Category: Longer Works

The Silence of the Mountains

I underlined so many passages in Joan Halifax’s The Fruitful Darkness that I didn’t realize how relatively short it is until I started to write about it (it didn’t help that I bought the Kindle edition, and I still can’t estimate length by the number of electrons in the book.) So, I’m hesitant to include too many passages in my discussion of it.

Halifax’s suggests there are many ways of â€?”questioning and directly understanding our place from within the web of creation,” many ways of coping with â€?”The World Wound.” Her table of contents provides a concise view of the many ways she discusses in her book:

1 The World Wound
2 The Way of Silence
3 The Way of Traditions
4 The Way of the Mountain
5 The Way of Language
6 The Way of Story
7 The Way of Nonduality
8 The Way of Protectors
9 The Way of the Ancestors
10 The Way of Compassion

One of the ways I was most familiar with is â€?”The Way of Silence.” In fact, this passage seemed particularly familiar, for obvious reasons:

The poet Kathleen Raine once suggested, â€?”It is not that birds speak, but men learn silence.” I think that it is when we learn silence that the birds speak to us. Fertile silence is like a placenta nourishing us from both emptiness and its connectedness with the greater organism of creation. Indeed, one aspect of silence is emptiness, and yes, it is often lonely. In the presence of silence, the conditioned self rattles and scratches. It begins to crumble like old leaves or worn rock. If we have courage, we take silence as medicine to cure us from our social ills, the suffering of self-centered alienation. In silence, sacred silence, we stand naked like trees in winter, all our secrets visible under our skin. And like winter’s tree, we appear dead but are yet alive.

If you’ve been visiting long enough you might remember an entry where I called myself â€?”He Who Talks to Small Birds” accompanied by a shot of the hummingbird that hung out in my front garden and talked to me every time I came out to take photographs. Strangely enough, I considered that moment a high point in my life only paralleled by the moment when the Grey Jay flew down to take a piece of trail bar out of my hand when I was cross-country skiing on Mt. Hood.

I also identified strongly with the Chapter entitled â€?”The Way of the Mountain” on many levels. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve spent most of my time backpacking or hiking in the mountains, whether Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier, or The Olympics. There’s always been something spiritual about spending a week alone or with a small group of people in the mountains, even more so than climbing mountains.

And, as I’ve noted before, it is the love of the mountains that drew me to many of the Chinese writers:

Before Dogen and after Dogen, in Tibet, China, and Japan, wilderness, and most particularly the greatness of mountains, has called rustic ascetics to their strength and stillness. The Chinese ideograph for hsien and Japanese sen is made up of two parts, one meaning person, the other meaning mountain. In Taoism and in Ch’an Buddhism, the hsien was a spiritual practitioner who used the mountain as a birth gate to awakening. Japan, like China, had a number of spiritual schools inspired by mountain mind. The tradition of Taoist naturalism and Esoteric Buddhist cosmology and rituals combined in the background of Shinto asceticism to give rise to Shugendo. The ascetic practitioners of the Shugendo sect are called yamabushi or â€?”those who lie down in the mountains.”

I suspect that the silence I encountered on those hikes and backpacks was one of the main reasons I loved spending a large part of my summers there. I’ve never really identified hiking in the mountains with meditation and silence, but looking back it’s clear that most hikes in the mountain were a form of walking meditation.

Joan Halifax’s “World Wound”

Near the end of her Preface, Joan Halifax presents a rather concise summary of the elements of The Fruitful Darkness that most interested me:

The Fruitful Darkness is in part the story of the journey that took me through an encounter between the body of Buddhist practice and the body of tribal wisdom, especially shamanism. â€?”Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with Truth,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh. This book is a description of such an experiment. It is grounded in direct experience, practice, and intuition. My personal experiences are the main source for the text; the information and inspiration in this book are rooted in my life. This is inevitable, for neither Buddhism nor shamanism are â€?”revealed” teachings. Both emphasize direct experience and personal realization over doctrine. In my years of practicing, working, and living with these traditions, I have discovered the profound value of truth that is directly known, directly understood, directly realized.

The book is also about the practice of ecology, an ecology of mind and spirit in relation to the Earth, an ecology that sees initiation as a way of reconciling self and other, an ecology that confirms the yield of the darkness, the fruit of suffering, an ecology of compassion.

