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Andy Puddicombe, Brook Ziporyn, Headspace, John Dunne, mystical experience, nondualism, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Satan, Spain, Teresa of Ávila, Tiantai 天台, Zhiyi
The autobiography of (Saint) Teresa of Ávila is a most remarkable book. Its beginning sections on Teresa’s early life feel at once relatable (she recalls her youthful interest in making herself pretty) and utterly alien: she and her brother admired the Christian martyrs so much that in childhood they “agreed to go off to the land of the Moors and beg them, out of love of God, to cut off our heads there”, and felt very disappointed that they could not find a way to do this. (Section 1.4, page 3 of the Kavanaugh-Rodriguez translation) The later sections are the more famous ones, depicting Teresa’s vivid visions of angels.
In the middle, though, the book takes an unexpected detour – nearly a hundred pages – providing instructions for prayer. I don’t believe in Teresa’s God, let alone pray to him, which made it very tempting to skip these chapters. I’m very glad I didn’t, though, because I found important things in them that I recognized as a Buddhist.
Most generally, these middle chapters detail the states of consciousness one can enter into after intensive prayer, which bear interesting resemblances to the Buddhist jhānas, and other mystical experiences besides. But the part that really struck me was where she talks about how those states can be disturbed by memories and images: “I see my soul become undone in the desire to be united there where the greater part is, and this is impossible; rather the imagination and memory carry on such a war that the soul is left powerless.” (17.6, p103) This “war” should be familiar to any Buddhist meditator, where so many thoughts start entering our minds whether we want them to or not. And what I find most striking is Teresa’s solution to the problem:
The only remedy I have found, after having tired myself out for many years, is the one I mentioned in speaking of the prayer of quiet: to pay no more attention to the memory than one would to a madman – leave it go its way, for only God can stop it and, in truth, here it remains as a slave. We must suffer it with patience as Jacob did Leah, for the Lord does us a great favor in allowing us to enjoy Rachel. (17.7, p104)
Leave it go its way, for only God can stop it. Even though these disturbances of mind aren’t good, trying to suppress them actively will only carry on the war within you; rather, you have to notice them and let them go. This advice very closely matches Brook Ziporyn’s summary of Zhiyi’s Chinese Tiantai Buddhist practice: when you let go of a desire, release it from your control, then it fades away – whereas by trying to suppress the desire, you paradoxically perpetuate it.
All this tells me that Teresa and Zhiyi have independently hit on something fundamental about the flow of human consciousness: even when we correctly recognize something in our minds as harmful or problematic, it remains counterproductive when we try to force it to stop. We need to simply let it go – neither indulge it nor resist it, as Andy Puddicombe says in his Headspace meditations. That is neither a Buddhist thing nor a Christian thing – it’s a human thing that we can discover when we enter the intentional periods of silence that we might describe as meditation or quiet prayer. Yet many seem not to discover it: Śāntideva, wise in so many other respects, tells us that we are at war with the kleśas, urging us to fight them in a way that may only serve to strengthen their hold.
I’ve enormously appreciated the work of the Buddhologist John Dunne for first pointing out this distinction between Śāntideva’s more aggressive variety of mindfulness and the more gentle letting-go of Zhiyi (and showing how that distinction shows up in a much wider variety of thinkers). Dunne refers to the former as “classical” and the latter as “nondual”. Reading Teresa gave me some pause on that terminology, for there is little that is nondual about her. Unlike Meister Eckhart, she does not point us to an ultimate nondual ground or “Godhead” that underlies both ourselves and God as normally conceived. More strikingly, there is a deep dualism in her own psychology: she believes that the devil and God are both at work in our minds, and describes a large number of our problematic drives as temptations from the former (especially in chapters 13 and 15, but really throughout the book).
Perhaps one could view Teresa as straddling the classical/nondual distinction: she is willing to allow a simple letting-go for stray memories, thinking they are placed there by God, but not for temptations that are placed there by the devil. If so, that approach still seems to me psychologically unhealthy. Puddicombe advises us in meditation to let go of all stray thoughts and feelings, whether harmful ones like anger or more indifferent or even positive ones, and his approach seems to me more effective as a way to reduce the number of bad thoughts. In Teresa’s language, it seems to me that we can avoid the devil’s influence most effectively by not fighting him too hard: our desire to fight the devil is itself something he uses against us.
Although I admit that what I’m about to suggest seems very far from Teresa of Ávila’s way of thinking, I think I can translate into a Buddhist nondualist perspective that belief of hers in the last paragraph that you find unhealthy: the distinction between images and memories placed in the mind by God versus those placed by the devil.
Perhaps a nondualist version of this belief would be that some images and memories induce in the mind, or at least do not obstruct in the mind, a feeling of nonseparateness whereas other images and memories induce in the mind a feeling of separateness.
The challenge or problem is that trying to fight an image or memory that induces a feeling of separateness would only deepen that feeling, and trying to fight the neutral/nonobstructing images or memories would also induce a feeling of separateness.
The general solution seems to be an attitude of loving-kindness, friendliness, benevolence, and compassion toward whatever is happening. There are a variety of more specific techniques that can be applied depending on the content of the images and memories (it may be letting-go in some cases, whereas in other cases it may be trying to work with the images and memories to reframe and transform them in some way, for example), but always in the context of that general solution.
Well, what concerns me in the last paragraph isn’t the distinction between what’s from God and what’s from the devil – some thoughts are really good and some are bad, and one of the reasons we meditate is to have more of the former and less of the latter! Rather, it’s that in the practice of meditation/prayer, it can be unhelpful to focus too hard on that distinction one way or the other. You need to train yourself to be able to notice and let go of thoughts in general; when you focus on the bad thoughts and try to fight them or resist them (devil, kleśa or otherwise), they wind up getting stronger.
Interesting stuff. In the great books program I did years ago, St. Teresa’s _Way of Perfection_ was to me one of the least interesting things on the reading list. I will have to take a look at her autobiography.
Never heard of the Way of Perfection – the works I always see referred back to are the autobiography and another work called the Interior Castle. The autobiography can go back and forth between interesting and boring, in part because it appears to be relatively unedited (one chapter begins with “I forgot to mention that…”) She’s clearly drawing inspiration for it from Augustine’s Confessions, though of course it doesn’t have all the stuff about the path to Christian conversion since she was baptized in the faith.