Issue3 Article5

Words and the Mind: Thoughts on an Ancient and a Contemporary Technique of Meditation Michael Nagler Michael Nagler finds close parallels between the descriptions of prayer in the writings of the seventh-century Christian monastic Isaac of Syria and the teachings on meditation given by the modern master Sri Eknath Easwaran. Both were adepts in the recitation of sacred text as a spiritual practice; as Professor Nagler says, both taught how to use words “as a tool of concentration—the jumping-off place for absorption into the abyss of meditation.”

God wishes the alteration of our mind, for by the mind we improve, and by the mind we become unprofitable. —Isaac of Syria

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hen the full weight of Roman violence fell on Judea in the terrible years of 69 to 70 C.E., it seems likely that among the refugees who escaped the destruction were members of the Jesus movement who fled north and east to Syria. It is distinctly possible, in other words, that in the Syriac church that flourished over the next five centuries (and still exists in some areas today) we are in a sense closest to what Jacob Needleman calls “the religion of Jesus rather than about Jesus.” If there be any truth to this claim, it would make it all the more interesting that the new religion which took hold among Syriac-speakers in the areas we now know as Syria, Iraq and parts of Iran had such a mystical bent.1 The early writers of this tradition cultivated an intense practice of interior prayer in monasteries and remote hideouts in the mountains of Syria, and some of them left nuanced descriptions of their experience that make stirring reading today, especially for those of any sectarian tradition (or none) who practice what is now more commonly called meditation. Indeed, these monks’ practices and spiritual experiences, which they describe with a psychological acumen

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that pushes through the barriers of translation, can often be taken as practical guides to meditation.

The most consistently profound of these writers (and the most influential to the present day) was Mar (Saint) Isaac of Nineveh, also known as Isaac of Syria (d. ca. 700 C.E.). A compassionate and very loveable man whose voluminous writings avoid any trace of the doctrinal controversies of his time, Isaac was installed as bishop of Nineveh but resigned after only five months “for a reason that God knows” and took to the mountains for ascetic practice. He went blind, his two biographers tell us, from poring over the scriptures and the words of his spiritual forebears from the deserts of Egypt. His works are being rediscovered today by religious and by practitioners of meditation (not that these cannot be the same persons!), as people from any background increasingly seek refuge from the materialism and violence of the modern world.

As with all Christian writers of the period, West or East, Isaac’s spirituality is intensely devotional. He is not, of course, scholastic or a worshiper of the Absolute, like, say, Meister Eckhardt. He talks about, but does not describe in terms of his personal experiences, what we might call visions and what he calls, with characteristic flourish, “outpourings of words which are beyond articulation, and within which is located the silence of insight.”2 But he most often uses the word “silence” for the desired state that supervenes during the praying of one’s liturgy. Most of his homilies are on the practice of prayer, but one quickly realizes that what he means by “prayer” is much more akin to what modern aspirants mean by meditation: What is prayer? The emptying of the mind of all that belongs here and a heart that has completely turned its gaze to a longing for that future hope.3 The difference between prayer and meditation has been characterized as a difference in attitude or relationship to God during that practice: in prayer we are speaking to God, in this formula, and in meditation we are listening to God. In more practical terms, I would explain the difference in terms of what one does (mentally, of course) with the words one is offering. If one is concerned only to offer them, one is praying; if one uses them as a tool to contain the random activity of the mind, one is in effect trying to meditate. In the classical definition of meditation by Patañjali, it is “dampening the thought waves in the mind” (Yoga Sutras I. 2).

One could say that in some contemporary Buddhist practices, the effort is to ignore thoughts, and (as in the koan technique) to “stump” the restless activity of the intellect, while in the methods put forward by most

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Hindu teachers, one is systematically disciplining the mind until it becomes focused, eventually completely focused, and finally silent. The Syriac fathers would be closer to the second approach. What we normally mean by “prayer” in Christian practice has, on the face of it, little to do with either of these techniques; but at various times and places in Christian tradition, prayer was in fact a vehicle for meditation; gifted individuals must have been absorbed during prayers at all times, however unrecorded. Whether known as “interior prayer,” “pure prayer,” the “prayer of silence,” and sometimes “contemplation”—as Isaac says, even in his day, “the Fathers used many different words for the same thing”4—there were always persons and at times schools for whom the point was not so much the content of the words as what you did with them, i.e., use them as a tool of concentration—the jumping-off place for absorption into the abyss of meditation.

