Truth, Relief, and Brotherly Love in the Mirror of Self-Reflection

BRO. CHUCK DUNNING

The image of a mirror can be very helpful in understanding contemplative experience, because it is the nature of our consciousness, of our minds, to reflect.   The term ‘reflect’ not only refers to the act of pondering upon something, but refers even more directly to the way the mind works.  All the images we see in our minds  –  whether images of things in the world around us, of memories, fantasies, or inspired visions – are representations of things and not the things themselves.  This process is also true for all our other senses, but nothing represents the reflective nature of the mind better than the way a mirror works for the sense of sight.  Even when a person attempts to think of his or her own mind, the thought is only an image of the mind, and thus is an action or a part of the mind, but not the mind itself.

Those last statements indicate how thinking about something might actually interfere with our ability to be as authentically present in the moment as possible, and thus to more completely observe and perceive the greater reality or truth of the moment.   As an example, consider the well-known phenomenon that thinking too much about doing something, like dancing, while actually trying to do it, gets in the way of dancing as well as we might.  Another example can be found in the obsessive shutterbug, one who can’t stop taking pictures of something long enough to simply be present in the more direct experience of it.  The more we think about something, the less we actually experience it, whether it is something we regard as external to self or something as internal as our most secret thoughts and feelings.

When practicing silent meditation or contemplative prayer, one sits in greater openness to whatever arises in consciousness, whether a sensory perception in response to something external, or thoughts and feelings arising in other ways.  This kind of prayer is practiced in faithful acceptance of whatever actually is, filtering and distorting it as little as possible with expectations, rules, analyses, or judgments. It means opening our awareness more completely to the immediate facts of existence and the mysterious presence of the Divine.  We therefore see more clearly the truth of things just as they are in the present moment, and less as though in a dusty and warped mirror. 

One of the most common experiences in such practice is a greater awareness of the whole of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Furthermore, most of us aren’t pleased to observe how much of a crazy mess is going on within us.   We discover that we aren’t nearly as rational, centered, harmonious, practically competent, emotionally secure, intellectually certain, spiritually enlightened, or morally virtuous as we’d often like to pretend to others and ourselves.   In fact, anyone who practices like this for very long eventually comes to see in oneself the seeds, if not the seedlings, or even the buds, of every sin ever committed by anyone.

There are many ways we can react to looking in that mirror.  I have no doubt that an intuitive sense of these possibilities, if not some actual experience of them, leads some people to consider contemplative practice too dangerous, and even speak of it as risking demonic possession.   Those sorts of fears should be respected for the individuals gripped by them, because too much raw truth can be harmful when we’re unprepared to cope with it.   Yet for others, the initial shock and horror of their existential disillusionment is eventually relieved, giving way to deeper and more authentic reverence, humility, gratitude, compassion, kindness, and selflessness.  We become less burdened by all the frailty, confusion, fragmentation, dishonesty, and negativity of our own humanity and that of others, and we see that these things come and go within a greater context, the beautiful wholeness of our being and becoming.  Our own looking inward upon the mirror of the soul, releasing our illusions and accepting reality as it is, in turn leads us to see others more clearly, to love them and ourselves more freely. We are less prone to be narrowly and rigidly judgmental, and more inclined to offer the relief that comes through understanding, forgiveness, good counsel, encouragement, and support.  This is how contemplative practice serves our Masonic principles of Truth, Relief, Brotherly Love.

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Wielding the Contemplative Gavel

BRO. CHUCK DUNNING

(C) Patrick Slattery- 2012

We talk a lot about virtues in Masonry, and for good reason. As the school of positive psychology persuasively argues, human beings fulfill more of their potentials and dreams by focusing more of their attention and energy on their strengths and the good that they desire to do. Even so, there is folly in ignoring our weaknesses or our potentials for doing harm. It can also be true that we fool ourselves by hiding vices behind the masks of virtues, and that is often nowhere more tempting and troublesome than in those parts of our lives we label as “spiritual.” This article will chip away a little on such issues for those of us on a contemplative journey in Masonry.

These matters take us right back to the Entered Apprentice degree and the lesson about perfecting the rough ashlar, which requires that we be ready, willing, and able to identify our vices. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t always easy to discern our vices. As previously noted, sometimes we can convince ourselves that they are actually virtues. Compounding this potential for self-deception is the fact that we don’t always have conscious awareness of everything occurring in our psyches.

