New Intro Course into New Monasticism

I am running a 4th Intro course into New Monasticism if interested click here
I am running a 4th Intro course into New Monasticism if interested click here
This was such a great conversation that I want to post it here:
Discussion on the Evolution of Consciousness
recorded 18th December 9.30am on the Zoom App.
TRANSCRIBED FOR USE IN PHD
MV = Dr Mark Vernon
IM = Ian Mobsby
IM: So thinking about the evolution of consciousness and the idea of awakening, and the importance of imagination to conceive of spiritual things, I have a question stemming from Thomas Merton’s writing, about humanity’s propensity not only for spiritual awakening but also to self-delusion, how does this propensity towards self-delusion fit with this picture of original participation, withdrawal and then final participation?
MV: In Barfield’s schema original participation is the experience where meaning, identity, delusions as well as truth and clarity, basically come from the ‘outside in’ rather than from the ‘inside out’. That it predominates in cultures around 500 BC or before in Hermetic cultures and in early Hebrew culture, or indeed in indigenous cultures now that haven’t really been affected by shifts of modern consciousness. It is not that these cultures are any less sophisticated it’s not a developmental model. it’s just done very differently and so you would track your delusions and your confusions and ‘so-on’ through the festivities of the year or the collective mythmaking or the events that happened to you. For example, the City-state gets cursed, or and the tribe loses touch with its gods and rituals requiring cleansings and so on. Here sacrifice is the way that you deal with the confusions, where as now, when I say now I mean the cultures that experience consciousness from the ‘inside out’, where it where it feels like the primary place of clarity, quest, identity understanding divine experience and so on is from the interior. There are inner corelates to that, so rather than making a literal pilgrimage or literal sacrifice to clarify some sort of relationship with the deity, there will be some sort of inner ‘letting go’. So there is a form of self-sacrifice that is under gone in order to clarify a distinction between delusion and truth and so on.
IM: I’m thinking about the shift from withdrawal to final participation and thinking about how you and Barfield talk about the Kingdom and about this shift in consciousness and spiritually seeking and about God making the God-self known and people encountering God in radical connection as a form of final participation and how that relates Thomas Merton’s concern, that as people seek spiritual experience from the ‘inside-out’ forms of consciousness as awakening and also equally the danger of self-delusion – I am wanting to explore this insight around awakening and delusion with that shift from withdrawal to final participation?
MV: This is a question you asked me at the Evolving Consciousness Conference that I didn’t quite answer. One thought that I think you get in Merton as much as Barfield’s writing in the mystical Christian traditions it is often taught there are two pathways to spiritual awakening. There are two ways, the first being a direct way and then the second being a more progressive way. So the direct way is when you have the moment of profound experience or realisation leading to new knowing – like Merton’s famous realisation on the streets of Kentucky where he suddenly sees everyone blazing and it’s a moment where in a way reality turns or opens up to him in a new form of the direct in the now. But what that means, and the process that follows this direct experience and encounter, the exploration of meaning that beds down into his life and so on, this process of embedding down then switches from the direct moment to the progressive moment. It is in this progressive moment where the delusions might kick in. So, he might have delusions of grandiosity having had this vision for example and so that needs to be worked through in order to you might say, so he can become a more purified container for the revelation.
IM: So that’s taking quite contemplative approach and I think touches the Christian contemplative tradition – so would you say that what we are talking about then is based on a more mystical theological understanding?
MC: Yes, I think that all this is in the Christian Contemplative tradition, in the Mystical tradition, yes, it’s all understood within that frame.
IM: Thank you. OK next question.
IM: I am a bit confused about how Jesus fits with the process of original participation, withdrawal to final participation and the Axial age – is his coming/incarnation to open up withdrawal to open up final participation and reconnection as expressed in the Kingdom – is that right?
