Spiritual Column
5th December 21 - Hinduism
Dr dear Dr: What is the Honest to God difference between British Christian Meditation and Hindu Indian Meditation? Are there any salient points that distinguish these formats from each other, or are the differences really just cosmetique?
Honest to God. Only special souls that persevere in meditational techniques can often scale these two tiered heights. This Question comes from Rutland on the road north to Wensleydale. It is a good one and one which does repay a good airing, not only for parishes around the city here in the Midlands, but also more generally for other parishes and monasteries too. When I was in a monastery in 1984 and then again in 2001 trying my best to become a Benedictine hermit, walking in the shoes of Bro Thomas Merton and his old disciple Bro Elijah Elias, having thence read the books Seven Storyed Mountain and Sign of Jonas by Merton, I was struck by the great number of travelling Buddhist monks that would stop at the monastery throughout the travelling months of the summer season. One of these I used to take tea with in those summer days. This is what he told me about such issues:
Fonts - Thomas Merton and Bro Elijah Elias - location, Belmont in Wales. The Buddhist monk explained to me that both types of meditation are needed among advanced students, precisely in order to ascend the Ladder of Jacob with the angels, since one operated at the level of the natural "this-world" ocean of being or what philosophers call "contingent" being, and this one involved natural methods of natural meditation and centering and focusing and self-abnegation, depriving the mind and the senses of stimulation so as to erase all images and thoughts and concepts from the mind thuswise producing a nice tabula rasa for meditation, requiring assiduous attention for an hour each day in the morning; whilst the other involved a supernatural and transcendental inter-personal optic but only once these other natural metaphysical ladders had been reached and scaled and achieved and climbed, one was a natural metaphysic, the other was a transcendental inter-personal framework.
He pointed out that East Anglia is nowadays full of young mystics and hermits and meditationals all training hard to be transcendentals with one eye on Hinduism and the other eye on Buddhist-Catholic syntheses. These are arguably forming a British School of Meditation, and much of it is more and more in its higher reaches also Christian. Both are needed for students of self-transcendence. Transcending the self and its years and years of hardened sense impressions and the manufacture of concepts and ideas in the mind - a hard thing to do to unlearn all of such processes so as to clear the mind for the rise into the ethereal. One involved a journey of the mind into the center of being, a journey to the center of the earth, whilst the other involved a search for God as person, God as over-arching optic on life.
Both types of meditation involved using mantras, "Om padme hadme hom" in the Hindu style and "Jesus Son of God have pity on me" in the Christian style, designed chiefly to quieten the sense impressions of the natural mind. But they differed as to object and range. The Hindu Indian Meditation techniques are designed to allow the believer to be absorbed into the ocean of being around the student - a natural exercise in new absorption of the metaphysical experience of being. Being in this metaphysical sense has to be intuited as an experience and thus it cannot be understood without an experience of being, like a religious experience but natural, a real this moment in the hic et nunc experience of the issue.
The British Christian Meditation techniques are designed to put the believer in touch with the Christian superstante Superior God. One was natural, the other was supernatural. But caveat emptor, the Christian meditation techniques did not substitute for the Hindu techniques, rather they presumed that some proficiency had been attained in the Hindu natural metaphysic techniques, why? Because no student can approach the Throne of God without first cultivating an experience of "being as being", nobody can approach the divine without metaphysics - living for a while in a cloister or wilderness or even for the brave in the desert like a Carlo Carretto - beyond the merely physical or meta-physica. In the Hindu techniques, much practise is needed to advance and progress, Hindus going for years and years without any significant progress in terms of curbing sense impressions, especially in a noisy radio filled world-soc. And it takes years of consistent application most religiously to make progress in such techniques. But the Christian method too involves all of this and then more besides, with much private and personal ascesis, much private abnegation in order to arrive at the pavilions and Fair Havens of the humble petitioner - a student must seek out this gift with much and repeated and prolonged humble petitioning - it does not arrive automatically without practise. In the first system, meditation is a natural skill for the metaphysical, in the second system it is a gift of God and is called infused contemplation. Teresa de Avila explains all of this in her account of the experiences contained therein. So there it is, the difference between the two techniques or skills. Good luck for those who would seek the higher platforms and plateaux of being.