Posted on 11/15/2005 2:20:30 PM PST by S0122017
Oh yes, I almost forgot.
The meditation (at the Buddhist priory), was stopped after a long half hour by loud bells and then the allergic monk, played a harmonium or some other strange instrument (I didn't see it, since like everyone else I was staring at the dark wall), and the people, all of them white, in this multi-ethnic community, chanted some gibberish, which, I thought, none understood, if there was anything to understand. So that was my first and last experience with meditating on nothing. I was dragged to go there and never had a reason to go back or practice whatever I learned that evening.
Deep prayer is meditation. Real meditation (not just invented new age stuff) is not different than prayer.
It's called food for the soul. The daily bread that is just as important, if not more so, as bread for the body.
Real meditation is not blanking the mind (which can never be done, anyway). Traditional meditation involves meditating on God. That's what the ancient Vedas teach. There is no possiblity of ever successfully meditating on "nothing".
And just picking any old thing to concentrate on? Everyone does that all the time anyway. Can be called "obsessing"!
:-)
Actually the new age crapola (MacLaine and all that) is invented and bogus and has nothing to do with real Hinduism.
Christian contemplation is defined by writers like St. Augustine, St. Bonaventura, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross.
Things evidently started to go wrong around the time of Thomas Merton. I enjoyed his first books, including "Seeds of Contemplation," but he went off the rails. As you may know, he was killed by an electric shock in his hotel room while attending a Buddhist convention in Asia in the interests of ecumenism.
In fact I know one scholar who wrote an excellent book on the mystical poetry of Henry Vaughan, then got involved with LSD, and wrote a second book comparing Christian contemplation with acid trips. No, they are not the same.
Go to ShirleyMacLaine.com and you can see what it is. View her pages on mediation and you will get the basics of what so-called evangelical churches are into. Many Catholics do it too. Also Jewish Kabbalists. It's the cross-over spirituality you see. It's the "all paths lead to God" concept. You search for the divine within. Go to www.explorefaith.com and see how the Episcopals practice and define it. They are finding "god" within, just like Shirley MacLaine.
Now he can as Islammm to the list.
You're a great story teller, lol! Good that you didn't go back. It's a very bad practice.
There is a certain sense of focus when Rita Rizzo leads the Rosary on EWTN.
It isn't bogus. It wouldn't be so popular if it were bogus. Read their material. They are finding the god within them, just like the Christian contemplatives. They have a mantra, or they use they use their own breath to help get in the altered state. It is entirely the same thing.
I've never had a Buddhist try to recruit me to their faith, unlike other denominations. If a faith that attracts rather than promotes can become your main enemy, that doesn't bode you well against more active opponents.
That's because the practice itself is a bad practice. You might as well try to reach God with a ouija board or a crystal ball. It's basically divination, a practice forbidden in Scripture.
What threat is promotion minus attraction?
My preference: 2 tylenol and a glass of warm red.
What threat is promotion minus attraction?
Nobodies watchin
For the record, I am not questioning the motives of all of the contemplatives. Some have good motives, and otherwise excellent teachings. But the pracitice is basically Christian divination. It's a seance for God. Only that's not the Scriptural way to pray or to meditate. We do not conjure up God's presence for ourselves (defined as: : to summon a devil or spirit by invocation or incantation b : to practice magical arts").
"The Monk and the Philosopher is a collection of father-son dialogues between Jean-François Revel, a French philosopher and journalist famous for his leadership in protests of both Christianity and Communism, and Matthieu Ricard, his son, who gave up a promising career as a scientist to become a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas."
Its strength is that the elder Revel, is a Western sceptic. That is also its weakness, as he identifies himself an atheist. (Reading it one wishes for a dialogue between religious thinkers from these two traditions.) But they are both highly educated and articulate Western men with many great insights. For example, the monk, does claim that with (years of) practice one can empty the mind of thought. Check it out.
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