MV: I think Jesus comes when the withdrawal is in full flow and shows the way to final or reciprocal participation. So, it’s the experience of exile for example and what that unfolds. It’s in the Greek tradition – it’s the experience of the collapse of the Greek City States, with the hedonistic empires, the political manifestations. But within that, the Deuteronic reforms would be the Hebrew correlate of this, where the coming of the Patriarchs switches from original participation, where Moses for example becomes the focus. Also, synagogues start to appear, so the centrality of the temple is lessened, and the focus becomes much more on the individual. We see this shift from original participation to withdrawal similarly with philosophy with the Greeks – the onus is on the individual to devise a way of life that reveals things to them rather than participating in the old city state. All that goes on, so that’s the period which is co-terminus with the coming of Jesus. In Jesus’s life you have I think these two elements. One is everything that shakes you up whether it’s the Cross, the parables, the prophetic proclamations, all of that is about withdrawing from the old ways. But then Jesus makes the space for reciprocal or final participation through the resurrection, the new birth, the new realisation. So when Jesus askes ‘so who do you say I am?’ comes after that, but what Jesus is really asking is ‘who do you think you are?’ It’s always got this inner element. Another thing which you see through Jesus’s teaching as it’s in the gospels and then also in the New Testament writing from Paul, is the move from expecting something ‘outside to come in’ to something being realised ‘within’. So apocalypticism, which develops in the inter-testamental period, expecting rescuers to appear ‘from without’, and I believe that Jesus reforms this. This will be more controversial because there’s clearly external apocalyptic events that happen in the gospels as well, but I think that you can track a history of development that sees people wrestling with what Jesus meant as recorded in the Gospels when he said, ‘it’s not here it’s not there, the Kingdom of God is within’. All this is also reflected in Jesus’ practices and teaching on prayer that survives, is all about going to the secret place and speaking to your Father in secret, and ‘not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing’ and all of that is talking about thew shift in consciousness from withdrawal to reciprocal participation apart from the Lord’s prayer which is the one everyone remembers of course.
IM: So just to check. You are saying that Jesus came in a time of place of withdrawal and then opened up the idea of relationship with God and withdraw by the God that can experienced from within linking this to the idea of the Kingdom.
MV: Yes, life is understood from its inner element rather than from its external element. It’s not necessarily a sense of physical withdrawal, although you might want to go and live in a desert for a while because it helps to clarify, but this form of withdrawal, it’s to see that the cosmos is pulse and then you are alive but within this new dispensation it’s known primarily as an inner experience – the inside of the whole world as well.
IM: When you talk about encountering Jesus from within as part of final participation do you think this is a connection with more contemplative knowing, or what are you and Barfield talking about when you talk about discovering God from within as part of a new reconnection? Is this not just some form of multifaith and New Age?
MV: One way perhaps in something like this, is the role of the individual and the difference between individuality and individualism. I guess a lot of Christians get nervous because they feel that this is ‘individualism on stilts’ and then they associate that with the New Age. The New Age is many things actually, but anyway, let’s put that aside for now. I think this is about individuality and it’s the way that the monotheistic God, the God who is ‘I AM’, this old revelation. I take it that this God who is ‘I AM’ wasn’t really well understood until much later from a moment of withdrawal. I think Judaism developed a way of understanding it and then Christianity as an offshoot from Judaism developed an understanding of it. The basic principle is that you need to have a sense of your own ‘I AM’ness, your own individuality, in order of that the oneness of the divine can mirror within you. So, you can know it. Without that, the birth of the sense of individuality which underpins our sense of self, there would be no monotheism. So, paganism is of course the experience of the divine that’s had amongst non-monotheistic cultures, because they see their sense of individuality as being different, shared across kin and city state and so on.
IM: So, it’s about someone having an ‘IAM’ness as a sense of self from within to then be able to encounter God from within?
MV: That is right. This individuality is also the awareness that ultimately everything is one, so by discovering your own ‘oneness’ you discover everyone else’s oneness to which is shared. It’s often talked about in terms of awareness or consciousness, pure consciousness, so that when you become aware of your own awareness you understand the irreducibility of this ‘oneness’. You realise that your neighbour shares the same awareness. It’s not that we are not monads – all separate and bouncing around – the awareness has the quality of being the common thing. So that’s the linking thing, that’s why it’s not individualism which makes the oneness into atoms.
IM: So that neatly links onto my next question. So thinking about God as I AM and Trinity, would you say that understanding God as I AM is part of the withdrawal as understanding that God has a self? And is the idea of Trinity a part of final participation – the sense of self and radical interdependence at the same time?
MV: Trinitarian wisdom is a way of understanding individuality and it’s in these triads that individuality is properly understood. So you know, one would be the knower, what’s known, and then the knowing which would be like Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is how I know my own capacity to know, I know that you’re knowing the same thing, and then the knowing is what is the shared known. Of course the thing about Trinitarianism is that the known always becomes the knower which becomes the knowing, so there is a revolution they revolve around as well. Another way of articulating this is with love – the lover, the beloved and then the loving would be a similar thing and in the same way that you know you can be a lover with the beloved but when there’s real loving the beloved is also the lover and you become the beloved, so there’s a circularity within the oneness of the relationship.
MV: Saying all of that though I think it is a mistake to think of Trinitarian Theology as a social model, I think it’s an ontological model. If you forget that it’s a way of understanding the unity then you start to lose the roots really and it becomes a bit of a moral imperative like we should be relating like perfect monads. Whenever I get the feeling that interpretations of Trinitarian Theology are edging in that direction, then I be clear I don’t like this myself.