Furthermore, in one set of circumstances it may be virtuous to think and act in a particular way, while in another situation such thinking and behavior would be more an expression of our vices and superfluities. These are among the reasons why it may be useful to regard self-awareness as our first contemplative practice, the first virtue to employ and enhance. Scottish Rite Masons should recall that in the Fourth Degree, when we are told we are ascending “into the skies of spiritual knowledge,” we are given the Key to the Mysteries, which is further explained as the key of self-awareness (Know Thyself!).

Self-awareness and discernment demand, in part, that we ask ourselves, “Why? Why am I thinking what I’m thinking? Why am I doing what I’m doing?” In doing so, it’s helpful to not settle for the first answers that come up. We can probe more deeply and courageously by asking: “Why do I want what I want, which is to say, what are all my motives and my intentions? What could be the worst of them? What might I be most ashamed to admit?”

Examining, evaluating, and intentionally changing this inner tapestry — motives, intentions, vices, and virtues – is something we must do for ourselves, although others can be of assistance in different ways.  So I offer you some of the deceptive vices I and others have discovered in asking ourselves such questions, specifically with regard to our interests and efforts in contemplative practice. I’ll start with two basic ones, and then I’ll present several that involve those two in more complex ways. As you will no doubt see, all these vices can have countless intersections with each other.

Basic Vices for Contemplatives

Hypocrisy: choosing to appear more virtuous, principled, or adherent to some belief, value, or practice than I actually am, such as self-righteously criticizing others for vices that I also have.

Spiritual Pride: attitudes of arrogance, conceit, self-righteousness, or vanity based on the conviction that my beliefs, values, or practices make me superior to others in one or more ways.

More Complex Vices for Contemplatives

False Humility: denying my own worth, strengths, or accomplishments, or otherwise assuming an inauthentic appearance of being meek, lowly, or servile; a pretense often motivated by the fear of seeming prideful and therefore being judged as hypocritical.
 

Spiritual Materialism: shoring up my spiritual pride by collecting things as evidence to myself and others of being more sophisticated, advanced, or praiseworthy; such things may include artworks, books, concepts, historical knowledge, jargon, degrees, titles, honors, positions, vows, practices, spiritual experiences, ‘gurus,’ students, disciples, etc.

False Asceticism: adopting forms of austerity, abstinence, and fasting, or appearing to do so, for the purposes of seeming more holy, enlightened, or pious to myself or others.

False Benevolence: a pretense of being kinder, more caring, more compassionate, or more charitable than I am genuinely motivated to behave, in the attempt to totally conceal my actual hostility, selfishness, or even disinterestedness.

False Equanimity: giving the appearance of rarely if ever having strong reactions to or feelings about things, rarely if ever being stressed, worried, angry, hurt, passionate or even delighted; this is a psychosocial strategy that requires minimizing and compartmentalizing the emotional aspects of being because they are regarded as too dangerous.

Acedia: an air of apathy, ennui, or boredom with ordinary matters, as if I am simply beyond the mundane silliness that disturbs other people, while in fact I am avoiding coping with realities that disturb me in some way.

Romantic Bliss: a euphoric affectation of extreme positivity, optimism, happiness, or contentment worn as a mask over my feelings of dissatisfaction, disappointment,  pessimism, frustration, and hopelessness. The term 'romantic' is used in the sense of "marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized." (see Merriam-Webster.com)
 

Romantic Despair: a dramatic affectation of hopelessness, pointlessness, pessimism, or defeatism, involving a disaffection with life for failing to be congruent with my ideas about the way it should be; similar to acedia in its avoidance of actually trying to cope more effectively with life.

Romantic Rage: a bitter affectation of loathing, hatred, and ill will toward various aspects of life, including other people, for failing to match my ideas about how they should be; another vice of avoidance.

This is far from a complete list, but is perhaps a worthwhile starting place for anyone interested in contemplatively wielding the gavel. As we do so, we may discover other vices that are very common, including a self-loathing that keeps us stuck in negativity and at war with ourselves. Such self-loathing is often rooted in the fear that we cannot satisfy our idealized notions of perfection or of being acceptable and admirable to others. We may even mistakenly consider such desires as detestable in themselves.

Of course, as we discover vices in ourselves, we naturally ask what we can do about them. One fundamental answer is that it’s helpful to simply be more honest and accepting about what it means to be human, which in turns enables us to exercise more self-compassion and genuine self-nurturance. These inner developments naturally facilitate us becoming more authentically virtuous people, reflecting our healthy self-love in the ways we become more loving with others.