Like Buddhism and shamanism, deep ecology is centered on questioning and directly understanding our place from within the web of creation. All three of these practices— Buddhism, shamanism, and deep ecology— are based on the experience of engagement and the mystery of participation. Rooted in the practice and art of compassion, they move from speculation to revelation through the body of actual experience. There are many roads into the territory of non-duality. I have chosen to reflect on those that I have traveled. What follows are observations, notes, stories, and realizations that point to pathways that link self and other— ways that often take one through the Valley of Darkness. I also suggest that the fruits of understanding and compassion grow in this Valley.

Perhaps the key line for me was â€?”Like Buddhism and shamanism, deep ecology is centered on questioning and directly understanding our place from within the web of creation,” though I would be hard pressed to define any of those terms. It’s obvious, though, that Joan and I arrived at these interests from quite different directions.

Though I hadn’t heard of the term â€?”deep ecology” until very recently, I think I’ve had a sense of â€?”deep ecology” throughout my life, beginning with the hours spent fishing in the Puget Sound. Despite being raised a city boy, I’ve always felt more at home in nature, and that’s where I go to refresh myself.

That, in turn, led me to my â€?”Indian” period. My first attempt at artwork was doing Indian beadwork on an inexpensive loom, something I’m starting to do again. In other words, I have been interested in Indian art and Indian culture for most of my life. It’s impossible for me to separate life here on the Puget Sound from the magnificent Northwest Indian art that evolved here.

I was introduced to Buddhism through the haiku poets, who I originally viewed just as â€?”nature poets.” That literary introduction, in turn, led me to a further study of Taoism and Buddhism. If I believed in reincarnation, I would suspect that I must have been Buddhist in a previous life because as I’ve read I’ve discovered that I’ve been leading most of my life according to some Buddhists’ values. Of course, others might argue that I’ve devoted much of my life to living some Christians’ values, too.

In the opening chapter entitled â€?”The World Wound” I also discovered that my sense of the state of our world was very close to Halifax’s view:

The World Wound is a collective wound that we suffer simply by being born. Buddhist practice and my study of shamanism have helped me see that we are one node in a vast web of life. As such, we are connected to each thing, and all things abide in us. Our psychological and physical afflictions are part of the stream of that being-ness. On my second day in the desert, as I was walking in the late afternoon, I recalled the years of mental and physical sickness I have suffered. I asked myself then, Whose sickness is this anyway?

From one point of view, the suffering was my suffering. From another point of view, it was rooted in social, cultural, environmental, and psychological factors that were far beyond the local definition of who I am. My suffering is not unique but arises out of the ground of my culture. It arises out of the global culture and environment as well. I am part of the World’s Body. If part of this body is suffering, then the world suffers.

Recognizing the World Wound also turns us away from a sense of exclusiveness. If we work to heal the wound in ourselves and other beings, then this part of the body of the world is also healed. Each of us carries or has carried suffering. This suffering is personal. But where is it that we end and the rest of creation begins? As part of the continuum of creation, our personal suffering is also the world’s suffering. Its causes are more complex and ramified than the local self.

I also believe â€?”we are one node in a vast web of life,” that my suffering and your suffering â€?”arises out of the ground of [our] culture,” and that if we are ever going to alleviate that suffering we all have to work to do so, first by trying to solve our own suffering.

The questions Halifax attempts to answer in the rest of her book are vital ones for most of us.

As the environmental aspects of our alienation from the ground of life become increasingly apparent, the social, physical, mental, and spiritual correlates rise into view. We all suffer in one way or another. Consciously or unconsciously, we wish to be liberated from this suffering. Some of us will attempt to transcend suffering. Some of us will be overwhelmed and imprisoned by it. Some of us in our attempts to rid ourselves of suffering will create more pain. In the way of shamans and Buddhists, we are encouraged to face fully whatever form our suffering takes, to confirm it, and, finally, to let it ignite our compassion and wisdom. We ask, How can we work with this suffering, this â€?”World Wound”? How can our experience of this wound connect us to the web of creation? And how can this wound be a door to compassion and compassionate action?