IM: So how do you feel about then the more Greek theological understanding of perichoresis, about the dynamism of God, the idea of the inner vibrancy of God, where God is less of a thing but more of an event.
MV: Well I guess when you use the language of being, that’s where it has that more event quality. Another way of putting it which I think final participation understands and withdrawal struggles with, is that truth actually is always subjective. Ultimately, it’s what’s known from within. It’s the phenomenology that counts, and withdrawn participation struggles to find objective proof as if you aren’t part of it. The minute you get to be part of it you are somehow compromised. So, whether it looks to texts for objective proof or scientific evidence and rejected proof and so on, but it seeks this view from nowhere. I think that final participation understands. So it may be a necessary phase, but it’s ultimately a mistake to think that things are only known for sure with certainty and in eternity, and unchanging. Actually everything can only be known subjectively, it’s what you know, it’s the language of simplicity or essence in the spiritual sense.
IM: Finally, thinking about the evolution of consciousness and the three cyclical stages of Barfield, would it be fair to say that pantheism is part of original participation? And what about the idea of unitive or collective consciousness? Is that original or final participation?
MV: All these terms, pantheism, panentheism, unitive and pure consciousness and so on – they are all terms wrestling for final participation within some sort of degree of withdrawn participation. I think original participation would not have understood any of these terms at all.
IM: Even Pantheism? the idea that God is everywhere and in everything and apart with an in and out flow between in and out?
MV: I think it’s too unitive for original participation. I think original participation is much more about animism for example. It’s a huge array of deities, from the grandest to the smallest, relating in all their complicated ways, courting rituals and myths and place and all that. I think Pantheism is something different, it is trying to describe everything as a kind of unity within some sort of theistic notion. Then panentheism adds the element that there’s a deity that exceeds what is manifest. So they are attempts to try to nudge a way towards final participation.
IM: OK, so you think that ideas like pantheism are not associated with original participation even though it may have been around in some of the Old Testament with the prophets and all the battles going on between the Hebrew God and the other gods?
MV: I think the prophets are within the withdrawn state for the most part. They spam the period. The earlier prophets and their obsession with Kings is very interesting, because Kings are an intermediary state. They are a single figure that are supposed to represent the whole, so the prophets get very upset when the Kings don’t include the whole. For example I think the sense of what justice means in the Old Testament for the most part, is that the King is supposed to be the figurehead within which everyone has their place. But it’s not in the sense that we understand justice where everyone is going to have an equal place and rights, not at all. To the contrary, it is that everyone had their place within the hierarchy and that’s what upsets the prophets.
IM: Following on, one person in one of the groups talked about non-duality, and that this way of understanding fundamentally did not believe in any form of ‘self’. Is that a devolution of consciousness to an original participation?
MV: I think this is very tricky but I think that there is quite a confusion about ‘no-self’ around at the moment, and I think part of the problem comes is that the texts from which the ideas come they do go back to periods of original participation where the sense of the self being extinguished would be to join the rich ecology of the original participatory world. Whereas I think now we’re in a different period where the notion of ‘no self’ is not very helpful. It is a little like the explorations of some on ‘emptiness’, wrestling with what emptiness means. I think basically what it means is your sense of self is being realigned so that rather than experiencing life primarily from your separateness, your ego, however you want to describe it – you and me as it were. You gradually realise that your sense of self arises first from that which is shared. So, you do literally see you in the other as much as in yourself. But then, coming from the pure consciousness the awareness itself. So you know, like William Blake, when he sees the sunrise he doesn’t see the Guinea which is him and the Guinea trying to relate, he sees the ‘holy, holy, holy’ and so on because he realises that his praise of God is actually just the kind of reflection of the divine praise that he sees in the praise of the sunlight. So, in those moments at least, he knows of himself, as part of the whole self rather than as a separate self, trying to relate to the whole self. So I think in a way it’s a it’s an extinguishing of the separate self but it’s not an extinguishing of the self completely.
IM: The other idea that keeps emerging is that of soul, and I notice Barfield uses the idea of soul a lot. In the fieldwork I completed there was a lot of talk of an individual soul and a collective or unitive soul. I am trying to get my head around these two forms of the use of soul?
MV: For Barfield the word ‘soul’ it just means ‘aliveness’ so anything can have a soul because if anything feels alive then it can have a quality of soul. So for Barfield words can have a soul. For example the word light has a different quality of soul from the word dark. So it’s anima, it’s the animated aspect of life, so it’s not on ontological category, it’s not a bit of you exist somewhere. There might be other words that would capture that, sometimes people use ‘spirits’ to mean that, but then sometimes people will use the word spirit to mean a more collective sense as well. so they are slippery terms. So you basically have to work out what people are saying I think.
