We made it
through a year. Next issue will mark the first anniversary; wouldn't it be
great if we had 100 subscribers by then? Nice round number and all that. We
have about 90 now. So pass this issue on to a friend!
What does it
mean to have an "inner life"? Do you have to be religious, or a
member of a church? Do you have to be "spiritual"? Do you have to sit
and meditate for twelve hours a day?
Here's my very
personal take on what inner life is about.
Let's look at a
couple of extremes first. At one end of my imaginary spectrum, you have the
total-inner-life person: almost no practicality of daily living can get in the
way of this person's spiritual sensibilities and/or navel-gazing. He or she may
live like a hermit, and have very strong ideas of what's "right" in
the spritual realm; there's hardly a practical bone in this person's body.
At the other
end, you have a totally "secular" person with no beliefs and no
desire to find out what's "inside." Ironically, some clergy and other
religious leaders come very close to this extreme. What with running a
church/synagogue/temple, doing fundrasing, supervising office staff, paying
bills, visiting the sick, teaching religion classes, and so on, they leave no
time for finding out who they are and how they relate to their deity (and
vice-versa).
What about the
mass of us in the middle?
Is an inner
life different for a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Muslim? (No, this isn't
a bar joke with a pun at the end.) Can an atheist have an inner life? I think
an inner life is possible for anyone, and that it can look pretty much the same
no matter what the religious tradition or background is. An outrageous claim?
Let's take a closer look.
Can you think
of any tradition that would actively discourage its people from sitting quietly
for a short space each day? I can't. Can you think of any tradition that has
never had such a practice of meditation or contemplation? I can't.
In some
traditions, of course, meditation is no big deal. Nice to do, but prayer,
churchgoing, and good deeds may seem more important. In other traditions,
meditation is a very big deal indeed. In fact, there's almost an orthodoxy
about it: sit this way, breathe that way, think -- or don't think -- about
these things. You could spend a lifetime learning how to "do" it
right.
I want to find
something in common about all of this, not in the trivial sense of a lowest
common denominator, but something rich and rewarding.
And I keep
coming back to just sitting and doing nothing. And what's the big deal about
that? I think the big deal is that it's the outer door to the inner life.
My theory: We
are constantly flooded with information, both important and trivial, from the
day we're born. Not only that, but we have programmed into our DNA another
bunch of information that makes us who we are -- our heritage as human
organisms, and also our particular heritage as individual human beings.
When we sit
quietly and get away from the constant input, we have a chance at tapping into
what's inside. At first, for a lot of people, there are echoes of the outer
world: reminders of duties and obligations, regrets, fears, and so on.
Beginning meditation can feel like obsessive rumination. With a little practice,
however, we find ourselves going into a quieter and more peaceful place.
We could stop
right there and enjoy the benefits (chronicled in medical research): lowered
respiration and heartbeat, lowered blood pressure, reduced anxiety. But there's
more.
Once you've
emptied your minute-to-minute consciousness of all the incoming junk and the
echoes, you may start experiencing, unbidden, a new perspective on your
existence -- what matters and what doesn't matter; answers to puzzles;
rediscovery and appreciation of beauty; strengths and resources; recall of
half-forgotten memories; understanding and forgiveness.
We could,
again, stop right there and enjoy the benefits: more focus in our life,
understanding and appreciation of other people, recall of childhood memories,
and so on. (There can be a down side, too, if we get in touch with old, painful
memories that we had suppressed.) And still there's more.
At some point
in the practice there can come a time when a sense of the divine comes into the
quiet space in your mind. This can be a sense of a spiritual presence, a divine
being; a feeling of oneness with everything; or simply a sense that time and
space have stopped, perhaps collapsed into a single point. The internal
experience is joy and peace, and a wordless realization, beyond any
intellectual understanding, that all is well.
Now here's a
really interesting and ironic aspect of all this: we can't consciously choose
to enter any of these stages. We don't sit down one day and say, "I think
today I'll visit the divinity" or "today would be a good day to
remember my fifth birthday" or "I've decided to lower my blood
pressure today." The only thing, I think, we can consciously elect to do
is to sit down somewhere, be quiet, maybe pay attention to our breathing, and
stay that way for a while. And anyone can do it. You can be a priest or an
apple picker, devoutly religious or an atheist, rich or poor...you get the
idea.
That's it. And
that's the doorway to the inner life.
Copyright
notice
All original
materials are (c) Copyright 2002, 2003 by Tim Baehr. All rights reserved. All
signed materials are copyright by their respective authors.
Warranty
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responsible for the contents of Web sites I list or recommend.
Personal
correspondence:
Tim Baehr
tbaehr@aol.com