As one of the masters quoted by Isaac says so eloquently (and this sentiment is echoed in many passages from early Christianity): I run to stillness so that the verses of my reading and prayer should become sweet to me. And when my tongue becomes silent because of the sweetness that comes from understanding them, then, as it were into a kind of sleep, I fall into a state where my senses and my thoughts become inactive. . . . [W]aves of joy ceaselessly surge over me, waves arising from inward intuitions that beyond expectation suddenly blossom forth to delight my heart.5 The remarkable thing about the Syriac fathers—and the mainly Greekspeaking solitaries of Egypt whom they revered as forbears, particularly monks like Evagrius (346–399)—is the extensive community of practitioners who sustained a veritable culture of meditation of a kind which has not been seen since, at least not to such an extent and of such duration, in Western spiritual experience. Even in today’s “New Age” (or perhaps especially now), it is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to be in such a culture of intense practice. The inestimable help of such a culture for the individual within it who is struggling to control his or her mind can only be imagined. Fortunately for us today there is a secondary benefit as well: as the tradition goes on, terms and images are worked up, models are worked out, which allow adepts to describe, as far as that is ever possible, the “sights and sounds” of the early stages of meditation: Just as the whole force of the law and the commandments laid down

by God for humanity have their boundary extending up to purity of heart [i.e., apply only so long as purity of heart has not been yet won], issue 3, june 2003

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as the Fathers have said, so all the types and varieties of prayer which human beings address to God have their boundaries extending up to purity of heart. Groans, prostrations, heartfelt requests and supplications, sweet tears and all the other varieties of prayer; as I have said, have their authorized boundary only as far as pure prayer. Moving inwards from purity of prayer, once one has passed this boundary, the mind has no prayer, no movement, no tears, no authority, no freedom, no requests, no desire, no longing for anything that is hoped for in this world or the world to come. For this reason, after pure prayer there is no longer any prayer: all the various stirrings of prayer convey the mind up to that point through their free authority; that is why struggle is involved in prayer. But beyond the boundary, there exists wonder, not prayer. From that point onwards the mind ceases from prayer; there is the capacity to see, but the mind is not praying at all.6 Or to paraphrase another, even more modern-sounding guidepost that Isaac gives elsewhere, “If you are aware that you are praying, it is not pure prayer.” This and many other passages show the psychological insight and articulateness of his self-observation—a rare quality even among mystics (note in the passage above the surprisingly modern description of meditation as “inward journey”).7 St. Augustine, in the West, who discussed every meditation technique known at his time, often referred to the same three steps the Syrian fathers identify in this journey: from words (which are “heard” by the inward ear of the mind as one recites them), to the meaning of those words, to a jumping-off of consciousness into silence and joy—to, I would say, an experience of the Reality of which even these meanings are a reflection. Words of heard language are but signa sonantia (audible symbols), Augustine would say. In Isaac’s words, “Silence is a mystery of the age to come, but words are instruments of this world.”8 My own interest in (or, more accurately, devotion to) Isaac and the Syrian solitaries comes from the precise accord between the methods and stages he describes so well and the practice in which I have been trained.

This practice, called “passage meditation,” was developed and brought to the West by Sri Eknath Easwaran (1910–1999). Easwaran more or less stumbled on the technique when he was still a professor of English in a well-known university in central India. He took to reciting to himself his favorite verses from the Bhagavad Gita in times of duress, and he noticed how much consolation it brought to do so. Soon (in fact, remarkably quickly, in his case) the experience became much more than a consolation, but a kind of absorption that began to reorient his whole life. Realizing that this

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could be systematically developed and taught, he came to the United States and eventually perfected the technique and some seven supporting disciplines. These became the Eight Point Program now followed by thousands in the U.S. and around the world.9 The technique gets its name “passage meditation” because you meditate on an inspirational passage, memorized beforehand. The skill is to go through that passage in your mind as slowly as possible (not so slowly that the words lose their syntactic connection and there is no discursive meaning any more), giving all your attention to the words so that they “drop like pearls into the depths of our consciousness,” as Sri Easwaran often put it.