MV: I try to go for images more than terms. So I am reading the Divine Comedy a lot, and I think one of the things that really strikes Dante in the paradise is how he sees individual souls. So he sees individuals and yet he recognises them keenly as themselves. Because the completely know themselves, they are completely one with the divine. Their love, their knowledge, their sites, their movements, are completely harmonious. So I think it’s an extension of the Trinitarian idea that the unity is actually multiple, true unity is multiple and not singular. The unity that is singular is actually tyrannical as it erases everything and ultimately it is nihilistic, I think. In contrast, a unity that is multiple it can be profoundly spiritual. For example if you meet someone who really transmits the divine, they are completely themselves as well, they are not a ‘non-human being’. For example Desmond Tutu is completely Desmond Tutu. You know the minute he walks in the room you would feel Desmond Tutu, and yet at the same time, you would feel so much more as well. I think that is part of the mystery of all this that of final participation. It’s when people become more and more and more themselves that actually they transmit more and more of this kind of particularity all these things that revolve around this issue.
IM: Right, that is really helpful thank you.
MV: So these things are really complicated, so try to get people to reflect on their experience rather than just an idea, because it can become very complicated. People can get very hooked on the idea of the ‘no-self’. I mean I think it’s partly a reaction against the individualism of modern times and you know the ego is bad period. Take them to the Maudsley hospital, then they will see people with no egos and it is a complete disaster, it is an absolutely hideous experience.
IM: Thanks Mark, this has been a really helpful time of clarifications.
Transcribed by Ian Mobsby
19th December 2020.
He who attempts to act and do things for others and for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give to others. He will communicate to them only the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, and his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. Thomas Merton
So this is my first of ten important thoughts for spiritual reflection. For the last year, I have been influenced by the incredible wisdom and gift of the 12-Step movement throughout the world. One of its core insights, indeed the thought akin to many forms of contemplative religions including Christianity for which I am a part, is the key idea that the violence and problems of human society and systems, comes from within each one of us.
Many have written about the importance of the human ego as an essential tool for survival. But it is a two edged sword. The human ego can also be that which becomes obsessed with the seven deadly sins of Greed, Anger, Fear, Lust, Envy, Pride and Sloth. If we become fixated with these things, then we literally become ‘adult children’ and we literally become distorted and addicted to these various intense behaviours that lead to forms of insane narcissistic violence.
This is why in the Christian contemplative tradition, forms of Buddhism, Sufism and other mystical religious traditions, the taming of the ego is an essential human discipline, because if we stay too aligned with the ego it leads us to put our identity into a false-self.
Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of the false self is but an illusion:
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 34-5.
In fact, what ever we do no tame and immerse in the love of God to enable us to find spiritual freedom in our deeper true-selves, then we will unleash egoic violence on those around us and the natural order. What ever we do not own from within ourselves, we wreak on others and the natural order of this world. This is why we have so many adult children who struggled with boundaries and power in the world of Donald Trump and Boris Johnston as examples. This is why we increasingly find ourselves in forms of society with increasingly authoritarian regimes. This is why we have seen forms of the worlds religions formed for being vehicle’s for the love of God, human cooperation, peace and for the stewardship of nature, have been distorted by the violence of religious fundamentalism advanced by the egoic tendency to the deadly sins. This is why our human societies seem impotent to face the drastic threat of global warming and ecocide. We are destroying the planet and self-harming all people and all life through the deadliness of the unrestrained human ego, which ultimately has to be expression of madness and evil, and we are often so ensnared we can not see it.
I believe the only true escape is by appealing to the Higher Power of the 12 Step Movement, the God of world religions, that through the love of God, and through our desire and intention to live another way, that we can reveal and face the consequences of egoic selves through self-awareness, prayer, meditation and spiritual practices, and then through forms of healing and formation, shift our focus of life away from the ego to the true self, or away from the brokenness and self-harm of the deadly sins, to the virtues or the focus on the true-self, through endurance and by being immersed in the love of God. without this focus, I have no hope for this planet, as the evil dark violence within us, can only be subdued through the power of love and humility.
This is why I am so committed to the Christian contemplative tradition and the 12 Step Movement. Both have been for me essential for me to shift away from a life time of self-harming egoic forms of behaviour and living, to something more self-loving, more peace-giving, and more in harmony with the natural order of things.
