Christian Meditation: Awakening the Christ Within

By John G. & Holly A. Shobris

Western philosophy emphasizes the reality of the physical world. Eastern philosophy emphasizes the supremacy of the inner world of mind. In this consciousness-raising book, John and Holly Shobris explore a spiritual blending of both, using the inner orientation of the East to deepen an appreciation of the Christian faith. The East's emphasis on

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jan 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638374954

John G. & Holly A. Shobris

John and Holly Shobris are interested in bringing the richness of authentic Christianity to the reader. John and Holly are deeply interested in the many denominations of the Christian faith and have a special affinity for Eastern Christianity. In their book, they wish to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with Eastern philosophy and how that philosophy can deepen the Christian faith without abandoning it.John is a clinical psychologist with a deep interest in Christian theology and Eastern philosophy. Holly is a nature enthusiast who finds a spiritual connection through nature. She has helped John with the mechanics and themes of their book.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Meditation on Jesus Christ is a form of prayer, eliminating the distinction between meditation and prayer.

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n our opinion, Christians are not well known for meditating. Christianity is a religion associated with prayer rather than meditation, although there certainly are Christian practitioners who regularly meditate. However, the distinction between prayer and meditation is not completely clear. Is silent prayer a form of meditation? Is meditation that focuses on a particular deity, practiced in Tibetan Buddhism, a form of prayer (Thurman, 1995)? These are difficult questions to answer. Meditation is often associated with Eastern religious practices, while prayer is more often a function of Western religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Meditation may stress a more impersonal approach to religious expression, while individual prayer is a more personal expression where somebody sincerely requests help or expresses thanks to the one God of creation, assuming the religion is monotheistic (Sullivan, 2013).

This impersonal-personal distinction between meditation and prayer reflects the different emphasis of Eastern and Western religious traditions. Although Eastern religions such as Hinduism have many gods and goddesses that can be the subject of prayer, the ultimate concern of Eastern religious expression is some form of enlightenment. Therefore, the personal relationship between a person and a deity is not the final focus. The final focus is always enlightenment, whether in this life or the lives to come (Eastern religions believe the essence of a person is reborn into another existence if enlightenment does not take place). To achieve enlightenment, a relationship with a deity is not required. A person can easily ignore any relationship with the divine. Here we can find the essence of meditation. Meditation does not require a personal relationship with a deity. It only requires contemplation on existential issues (however, they are defined by the person) and achieving some type of resolution based on that contemplation. An excellent example of two different answers to these existential issues comes from Jainism and Buddhism. Jains follow Mahavira, who lived around the time of the Buddha (fifth or sixth century B.C.). Jains adhere to radical nonviolence and ultimately believe that a truly enlightened person will starve himself to death instead of destroying life to eat (Long, 2009). Buddhists, who follow the enlightened one or the Buddha, insist that nonviolence is a state of mind and that eating, as long as it is done with restraint, does not violate the principle of nonviolence. Unlike Jains, the Buddhists follow the Middle Way, which emphasizes moderation. Although both religions have different answers to ultimate existential issues, they both do not require a personal and prayerful relationship with the divine (Nadeau, 2014; Noss & Grangaard, 2018).

Of course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are closely related religions that are very different from the Eastern way. All three religions emphasize a relationship with a personal God. Out of the three religions, Christianity is hyperpersonal. Not only does it emphasize a personal relationship with God, but it emphasizes the overpowering love of God, a love so strong that it includes God taking human form. Although Hinduism allows for many human manifestations (avatars) of God, the Christian Incarnation is a one-time event to save humanity from rivalry and violence. In Christianity, as in Judaism and Islam, it is impossible to avoid prayer. God is a person and is addressed as a person (Peters, 2004). Sometimes addressing God involves words, sometimes it involves silent contemplation. However, it never involves ignoring God and replacing prayer with an impersonal meditation (Van Breemen, 1974).

FURTHER READINGS:

Long, J., 2009, Jainism.

Peters, F., 2004, The Children of Abraham.

Nadeau, R., 2014, Asian Religions.

Noss, D. & Grangaard, B., 2018, A History of the World's Religions.

Sullivan, L. (editor), 2013, Religions of the World.

Thurman, R., 1995, Essential Tibetan Buddhism.

Van Breemen, P., 1974, As Bread That Is Broken.

Chapter 1

CHRISTIANITY AND EASTERN PHILOSOPHY

There is no contradiction between Christianity and Eastern philosophy if Jesus Christ is at the center of the synthesis.

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robably what distinguishes Western and Eastern philosophy more than anything else is the way each tradition deals with reason or rationality. In the West, reason is supreme and regarded as the major vehicle of understanding. Greek thought differentiates between dianoia and nous. Dianoia has to do with syllogistic, mathematical, and technical knowledge while nous is more akin to intuition (VujisiŽ, 2011). However, the Western Roman Empire (home to Latin Christianity) lost the emphasis on this distinction as it separated from the Eastern Roman Empire (home to Greek Christianity) congealed by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine (280-337). The Romans were great conquerors and builders and this tendency to ignore nous might have arisen from the ancient Roman bias toward the practical and technical. The Eastern Roman Empire did not carry this bias and was much more loyal to the Hellenistic culture that preserved the distinction between dianoia and nous. As Latin and Greek Christianity grew further and further apart, dianoia has been the dominant mode of thought in the West, while nous is preserved in Greek Orthodox theology, where it is often translated as spiritual intuition or spiritual intellect. Consequently, Eastern Christianity, associated with Hellenistic culture and preserving the distinction between dianoia and nous, recognizes nous to be the superior faculty. Western Christianity, arising out of the Western Roman culture that started to distance itself from Hellenistic culture, diminished the importance of nous, elevating dianoia to supreme status. Eventually, as the scientific revolution took hold, dianoia became the only legitimate way to understand reality and nous as intuitive insight began to be seen as unreliable and unscientific, more appropriate for artists rather than seekers of scientific truth (Baynum, 2012; Cohen, 2015).

The Greek distinction between reason (dianoia) and intuition (nous) is present in many cultures and Eastern philosophy is especially attuned to intuitiveness (Morgan, 2001). Yet, Eastern philosophy recognizes the importance of reason. For example, Asian Indians are no stranger to mathematics (Mazur, 2014). They invented the number zero (the Mayans in the New World independently invented zero as well) and Arabic numerals (Arabs adopted them from India). Another example comes from China. The Chinese produced thinkers who delineated rules of logic, invented gunpower, and made paper many hundreds of years before the products of these thinkers came to the West (Mitter, 2006). Despite these inventions (and many others) using reason, it is undeniable that the Eastern approach is dominated by intuitive insight. Consistent with this emphasis, science was never formalized in the East. The discovery of the formal rules of science leading to the modern world is a unique development of the West (Halle, 1977). The East's contribution to civilization clearly rests in spiritual insight, although many Eastern countries have very successfully adopted Western science and technology and China has even adopted Western philosophy (Marxism). Despite the willingness of the East to adopt Western-style science, technology, and philosophy, the historical emphasis in the East has been on psychology, consciousness, and the inner life. The failure of the West to recognize the East's gift of spiritual insight to human culture is a blind spot in the Western cultural matrix. It is important to remember that Christianity is not a product of European civilization, and early Christianity maintained its connection to the intuitive nature of religious expression.

Christianity was transported to the West by early Jewish and Greek converts. It largely existed underground until the Emperor Constantine legalized it and eventually made it the official religion of the Roman Empire (Cary & Scullard, 1975). Greek Christianity, practiced by the Roman (Byzantine) Empire of the East, used spiritual intuition as the foundational tool of theology. Fortunately, Greek Christianity led the ecumenical councils, and many of the doctrinal formulations of the Christian faith are from the East. Where the Latin Church made decisions independent of the Greeks, it deviated from the guiding light of spiritual intuition. For example, in an effort to fight Arianism, the Latin Church decided to change the original Nicene Creed, a profession of faith established by the first two ecumenical councils. It was confronted by the disapproval of the Greek Church, which insisted that the change was bad theology. To this day, Western Christianity does not seem to understand why the change meets such disapproval from the East. The change is not irrational and makes sense when dianoia is used. However, from the standpoint of nous, which transcends ordinary reason, it makes no sense and is a mockery to monotheism (Burgess, 1989; MacCulloch, 2009).

From an Eastern perspective, monotheism is preserved if the Son and Holy Spirit are generated from a primordial source, which is described as the very essence (core) of God the Father. The Western alteration of the Nicene Creed involves adding that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as well as the Son. In Latin, adding the Son as cogenerator of the Holy Spirit is called the filioque. The change means two persons of the Holy Trinity generate a third person (hypostasis). This lopsided Trinity is emphatically rejected by the East (Lossky, 1985). Although the Father and the Son share the same essence (homoousios), they share this essence because the Father generates the other two persons of the Holy Trinity. In other words, the primordial essence comes only from the Father, not from the Father and the Son. The Son and the Holy Spirit are equal to the Father because the Father gave them his essence before the creation of space and time, making them equally divine and united in essence (Siecienski, 2010). It is important to understand that all of this reasoning is lost in Western theology. Western theology seems to suggest the Eastern approach to the Holy Trinity is just one theological interpretation out of many others that are equally valid.

The Western approach is based on an abstraction and not spiritual intuition. The Holy Trinity is abstracted as one God united in a single essence. Since all three persons of the Holy Trinity have the same essence, the Western abstraction sees nothing wrong with stating that two persons of the Trinity generate a third Person (Pohl, 2019). Unfortunately, the reasoning of the West does not speak to the heart. It only speaks to the mind. It is rationally correct but esthetically and intuitively wrong. In this sense, the criticism of Judaism and Islam that Christianity is not truly monotheistic has some validity. Only when the united essence of God, coming from the Father, generates the Son and the Holy Spirit (Bulgakov, 2004) is monotheism genuinely preserved.

The association of reasoning with esthetic appreciation and the heart may seem strange. A science-minded person may dismiss such an association as muddy thinking and irrational. In the West, esthetics and things of the heart are dissociated from hard science and reality. The development of psychology as a science is an excellent example of this dissociation. In the early history of experimental psychology, the content of the conscious mind was the focus. However, there was no way to reach objective consensus, even with training, when experiments relied on the reports of subjects describing their experience of conscious reality. For this reason, psychology abandoned studying consciousness and focused on behavior (Woody & Viney, 2017). Only recently, when the methodology of behaviorism is preserved, is psychology dipping their toes back into the lake of consciousness. Consciousness became a respectable topic of study again (Dehaene, 2001).

Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, sees all reality stemming from consciousness. Nothing exists apart from consciousness. We assume there is an independent space-time world. However, this assumption cannot be objectively verified because everything depends on someone being conscious of a space-time world. If the space-time world exists apart from consciousness, there is no way to verify this claim. Only a consciousness can verify the existence of a space-time world. Once you remove consciousness, for all practical purposes, the space-time world ceases to exist (Gold, 2015).

Western understanding of consciousness is different from the Eastern understanding. The West focuses on the content of consciousness. In contrast, the East focuses on consciousness-in-itself (Hall & Lindzey, 1978). The number of mental entities that can potentially exist in consciousness is practically infinite. It is consciousness-in-itself that unites all of the different elements of consciousness. Despite the vast number of potential mental entities, they can be clearly defined and described (at least, in principle). In contrast, consciousness-in-itself defies clear description. It is the background that unites all conscious content. As a unifying agent, it has no modules, components, or boundaries.

An appreciation of consciousness may illuminate our understanding of paleotheology. Early human religious expression deals with the projection of our experience of consciousness onto animals, plants, and even inanimate objects. This mentality is called animism, consisting of the belief that potentially everything has a spirit. These spirits can help or hinder people and the power of these spirits is referred to as mana (Peoples, Duda, & Marlowe, 2016). Animism would be impossible to understand without consciousness, an experiential reality that the West tends to minimize. However, the projection of consciousness is not just a characteristic of early humans. Modern humans project their own consciousness just as much as the Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, and other human beings of prehistory and history. As social animals, each human being assumes that other people possess a seat of consciousness (mind) similar to every other human being (Maibom, 2020). In other words, we project our experience of consciousness onto other people. It is important to point out this projection is not based on objective reality. Consciousness is always experienced as a singular event. We assume other people and animals have consciousness. However, there is no direct evidence for this assumption and there can never be any evidence in the future. By principle, consciousness is a singular, subjective experience that cannot be shared with others. Nothing can change that.

An empirical, experience-based approach to consciousness cannot draw the unempirical conclusion that consciousness is plural. There is no experience of plural consciousness. In other words, no person can experience more than one consciousness. Consequently, the assumption that other people and animals have a separate consciousness is a nonempirical belief. Another word for a nonempirical belief is superstition. At first, this position may sound ridiculous. What could be more obvious than the existence of other minds? People act like they have minds. Is it possible they are robots or sophisticated, carbon-based, mechanical beings without any inner life? Not really. Maybe we all share one mind. As fringe as this proposition may sound, Erwin Schršdinger (1887-1961), one of the fathers of quantum physics, believed that consciousness is a singularity and our belief in plural minds is an illusion (Schršdinger, 1967). If you do not believe one of the fathers of quantum physics, would you believe millions of other people? Most Asian Indian philosophy embraces the belief in a universal consciousness that is the ground of existence. All other minds are a manifestation of this universal mind. In fact, the belief in independent minds is a kind of illusion. One important goal in life is to transcend this illusion by a commitment to meditation and the attainment of enlightenment (Gupta, 2012). The conclusion that consciousness is a singularity and the sole essence behind all existence is a type of monism. Dualism is the contrary position. One type of dualism concludes reality consists of two types of essences: one essence is spirit or consciousness and the other essence is matter or space-time (Heil, 2020). A third alternative is pluralism, concluding that reality consists of multiple essences and hierarchies. Pluralism will not be considered separately from dualism since it can be regarded as an extension of dualism. In this regard, dualism is the simplest pluralism, consisting of two kinds of essences.

FURTHER READINGS:

Bulgakov, S., 2004, The Comforter.

Burgess, S., 1989, The Holy Spirit.

Bynum, W., 2012, A Little History of Science.

Cary, M. & Scullard, H., 1975, A History of Rome Down to the Reign of Constantine.

Cohen, H., 2015, The Rise of Modern Science Explained.

Dehaene, S., 2001, Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness.

Gold, J., 2015, Paving the Great Way.

Gupta, B., 2012, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy.

Hall, C. & Lindzey, G., 1978, Eastern Psychology. In Hall, C. & Lindzey, G., Theories of Personality.

Halle, L., 1977, Out of Chaos.

Heil, J., 2020, Philosophy of Mind (Fourth Edition).

Lossky, V., 1985, In the Image and Likeness of God.

MacCulloch, D., 2009, Christianity.

Maibom, H., 2020, Empathy.

Mazur, J., 2014, Enlightening Symbols.

Mitter, R., 2016, Modern China.

Morgan, D., 2001, The Best Guide to Eastern Philosophy and Religion.

People, H., Duda, P. & Marlowe, F., 2016, Hunter-gatherers and the origin of religion, In Human Nature.

Pohl,