When (not if, unfortunately) there are distractions—i.e., when absolutely anything occurs to you other than the passage—it is important not to fight against the distraction or to get irritated with yourself, but simply to focus once again on the passage. Should a distraction gain the upper hand (or as Isaac puts it, if you find that “harsh deliberations reign over thy soul, and it is tyrannized by them every moment”10)—that is, if you find yourself at the tail end of a longish argument “A single word said with an with your boss, or going over the laundry list of things to do, or admiring the solution to a tangled problem, attentive mind is better such that it is clear that you have been off your recitation passage for minutes on end — you “pick up the than a thousand when the mind gently” and return it to the beginning of the passage, or at least to the beginning of the current stanza, mind is far away.” and start over. We can almost hear Evagrius: “A single word said with an attentive mind is better than a thousand when the mind is far away,”11 or more bluntly, his passionate follower Isaac: “The only opportunity for Satan to enter the soul is distraction.”12 Now, the emphasis on concentration—the need to struggle against distraction(s)—is not surprising in any form of meditation, or indeed any kind of cultivable human excellence (pace the modern valorization of “multitasking”). What is surprising—at first—is the point-for-point correspondence in technique between the two teachers (more of which we’ll be pointing out in a moment). But it should not be too surprising: the value of both what Isaac calls “pure prayer” and Sri Easwaran’s method of passage meditation is that you are working simultaneously on two fronts: content and focus. What you are giving the mind to think and how are powerfully synergistic here. There is an innate connection, Easwaran maintained, between the content of our thinking, which for these purposes can be analyzed very simply as positive or negative, and the manner of our thinking, which can also be simply analyzed on an axis of fast or slow.

Rapid, scattered, negative thinking is all of a piece—and that piece is issue 3, june 2003

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harmful—while slow, focused and positive thinking leads to everything from health benefits to improved relationships to greater effectiveness: in the Indian Sufi master Meher Baba’s saying (which Sri Easwaran often quoted), “a fast mind is sick; a slow mind is well; a still mind is God.” Easwaran is to my knowledge the first to point out explicitly that the inverse connection of speed and quality can be sys“A fast mind is sick; tematically exploited to move the mind from “sick” to “well” and eventually to God—or absorption in the absolute Reala slow mind is well; ity.13 But Isaac, too, was intuitively aware of the connection, and of the value of keeping the mind moving on interesting, a still mind is God.” discursive content: since the mind is never still anyway, the way to move it toward stillness is to channel its movement along one consistent track that can engage our progressively deeper attention. Hence he observes: “Meditation upon an impotent thought weakens the power of patience, but a steadfast mind [i.e., one concentrated steadily on a suitable thought] gives a strength that nature does not possess.”14 Again in contrast to the practice of stunning the intellect into silence— e.g., by means of a koan or other type of paradox—the early Christian technique and the modern parallel we are looking at (Sri Easwaran is from a long Hindu tradition, but one hesitates to use that label as his technique is so well adapted to the West), emphasize not so much suspension as absorption. Easwaran’s advice to change passages when they are getting “stale” (and the Eastern Orthodox method of using long series of passages in one’s personal liturgy—not very practical any longer, especially for nonmonastics) keeps interest fresh, indeed intensifies it as it is directed progressively more deeply on the words, their meaning, and finally the Reality which is the source of all meaning. As Isaac writes to a fellow monk, “You are wise enough not to require of the mind motionlessness . . . for this cannot be asked of human nature.”15 And yet in the practice of concentration, as he adds in nearly the same breath, what we can arrive at by our own unremitting efforts is “the wonderment of mind that is free of all images, and the spiritual silence of which the Fathers speak.”16 Similarly, both teachers emphasize the all-important technique of not getting rattled by distractions. As anyone who has tried to meditate along these lines can testify, to be frustrated over a distraction only means, as Easwaran would put it, that now you have two distractions, the wayward thought and the frustrated reaction. So the ancients: And if unclean thoughts should enter your mind, do not be upset; just refuse to consent to them: do not accept them or allow them any

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place in your mind, then they will leave all of a sudden and run off, like a traveler who turns aside for the night, but then moves off early.17 For God does not turn away from us on account of the mere movement of a thought, but only when our mind persists in it.18 Both the ancient and modern teachings warn against visualization during this struggle, even if (perhaps especially when) the vision is the more dangerous for being pious. While Isaac does at times speak highly of “vision” he is quick to add that what he means by the term (usually theoría in the Greek, a term often translated as “contemplation”) is far beyond visual imagery: Delight during prayer is different from vision during prayer. The latter is superior to the former, just as a fully grown man is superior to a small child. . . . Sometimes out of prayer contemplation is born: this cuts off prayer from the lips, and the person who beholds this is like a corpse without soul in wonder. We call this faculty “vision in prayer”; it does not consist in any image or portrayable form, as foolish people say.19 The similarities extend to the “ultimate sanction,” which could be said to be a cornerstone of Easwaran’s technique, though hopefully seldom invoked, of bringing the mind back to the beginning of a passage or stanza when it has left the passage altogether for some time (or as Isaac says, “when our mind persists in it”): If, while you observe your liturgy, a thought should accost you and whisper to you, saying, ‘Hasten a little, your work is multiplying,’ and you free yourself from it quickly, then do not place some rule upon yourself [or in the Syriac, ‘do not pay attention to it’]. But if this thought disturbs you the more, immediately go back to the last Glory be, or as many as you like, and with understanding chant each verse repeatedly which has the character of a prayer.20 No responsible teacher fails to warn students or prospective students that this, like any other kind of medtation, involves dangers. Here is another advantage of using the inspirational passage (Isaac’s “liturgy”), and both Sri Easwaran and Saint Isaac use similar imagery to explain that when we are too close to unconscious energies (that is, before we are ready to