Finally, I want to avoid giving the impression that these processes are merely a formula of personal development that’s entirely within our conscious control. As we earlier considered, we don’t have immediate conscious access to everything in our souls. We will miscalculate, misunderstand, and make mistakes because, to some extent, we are always mysteries to ourselves. To acknowledge that fact is an important part of accepting our humanity. Ultimately, contemplative practices such as this are about penetrating into the deepest mysteries of our being with a sense of adventure, experiencing the joys of spiritual discovery and creativity. Wielding the gavel may thus become more of an ongoing artistic experiment than a painfully arduous labor toward an unattainable completion.

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Engaging the Risks of Contemplative Practice

BRO. CHUCK DUNNING

Across all great spiritual traditions, there are warnings about risks in contemplative practices. This article explores some of those risks and associated problems, all of which I have personally experienced to some extent. 

The Problem of Results

I’ll begin approaching this issue from the observation that each of us has a tendency to judge some particular kind of experience as especially meaningful or rewarding, and so we can naturally focus our efforts on contemplative practices that we believe improve our chances of having such experiences, our metaphorical wages.  However, because very few practices have a 100% return of the desired results, the effect of partial reinforcement can push us toward a kind of addiction in which we feel compelled to try harder and harder to get the high, no matter what the cost.  In effect, we run the risk of our practice becoming a drug that we use to attain our particular favorite high. Casinos profit obscenely from this phenomenon, and so do some people in the spirituality/religion business, but I digress.

From this point, let’s consider different categories for experiences and practices people commonly consider meaningful or rewarding in their spiritual lives.  This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good starting place and you are encouraged to add some ideas of your own.  It will probably be fairly easy for you to look at the list and pick out a few things at each end of your own like/dislike scale.

Intellectual – These experiences are about the discovery, acquisition, processing and communication of information, ideas, and insight.  Along with such effects through the usual academic pursuits, this category would include those from all forms of analytical, theoretical, and speculative thinking, as well as from visions and related psychic experiences.

Social – These experiences are dependent upon relationship with other human beings, and involve themes of acceptance, belonging, support, roles and responsibilities, status, esteem and power.

Physical – This category involves increased or decreased sensory stimulation.  Nature, art, ritual, ceremony, service to others, dietary observances, exercise, sex, austerities, and the bodily aspects of meditation and prayer all have relevance.

Emotional – Here we are speaking of heightened or lessened feelings, such as pleasure, pain, comfort, discomfort, satisfaction, frustration, excitement, sadness, happiness, anger, peace, confidence, anxiety, fear, release of tension, relief from boredom, and so on.

It’s apparent that these categories aren’t completely discrete from each other; they are interconnected.   In considering that interconnectedness, you might have already noticed how often the emotional category serves as the final arbiter of our choices.  We can contrive lots of rationalizations and justifications for pursuing one thing more than another, but the deeper we look the clearer we see that we’re more likely to follow through with something if we believe it promises some sort of emotional satisfaction for ourselves, whether it is comfort in having done the “right” thing or even a kind of masochistic satisfaction.  Even the continuation or cessation of our own physical lives is subject to this dynamic.

It’s not my intention to encourage self-flagellation about our very deep and powerful tendencies to serve ourselves.  I am convinced that emotional self-interest is an inextricable part of human nature, and any attempt to pretend otherwise only leads deeper into a life of unhealthy illusion.  These observations are instead made primarily to point out some of the most crucial dynamics leading to imbalance, disharmony, and fragmentation in our souls.  Likewise, they suggest that our choices about contemplative practice can actually contribute more to psychospiritual dysfunction than to wellbeing, even when they feel very good.

The Problem of Discipline

With regard to discipline, in observing my own practice and the practice of others, it’s obvious that consistency and persistence can be huge challenges. Quite frankly, I believe a large part of this problem is our wanting easy, low-cost, instant gratification. It might be a little reductionist, but it sometimes seems to me that we regard contemplative practice more like a form of entertainment than a way to greater awareness, wholeness, integration, and depth of being in ourselves, in relationship with God, and in our presence in this world.  Many of us also want our experiences to be intellectually or emotionally profound, and perhaps even socially or materially tangible.  Any practice that doesn’t seem to quickly produce such fruit can quickly be judged as unproductive and worthless, and then we flit off to something different; we can also imagine ourselves as having already “advanced” beyond the need for that practice.  It’s so easy to ignore how often the great saints and sages have asserted the value of enduring commitment to the most basic practices.  My personal observation is that it’s often in persisting through boredom with a contemplative practice that we begin to gain the most significant benefits, subtle though they may be. 

