separate from our life, not-separate from who we are. The idea that there is someone at a distance from us to be in rivalry with, or to fight with, or to hate, falls away.
We are restored to who we really are: not separate, but one in God’s oneness. We are restored to each other.
The Book of Privy Counselling
I’d like to share a translation I made from the Cloud author’s later work, The Book of Privy Counselling:
Blissful is the person who can find this oneing wisdom and flourish in their spiritual work of contemplation with loving skilfulness and prudence of spirit, offering up their own blind awareness of their own being, with all their learning through education and all they know laid aside.
The receiving of this spiritual wisdom and this wise work is better than gaining the ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ (1) of all other bodily or intellectual knowledge, which we get by seeking and working with our natural faculties through thinking about any of the attributes that belong to God or any created thing.
Solomon tells us that this oneing wisdom is better than this ‘gold’ and ‘silver’ because, ‘its fruits are the first and purest.’
And no wonder, because the fruit of this work of contemplation is high spiritual wisdom, suddenly and freely brought up from awareness inwardly in itself and unformed, far distant from our fantasies, impossible to constrain or bring under the activity of our intellect or senses.
Compared with this wisdom, our intellect and senses, however subtle or holy they are, seem like folly formed in illusion, as far from the very truth that shines in the light of contemplation, as the darkness of moonlight in mist on midwinter night is from the brightness of the sun’s rays at the clearest time of midsummer day.
As Solomon says, ‘keep this law and this counsel,’ in which all the commandments and counsels of the Old Testament and of the New are truly and perfectly fulfilled, without any special concern for any one separately.
The work of contemplation is not really a ‘law’ but we can speak of it like this because it contains within it all the branches and fruits of the law.
For, if truly considered, the ground and strength of this work of contemplation will be seen as nothing else but the glorious gift of love, in which, as the apostle teaches, the whole law is fulfilled: ‘Love is the fulfilling of the law.’ (2)
If you keep this loving law and this living counsel, as Solomon says, it ‘shall be life to your soul’ inwardly, in softness of love to your God, ‘and grace to your face’ outwardly, which is to say that this work of contemplation will make your outward form of life and relationships with others beautiful.
An ancient path of oneness
While meditation is deeply personal it is far from private, for it affects all beings.
To practice meditation, is to walk an ancient path of humility and integration, a path of oneness which contributes not only to our individual well-being, or to the wellbeing of others, but to the wellbeing of the entire, interconnected universe.
This blog is based on one of the teachings given in a recent online meditation group gathering. You are warmly welcome to join one of our future gatherings.