Inner Life

From Menletter March 2003

By Tim Baehr

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 spiritual 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.