If we do not face this, then we will continue to destroy, setting up even more despotic regimes, violence to all living things, and an insatiable and unmeetable hunger for power, experience and greed.
I do believe this is what people mean when they say they are spiritual not religious, because they are seeking to go deeper with this striving to take the egoic into the the true self, but I don’t believe you can only do this out of self-will, this is the lesson of the 12-step process. And we are so obsessed with our thinking and feeling and blind to our delusions, that we need forms of loving contemplative spiritual practicing communities who are transformed by the love of God. This is my one hope and trust.
The essential truth is, that only true surrender of the human heart and will can lead to non-egoic spiritual freedom, for which, we all need to do the work.
But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 35.
Over the next few weeks I am going to post 10 thoughts that I believe require some reflection about the way things are and the potential for change in the future. I hope these will promote some deep searching and engagement. The first will begin in a few minutes
1 – The violence and threat to the world is located from inside each human-self.
2.- The world financial system is not morally neutral
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Knowing I have not posted here for sometime, I thought I would repost these words of hope and encouragement as I recognise that so may people continue to suffer, so receives these words for what ever is going on for you in this present moment
To give people the heads up, I will be running two online courses on New Monasticism starting in September, the first I am facilitating on my own which is a 4 week introduction to a more contemplative and missional understanding of New Monastic Community, and the second is a course for people wanting to set up New Monastic Communities which I will be leading with MarK Berry of the Safe Space Community. So see below details for the Intro course and please do send this onto anyone else who may be interested. Intrigued and what to know more about contemplative and missional new monasticism?? Why not try out this short online course I am leading. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/intro-course-to-new-monastic-missional-communities-by-ian-mobsby-tickets-115539526835
This wellbeing prayer and meditation is a contemplative form of spiritual discipline that attends to who we are and hope in God as the source of all being. This is really good if you are struggling with anxiety or mental health issues.
This contemplative prayer is aimed at helping us become centred, and attending to the different parts of us to and with God to help us again find our strength and centre in the source of all life. Again this is a great form of prayer and meditation if you feel anxious and find it difficult to switch off before sleeping.
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We live in tough times, made even harder by the current viral pandemic. If you like me struggle a bit with anxiety and getting overwhelmed, then I commend this form of contemplative prayer. It’s approach of focusing on emotions, the body and surrendering elements of your life to God a powerful combination of embodied meditation and prayer that bring spiritual relief, wellbeing and deep connection to and with God. I highly commend this, so please do see the audio below and the attached doc in words.
If you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed by what is going on, I recommend doing this form of prayer at least twice a day
You many not know, but one of the greatest growing Christian contemplative expressions of Church is in Iran and Iraq. They meet to pray, but have no buildings, no visibility, no formalised leaders but are deeply oppressed where their lives are often at threat, and also at risk of rape by the secret police – both the men and the women.
Their model is a radical openness to the Holy Spirit, to be obedient to the Gospels, where there is a deep relational commitment to be brother and sister Christians, but how they wait and hold back and wait for others to ask religious questions. The focus then is on living the Christian faith – discipleship – not evangelistic events or the approaches we use in the west which just don’t work. For them this is high risk, where they have no religious freedom and oppressed by the threatening domination system.
What can we learn from this?
Clearly at the moment we are not persecuted, but I do believe we are struggling in the west with a massive negative stereotype concerning Christianity and the church which is still too connected to establishment and privilege – and culturally is seen and treated in a way that is not far from forms of prejudice that can easily grow into forms of persecution.
The persecution in the persecuted church allow each of the individual to grow spiritually to have the maturity to cope with oppression but open to God doing things and working miracles that comes from prayer and being an underground network family.
In my new context, Christchurch Southwark, we are struggling because the area is I think sanitised by the market society which isolates the rich and dehumanises and marginalises the poor and vulnerable where our worth is measured against economic or commodified value. So the question is how to we relate to this type of society where many are not free and struggling and not open to Christianity, largely because they have never seen it lived. Living it is critical so people can experience Christians and how faith and spirituality has transformed their life. Only by being an example can we be effective with mission and hence Jesus” teachings and the new commandment and the Lord’s Prayer as a way of life. So this is what we need to learn, and we have got lazy in the west, because we don’t have to fight for the right to express our faith. I am struck by the approach in Iran and Iraq and China because they developed a movement, being able to use forms of relational ministry and do food ministry, friendship and soul friends so we put the focus on living it, and learning to live it better together. If you get a chance see the Youtube clips of sheep amongst wolves. It is cheesy in places and some of its theology is not where I am at, yet I believe the focus on living it guided by God builds mature disciples – I think is helping me to think what I need to get going at Christchurch..,..