The Problem of Discernment

Here we are beginning to consider how confusion about the value of experiences can impair discernment about the value of a practice.  A major element of such confusion is assuming that the value of an experience, and therefore the practice that facilitated it, is measured by the magnitude of its immediate impression upon our conscious minds. Another aspect of this confusion is in taking an extraordinary experience too literally; there are countless stories of visionaries who have brought horrible suffering to themselves and others because of knee-jerk reactions to their own inner experiences. For example, strong desires can lead to mistaking an experience as a direct contact with something that the experience actually only represents.  More specifically, a flash of light experienced in the depths of meditation may reveal something to us about the presence and action of Spirit, but it does not necessarily mean that the light was the appearance of a particular spiritual being.  Similarly, just as the on-screen image of a movie actor is not the actual character portrayed, or even the actual actor, so too can dreams and visions about other beings be far removed from actual contact with them.  Even the images of these words are not the actual forms on the screen, let alone the actual thoughts in my mind, but are your mind’s perception of the words and the thoughts behind them.  Another potential confusion is taking the magnitude, frequency or total number of one’s experiences as an unquestionable sign of spiritual “progress.” Such an attitude is dangerously self-aggrandizing and a highly volatile fuel for wish-fulfilling delusions.

Mediating the Risk-Benefit Problems

So, is there some way to minimize these risks without turning contemplative practice into nothing but a heartless drudgery or abandoning it all together? 

One generally useful guideline found is to carefully attend to the overall integration and harmony of the psyche’s different aspects and functions. Of course, this guideline is itself based upon a very deep, broad and persistent practice of honest self-awareness and caring self-acceptance.  Said another way, it is the practice of being lovingly present with oneself, and thus becoming increasingly aware of the very fluid interconnectedness of everything within us – head, heart, and gut. 

Along with this practice of presence, all the great spiritual traditions recommend the mindfulness and application of certain virtues.  In Masonry we traditionally rely on the Four Cardinal Virtues – Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice – and the Three Theological Virtues – Faith, Hope, and Charity (from caritas, spiritual love).  But it’s very important to understand that the practice of the virtues is not about forcing one’s external behaviors to conform to some predetermined model of perfection.  The object here is not to build up some new external facade of perfection in the place of being more consciously whole; in fact, when rightly understood, the virtues are first and foremost internal processes. When incorporated with the practice of loving self-presence, they shed significant light on the ways one is at odds with oneself, suffering from psychic fragmentation and compartmentalization, while also pointing out paths toward greater integration and harmony. 

A third recommendation is to seek companionship and mentoring from others engaged in contemplative practice. While it is often advisable to avoid making one’s contemplative practices a topic of ordinary conversation, there are significant benefits in comparing notes with others seriously engaged in work similar to ours. This is especially true with people who not only have more experience with the work, but also impress us as having grown wiser and more loving in the process.

Being more fully present with ourselves, the checks and balances of the virtues, and the company of fellow practitioners don’t provide a foolproof guarantee that we won’t make mistakes, yet they can reduce the risks in making them.  When we do make mistakes, these guidelines can help us lovingly embrace them as learning opportunities and thus become even more meaningful experiences in our spiritual lives.  Beyond these very significant benefits, they may also facilitate a deepening awareness of something in ourselves and our relationships other than thinking, feeling, sensing, and doing – something quiet and still, and at first seemingly tiny and insignificant, yet more vast and powerful than we can comprehend, let alone control. Awareness of this perplexing presence can be fascinating and frightening – fascinating in its penetration into a very deep mystery of our being, and frightening in our awareness of the comparative smallness and powerlessness of that part of us we most often identify as “me.”

Conclusion

With contemplative practice, like the rest of life, let’s acknowledge that there is no way to totally eliminate risk; even in retreating to avoid some risks we fate ourselves to take others.

So the question I’ll leave you with is this: What risks do Faith, Hope and Love call upon you to take?

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THANK YOU FOR READING THE LAUDABLE PURSUIT!

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PIECE, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SHARE IT ON SOCIAL MEDIA SITES AND WITH YOUR LODGE.

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Chuck Dunning has authored: Contemplative Masonry: Basic Applications of Mindfulness, Meditation, and Imagery for the Craft

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