| | Hi Villum,
Thanks for your fascinating post.
"I haven't seen much dark night related to concentration meditation, except that being concentrated makes it hit lots harder. But it you could be right in trying to fit it with the first A&P, which i suspect requires unusual (for pre-contemplative life) levels of concentration."
I’m not sure about the correspondence between John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Senses and concentration— as I said in my initial stumbling, I have a vague notion that the particular crisis of the Night of Sense might relate to the acquistion and exercise of concentrative states concurrent with an internal realignment having to do with “renunciation” — with the transition from seeking our gratification in “the world” to seeking our gratification “in God.” This is only possible, realistically, after what we are calling here the first A & P, when the possibility of “spiritual” juice has been revealed and the desire for that juice is strong enough to trump our previous conventional desires and motivate us to reorder our lives in the interest of cultivating deep prayer. I am only groping around here at all in the interests of cross-cultural mapping, and because of the fact that John distinguishes so emphatically between the two nights. The conduct required in both of them is basically the same, however; and the deepening cultivation, out of necessity, of the basic virtues of faith, humility, patience, compassion, courage, and so forth, is also largely the same. I think that it is what the nights deconstruct that seems like the meaningful variation.
For myself, i have never really cared whether I am in a “night of sense” or a “night of spirit,” in practice; by their fruits ye shall know them, and it is only in retrospect that i am prepared to see what exactly was “purged” or accomplished in any given round. Bernadette Roberts, whose reports and analyses of experience in this territory I trust to a very high degree, says in her published works that for her the night of sense ran right into the night of spirit; two for the price of one— she bought one and got one free, basically, and good for her, but obviously her books are no help on sorting things out here. Even in correspondence she says that the Passive Night of the Senses and the Active Night of the Spirit “overlap or go on at the same time, I treat them together.” I have definitely experienced multiple major nights, and at least two genuine and distinct emergences from them (and have cycled recurrently through the territory, in a spiral sort of way, on a smaller scale, frequently), so probably there are meaningful distinctions to be made here once the terminology is sorted out (and the guy using the terms is more lucid and informed). But without that lucidity, it might well be a waste of time to try to get too precise on what corresponds to what in what language.
I do think, in practical terms, that dark nights in the strict sense of the term (i mean, in practice— “on the cushion,” as Daniel often puts it) all have to do with the shift from content/state-centered prayer or practice to God-oriented pathlessness in the cloud of unknowing, roughly speaking— from meditation to contemplation, in Christian terms, and from concentration to insight, or from samatha jhana to vipassana jhana, to try to speak DO here (and one of my main interests in this thread is in fact learning the MCTB/dharmaoverground language, in the interests of discovering the range and limits of meaningful translation and its potential to deepen practice, and also, at the very least, making more fruitful conversations possible, if only in my MCTB pidgin, in the courtyard of the Contemplative Tower of Babel).
"I don't know much about the christian concept of the Dark Night, but i think i can distinguish to some degree between two kinds of 3rd vipassana jhana experiences i have had."
John’s second night, the Dark Night of the Spirit, to me, corresponds clearly and fairly precisely the 3rd vipassana jhana, and it seems like that is probably the most promising tentative translation to make here, as it seems like we’re on solid common ground with the experiences and in the same ballpark with their interpretation.
"There seems to be some sort of shift (note sure about this) between seemingly ordinary emotions (i guess fear through disgust), and then there's the deeply soul-wrenching giving up, casting out for something, anything to help (desire for deliverance, reobservation). I'm not sure about the mapping, but the second kind of dark night for seemed to arise from directly noticing that there were no place for "me" in any of this, after i had done a concentration meditation to become absorbed in the background emptiness from which phenomena arise (making the impermanence of phenomena very very noticeable in real time)."
Amen! This is the territory, whatever map we’re using. I agree that the conditions of the dark night seem to arise from the dissolution of our stabilizing concepts in prayer/meditation/life. The Christian way is what Daniel calls a “True Self” path, and the Buddhist way is a “No Self” path, but in both cases i think what the dark night reveals is in large part the emptiness of whatever self we’ve been assuming we were, or had; and that the gist of the work of the dark night is making peace with that. For the Christian, another aspect, in addition to the Incredible Shrinking Self is the dissolution at increasingly subtle levels of our constructions of “God.” All the handles fall off the divine, even as the hands fall off the self that was grasping for those handles.
"My impression, and i hope you will correct me, is that centering prayer doesn't actually involve looking closely at phenomena in the same way as vipassana. This fits with my understanding (following Duncan Barford: Handbook for the recently enlightened) that there is another kind of meditation that can lead to the same sorts of awakening - a meditation where you surrender everything you are to a higher power, and keep surrendering until the you isn't there anymore, because everything have been surrendered. Would this fit with centering prayer?"
The centering prayer thing is in many ways a can of worms, or a truck full of cans of worms, worthy of its own thread at least, starting with all the trickiness of it being “Centering Prayer,” a distinct brand name; and moving on through the politics and ecclesiastical politics of that; the history of the movement, as a distinct impulse of contemplative renewal within the Catholic tradition; the developments and strengths and weaknesses of the specific brand name itself; and the issue of Christian “mantra” practice in general. (The Centering Prayer folks are at great pains to distinguish what they call a “Sacred Word” from “mantra,” for various reasons, mostly in my opinion having to do with covering their ass with various Christian elements (necessarily, for the most part: again, this level of stuff is complicated socially and culturally). There is a species of Christian meditation developed by John Main that does call their mantra a mantra. The invoking of a whatchamaycallit as a prayer technique goes back at least to the desert monks of the third and forth centuries, and from there moves in a basically uninterrupted line with the hesychasts into present-day Eastern Orthodoxy, which thus needed no Centering Prayer movement and its complications just to start simply praying again. But I digress.
A very short answer to your question, in the spirit in which I think you are asking it, is that in the basic “technique” of centering prayer there is in fact no element of close examination of the passing pheneomena as there is in vipassana. The CP thing is simply to notice what comes up and let it go as it is noticed, with no emphasis on analysis or seeing-through or “noting” in the more technical sense of MCTB. The “orthodox” Centering Prayer differs from a lot of mantra work in that it says to only invoke the sacred word when distraction is noticed, when you’ve gotten caught up in something, sensory, emotional, ideational, etc. The use of the prayer word is thus, as you say, a kind of surrender of everything else and you “keep surrendering until the you isn’t there anymore, because everything has been surrendered.” At that point, “not I, but Christ in me” is left, theologically speaking. |