Skip to main content

Meditation and day dreaming.

My mother had me listen to a tape of Fr Laurence Freeman introducing meditation where he quotes Simone Weil saying that, "Daydreaming is the root of all evil". He is discussing the importance in meditation of remaining present to the unfolding saying of the mantra, of staying in the present.

However, the use of the phrase 'day dreaming' sparked a conversation in her meditation group, after all, some people get good and inspiring thoughts out of their day dreaming. If you watch a child 'day dreaming' are they not doing it with extraordinary engagement, attention and awareness (even as they are ignoring the lesson going on around them). Carried over into adulthood is this not what Einstein was doing when he was imagining travelling on a beam of light, a 'day dream' out of which the theory of relativity was born?

What Weil was buying into was the traditional devaluation of the imagination of her beloved Plato that was then carried over into the Christian mystical tradition (especially its male strand, the visionary was much more greatly valued by the female strand - Hildegard, St Catherine and Mother Julian all come to mind).

What Weil ought to have said perhaps was that distraction is the root of all evil - the failure to be wholly and lovingly present to whatever is present. In meditation, this may be the mantra or the breath etc but out of meditation, ably assisted by it one hopes, it may be whatever is drawing your awareness right now, including one's day dreams.

Distraction may be the enemy of virtue, imagination is not.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev