(Rembrandt, The Philosopher in Meditation, Public Domain)
Dear Friends,
In the coming months I will be shifting my occasional writings to the Substack platform for publication. My hope is simply to connect with more readers more easily. I would love for you all to join me on my Substack as well. I will continue to post to this blog and share with my existing e-mail list at least for a while, but some content including short notes and poems may be posted to Substack only. Please join me there if you can!
Contemplation can go by many names. Sometimes we call it “prayer” or “worship,” sometimes, “meditation” or “reflection,” sometimes even “rest” or just “silence.” These names often denote somewhat different forms of contemplation with different specifics of praxis and emphasis. They are not all the same, and yet they are branches growing from a single root.
At the heart of contemplation, in whatever form, is attention. Contemplation is the act of setting aside time to pay attention to a different set of realities from those on which we normally focus. In contemplation we turn from the regular busyness and cares of everyday life toward reflective thoughts of various kinds, or perhaps seek to silence our thoughts altogether for a little while. That to which we attend is what becomes real to us, and thus in contemplation we widen the scope of attention to bring back into our reality things like God, philosophy, peace, insight, or merely silence.
Historically, it seems, every culture until our own has gone to substantial lengths to make space for contemplation. Times of prayer, weekly gatherings for liturgy and worship, regular practices of meditation and devotion, times of fasting and silence, various kinds of sabbath, pilgrimages and spirit quests—all such social institutions encode the importance of contemplation and create a communal expectation that people will take time at least now and then to focus their minds on one or more of its forms. Further, most human cultures have made room for certain community members to specialize in the work of contemplation in order to share their insights about its practice with others. Monks and nuns, priests and shamans, holy men and holy women, gurus, oracles, philosophers, and wise men are found everywhere one looks in history and all across the world. Cultures of the past, and most cultures of the present, seem to have an intuitive understanding that contemplation is something as essential as law, or art, or warfare, or agriculture.
It would be a radical exaggeration to claim that no one in our Western world still values or practices contemplation. Prayer, meditation, yoga, spiritual retreats, sabbaticals, time in nature and many other contemplative practices remain a crucial part of the lives of millions of Westerners, and if anything interest in contemplation is on something of an upswing. Yet, it does seem to me that in our secular culture contemplation has come to be seen as something optional and voluntary—the kind of thing that some people may like to do but that many people just happen to have no interest in. And this, frankly, is a bit of a disaster. Because contemplation is not, in fact, optional—not if one wants to be any sort of healthy human being in the long term.
Consider for a moment the observation above: that traditional cultures in both the past and present have always made space for contemplation. On the surface it might seem surprising that subsistence farmers, or people living hand to mouth in fishing villages, or nomads herding livestock across the desert would treat as absolutely essential the work of prayer or meditation or yoga or sabbath. Moderns may find it easy to scoff and write off such things as mere superstition, and point to the incredible prosperity of our society as proof of our superiority. And to be sure, traditional cultures are often extremely superstitious. Yet, traditional people are also not completely stupid, and they are certainly not motivated to starve to death by wasting time on things that do not benefit themselves and their communities in the long run. The fact that people living on the razor’s edge of survival have both historically and in the present age spent more time in contemplation than those of us living in history’s richest and most prosperous society ought to tell us something.
Traditional societies have made room for contemplation because it is a requirement of long term human survival. Contemplation is not like baseball, or jazz music, or French cuisine, or chess—things that many people enjoy and many people happen not to. It is also not like the belief in a specific set of gods, or the preference for a certain style of clothing or architecture, or the choice of certain instruments for making music. Rather, contemplation is to the human mind as essential nutrients are to the human body. Certainly we can live for quite a while without any iron, or B12, or Vitamin C in our diets. But eventually a complete lack of such things will catch up to us and we will begin to break down. So it is also with contemplation. One single day without contemplation will not result in some kind of catastrophe by any means—but unless one makes space for it regularly over time, the mind will begin to degrade and slowly fall apart. And as one person after another begins to succumb to such a breakdown, society itself will begin to suffer as a whole. Traditional cultures, it seems to me, have known this intuitively—have sensed that people need to take time (usually daily) to shift their attention away from the things in front of their eyes and toward things that cannot be seen—giving the mind space to reflect on the transcendent, or the ideal, or to simply reflect on itself for a while.
The lack of such an instinct is one of the many reasons, I think, that today we find ourselves in a world of almost unimaginable prosperity accompanied by sky-rocketing rates of anxiety and depression. The human mind cannot process the challenges of life, the struggles of things like grief and loss, the uncertainty we all face about the future, the questions of why we are here and what it all means—in fact it cannot even process the simple problems of arranging a daily schedule and keeping up with one’s chores and work—without taking time for contemplation. The mind must turn its attention away from the things of this world from time to time in order to carry out those very things themselves, to say nothing of finding peace, acceptance, love, and balance within one’s existence.
This really should not shock us. The fact that one must shift one’s attention from time to time is obvious if we reflect on it momentarily. Think, for instance, about a long haul trucker, who must drive from Halifax to Vancouver and back repeatedly. While this man’s task is obviously to drive his truck, it would be virtually impossible for him to get through even one single trip across the country—to say nothing about regular trips back and forth—without precisely taking an appropriate amount of time to not drive his truck. He must sleep, eat, and rest along the way or else he will eventually careen into a ditch and his trip will be over, quite possibly along with his life. It is easy to think of active driving as the only essential component of our trucker getting to the destination. But this is not at all the case. Not driving for part of the time is equally essential for completing such a long journey.
Life as a whole works in a similar way. The road is long and we need time to turn our eyes away from it, to pay attention to other things—to contemplate what is deep and meaningful in existence. In a culture wherein we are not reminded to take time for contemplation, more and more of us are like truckers trying to do nothing but drive 24 hours a day and seven days a week, taking more and more caffeine pills and cigarettes to try and keep ourselves awake and our mind on the road, not realizing that no matter what we try we can never keep our attention on driving forever, and that by attempting to do so we are only putting ourselves and everyone around us in danger. We devote all of our attention all of the time to the things of this world. From the moment we wake, we think of nothing but our work, our career, the latest news and politics, our family and its needs, our friends, our hobbies. When we take breaks we fill them with entertainment to make sure our minds remain focused on something material. Then we lie in bed, heads spinning with worldly thoughts even into our sleep, which is restless and disturbed. Then we wake up to do it all again the next day.
Work, family, friends, and all the rest are not evil things to care about—not at all. We should pay attention to them, and indeed we will spend most of our lives attending to things of this world. But like the trucker who must sometimes not drive in order to get where he is going, we must sometimes turn away from attention to this world if we are going to carry on living in it. Focusing on our work in itself cannot ever give us a sense of whether our work is truly worth doing and why. Focusing on the immediate needs of our family gives us no time to reflect on and cultivate the love we wish to share with them. Focusing on only the outward tasks of life can never bring about an apprehension of their real telos. And above all, focusing on only this world can never provide us with an understanding of our place in it; we must step outside it all for a time if we are to gain any sense of the true context of our existence. Attention, as I have said, is what makes something real within the scope of our awareness. That to which we never attend essentially does not exist for us, even if it exists in some objective sense. And therefore if we do not attend to truth, love, peace, meaning, and God Himself through contemplation, none of these things genuinely exists to us and our lives will become increasingly deformed owing to the absence of these realities over time.
When something is necessary for our health and survival, we nonetheless sometimes have to force ourselves to do it. The fact that we may seldom or never find ourselves in the mood to stop and contemplate does not mean that it has become unnecessary for us or that we can safely skip it without any negative consequences. In framing contemplation as welcome but entirely optional, our culture has taught us that we need not push ourselves to create a habit of contemplation unless we happen to feel like it. And this is where our culture’s attitude becomes so destructive. We long ago passed laws prohibiting long haul truckers from simply driving for days at a time without a break for rest and sleep. Yet when it comes to the work of turning our attention away from the world in order to let our minds and souls process our existence for a time, we leave such things entirely at the discretion of the individual, and encode no space whatsoever in the daily or weekly cycles of our society for such important work. Even those who might desire to pursue contemplation are, more often than not, largely left to the wolves and must either make up their contemplative practice as they go, or themselves do the work of finding a real tradition that can teach it to them.
Little wonder that more and more people are becoming depressed and anxious. Depression and anxiety are the signals of a mind that has become exhausted and found itself adrift without an anchor. Such feelings are meant to be our mind’s way of forcing us to take the time to rest, refocus, and ultimately contemplate. In this way, they are similar to bodily pain, which is meant to force us to attend to an injury so that we can take steps to heal it through rest or protection. Yet in our world we refuse again and again to listen to the mind’s signals that we must stop and reflect, treating them instead as though they are somehow pathologies in and of themselves. And so they grow louder and more prominent as they seek hopelessly to draw our attention away from this world for a while. Just as Victorian sailors once died at a horrifying rate owing to the lack of an invisible nutrient (Vitamin C) of which no one at the time was aware, so we stand by while more and more of us break down for lack of essential mental and spiritual practices that our culture falsely claims are, at best, optional pastimes for those who happen to like them.
How our culture got to this point I could not say for sure. And how we can turn our culture as a whole around is far beyond my ability to discern. But the good news is that at least at the individual level, any one of us may learn at any moment what our ancestors from every corner of the world once knew intuitively. Taking time for contemplation—taking time to turn attention away from even the most important aspects of our lives in this world—is essential to our very survival and something we must do regularly if we wish to remain healthy, sane people in the years that we each have left in front of us. Even a few minutes a day of simply sitting in silence can have an enormous impact on the health of our minds. Longer periods of time, and habits of regular deep prayer or meditation are all the better. Moreover, when a habit of contemplation has begun to be ingrained within us, we will soon find ourselves enjoying it, looking forward to our contemplative moments, and resisting more and more easily the temptation to skip them and do something else.
To get there we must resist any sense that taking time to contemplate is unimportant, recreational, or wasteful. Contemplation is not something we do just for fun—it is not a game or a form of entertainment. This is why traditional cultures take it so very seriously. A Muslim need not have any interest in chess, but he must pray five times a day. A Buddhist is not required to have any particular job, but she must meditate regularly. An Orthodox Christian like me need not run marathons, but he must keep his prayer rule and attend the liturgy each week. Contemplation is integral to the work and practice of being human. Any person who wishes to grow into the creature they are meant to be must contemplate—regularly—or else stand by while their mind and spirit degrade into illness and misery.
Contemplation is not optional. You must begin today.
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