Most of us hope that confronting our suffering, â€?”This World Wound,” will help us to feel less pain, but few of us think of it as a â€?”positive” experience, one that can â€?”be a door to compassion and compassionate action.” Fewer of us know how â€?”our experience of this wound [can] connect us to the web of creation” and â€?”be a door to compassion and compassionate action.” It’s a journey well worth taking with Joan.

The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom

Despite the lack of discussion here at In a Dark Time, I have been steadily reading books, just not spending the time needed to actually make sense of them or discuss them (strangely enough, I like to make sense of them before I start writing about them, and not after the comments). I’m still having a hard time deciding what it is I want to focus on now. Most of my reading has had â€?”happiness” or â€?”finding meaning” in life as a central theme, but I’m not sure that many of the books I’ve read have really helped me to define â€?”happiness” or to find it any better than I could before, though perhaps there has been a gradual movement toward some conclusions.

As part of that process, I have just finished reading The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom by Joan Halifax that comes closer than any book I can remember reading to reflecting my overall values, though Halifax’s experiences in both Buddhism and Shamanism go far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, or, perhaps, quite believe. The book gathered together at least three different strains that I’ve touched on repeatedly in this blog: Buddhism, Shamanism, and deep ecology. In my mind I tend to separate them, but Halifax does an excellent job of exploring each and showing how they are interrelated.

I’ll spend several upcoming entries discussing the book, but for the first time I think I’ll begin with the last pages of the book, the appendix, where she lists the Precepts of the Order of Interbeing which she apparently took from Thich Nhat Hanh, another writer I’ve discussed earlier.

Consciously, or unconsciously, I have followed these precepts most of my adult life, with a couple of notable exceptions, as indicated in parenthesis after the precept.

The First Precept: Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones.

The Second Precept: Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth.

The Third Precept: Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threats, money, propaganda, or even education. (One of my central tenants all those years I taught. I found it difficult to team-teach with teachers who pushed their beliefs on students, particularly if they used their beliefs as part of their grading criteria.)

The Fourth Precept: Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. (Hard to do that when you spent most of your adult life as a caseworker and teacher.)

The Fifth Precept: Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. (See the above entry.)

The Sixth Precept: Do not maintain anger or hatred. (This is a hard one; I preferred to think of my anger as â€?”righteous indignation,” but I also worked at eliminating that anger, too.)

The Seventh Precept: Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. (I need to explore in more detail what is meant here.)

The Eighth Precept: Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break. (Some parents objected rather vociferously to the â€?”liberal” textbooks and novels that I often taught in my classes.)

The Ninth Precept: Do not say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people.

The Tenth Precept: Do not use the Buddhist community for personal gain or profit, or transform your community enjoyed political party. (Since I don’t have Buddhist community per se there’s no temptation here.)

The Eleventh Precept: Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature.
(Some students seemed to believe that education was harmful, but I never really believed that.)

The Twelfth Precept: Do not kill. (I don’t think I ever did, but it’s hard to tell when your government has you spraying machine gun bullets into the underbrush to suppress enemy fire.)

The Thirteenth Precept: Possess nothing that should belong to others. (See above, again.)

The Fourteenth Precept: Do not mistreat your body. (I try to believe that all those years I spent playing basketball were actually good for my body.)

I’ve only taken the first sentence from each of the precepts, but it might be worth buying the books just to read them in their entirety. If you don’t want to get the book, this site presents a more thorough discussion of each point, though not exactly the same discussion provided in Halifax’s book.

Final Thoughts on The Seven Storey Mountain

I enjoyed reading Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Personally, I would rate it higher than Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It gave me insight to Merton’s life, insight I didn’t get from just reading his poetry and non-fiction. At times it was hard to believe that the Merton portrayed in the beginning chapters could ever become the Merton I knew through his later writings. That said, I might not have gotten through the book if I hadn’t previously read some of Merton’s later works and hadn’t been prepared by this disclaimer

He was happy to replace the doubts and uncertainties of his past with the unquestioned and unquestioning certitude of the Catholic Church of the mid-twentieth century. Confident in his belief that he belonged to the “one true” church, he all too often speaks disparagingly about other Christian churches— mirroring the church’s complacent triumphalism himself. Even fifty years ago this triumphalism proved a problem for some readers of other religions, who sensed the book’s power but were bewildered by its narrow religiosity. One young woman, although obviously moved by her reading, lamented: “Why is he so vituperative about Protestants? Are they that bad?” Readers today will be better able to put this narrowness in historical perspective and thus be less bothered by it.

in the preface. Truthfully, I still had a hard time with several of his statements about other religions; they undermined much of what he had to say. At times he reminded me of one of those people who Eric Hoffer described in The True Believers (a book I discussed years ago) — and that’s definitely not a good thing.

Luckily, I had forgotten most of that by the time I reached the last chapter entitled â€?”America is Discovering the Contemplative Life” where he summarizes what seemed to be his most influential ideas.

But Saint Thomas also comes out flatly with a pronouncement no less uncompromising than the one we read from “Umbratilem.” Vita contemplativa, he remarks, simpliciter est melior quam activa (the contemplative life in itself, by its very nature, is superior to the active life). What is more, he proves it by natural reason in arguments from a pagan philosopher— Aristotle. That is how esoteric the question is! Later on he gives his strongest argument in distinctly Christian terms. The contemplative life directly and immediately occupies itself with the love of God, than which there is no act more perfect or more meritorious. Indeed that love is the root of all merit. When you consider the effect of individual merit upon the vitality of other members of the Mystical Body it is evident that there is nothing sterile about contemplation. On the contrary Saint Thomas’s treatment of it in this question shows that the contemplative life establishes a man in the very heart of all spiritual fecundity.

Though I’m afraid I’m more apt to be convinced by, â€?”that pagan philosopher” Aristotle than by Saint Thomas, contemplation does seem, at the every least, a spiritual act, and is seen as such in nearly every religion I’ve read. No wonder Merton would later find such common ground with the Dalai Lama.

I wish Merton had done more than just briefly outlining the steps in reaching a state of contemplation and defining contemplation,

First comes the active life (practice of virtues, mortification, charity) which prepares us for contemplation. Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

Yet to stop here would be to fall short of perfection. According to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux it is the comparatively weak soul that arrives at contemplation but does not overflow with a love that must communicate what it knows of God to other men. For all the great Christian mystics without exception, Saint Bernard, Saint Gregory, Saint Theresa, Saint John of the Cross, Blessed John Ruysbroeck, Saint Bonaventure, the peak of the mystical life is a marriage of the soul with God which gives the saints a miraculous power, a smooth and tireless energy in working for God and for souls, which bears fruits in the sanctity of thousands and changes the course of religious and even secular history.

With this in mind, Saint Thomas could not fail to give the highest place to a vocation which, in his eyes, seemed destined to lead men to such a height of contemplation that the soul must overflow and communicate its secrets to the world.

but contemplation as he defines is certainly a tantalizing prospect, tantalizing enough that I added his New Seeds of Contemplation to my Amazon wish list. Is â€?”contemplation” just a different name for â€?”meditation” or are the two traditions different? Interesting, too, that contemplation seems tied so closely to his lifelong ambition to be a writer, one whose â€?”soul must overflow and communicate its secrets to the world.”

I suspect the climax of The Seven Storey Mountain can be found in this passage:

This means, in practice, that there is only one vocation. Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to a deep interior life perhaps even to mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others. And if you cannot do so by word, then by example. Yet if this sublime fire of infused love burns in your soul, it will inevitably send forth throughout the Church and the world an influence more tremendous than could be estimated by the radius reached by words or by example. Saint John of the Cross writes: “A very little of this pure love is more precious in the sight of God and of greater profit to the Church, even though the soul appear to be doing nothing, than are all other works put together.”

It’s hard to know whether Merton’s main purpose was to convert his readers to Catholicism or to convince them of the importance of Contemplation. I decided to read his book because several people I admired said that they had converted to Catholicism because of it. It obviously didn’t have that effect on me, and I doubt it would have even as a teenager.

On the other hand, as I noted it did enhance my interest in contemplation. Although I’m sorely tempted to download Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation on my Kindle immediately and begin reading it, I’m going to avoid that because I need to finish writing up some of my ideas on other books I’ve recently finished before I forget them entirely. One of the ways I’ve avoided writing lately is by picking up a new book and reading it instead. Maybe I’m just saving my brain for the many â€?”brain games” I’ve been playing lately.