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deal with them) the passage can act as a “lifeline,” as Easwaran writes, that keeps us from falling into such mental black holes.21 Likewise Isaac: Gifts, such as illumination of insights and a precise understanding of the verses of scripture act . . . during prayer and the Office as a rope by which the naked intellect [i.e., our otherwise unguided attention] is held back from distraction and brought close to God.22 Here Isaac is speaking of “gifts” that accrue from absorption in the words rather than from the words themselves, and in fact there is at first sight a rather significant difference in the two teachings, inasmuch as Isaac gives instructions on how to distinguish between those mental events that carry one deeper than the words of the recited text and should therefore be followed, and those which are only leading us off the path and should be shunned. Easwaran, on the other hand, cautions strongly and often against following anything but the words: even a “pious” thought or image is a distraction, consequently a trap.

I would maintain that the two writers, however, are not really giving inconsistent advice. Isaac was writing for monastics, indeed mostly eremitic seekers who were intensely—one might say, exclusively—dedicated to a life of spiritual practice: he frequently underlines that his advice cannot be followed except by solitaries. Easwaran, on the other hand, took pride in developing a system that could be undertaken by householders. And there is a more important contextual difference. Isaac was writing in an age of devotion; just behind him lay the era of the Christian desert when tens of thousands of monks in remote sketes or remoter huts and caves were spending day and night (especially night, Isaac recommends) in intense struggle for surrender to the will of God. While monasticism and interior prayer would crop up from time to time in the centuries after him, it could safely be said that there would never again be such a supportive climate for the contemplative struggle—such a “spiritual ecosystem,” to quote Peter Brown.

Easwaran, on the other hand, is writing for—well, for us. It is logical to assume that Isaac’s solitaries could be trusted to follow their cultivated spiritual instincts and push off beyond the words, while those of us who are struggling in an age of such intense materialism cannot.23 These differences being taken into account, one is the more struck by the consistency of the two methods—if they are indeed two and not one.

One explanation for the similarity lies, quite simply, in its effectiveness.

Simple, not to say tedious as it may sound, concentrating and reconcentrating on an uplifting piece of discourse is a powerful technique which can lead to remarkable changes in one’s life, up to and including (though

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not yet in the author’s experience, alas) the tremendous, climactic changes called illumination or similar names in all the world’s spiritual traditions.

As one progresses, more and more aspects of daily life seem to one to come under this fundamental dynamic of recollection, or focus. The ability to “stay on task,” even an unpleasant task, increases; a general feeling of athomeness in whatever situation one is in increases; and even relationships benefit from greater stability (“falling out of love” turns out to be a form of distraction!). As William James also discovered: [T]he faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which would improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.24 Easier indeed. For Augustine, this life of ours on the material plane is itself nothing more than a distentio (distraction). The key to overcoming the liabilities of this life (including its brevity) is the discovery, whether it be among the desert fathers and their Syrian followers or in modern ashrams and zendos, of concentration. Once human beings make the remarkable discovery that every misfortune that befalls human flesh on this Earth is a kind of distraction, it is only a short step to realize that the panacea is concentration—though it may be a much longer step, and one that requires every culture to redefine how to achieve it.

I have concentrated here on the meditation technique itself, and its situation in the long tradition (or traditions, Eastern and Western), that use the tool of speech to get beyond speech—to, as the Katha Upanishad puts it, enable us to go “from the world of words to the world of thoughts; then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self.”25 There is more to the path, of course. It might be thought that the question of what to do during the rest of the day is more acute for modern, householder meditators than it was for the early Christian or other pioneers who essentially dedicated all their time to what the Hindu tradition called sadhana (spiritual practice, disciplines) and Greek seekers, dieita (way of life, ancestor of the English “diet”). “If we accustom ourselves to a good meditation,” as Isaac says, “we shall be ashamed of the passions whenever we encounter them.”26 In Easwaran’s presentation, however, the difference is not extreme for serious meditators. The second discipline he recommends is the frequent use of a much shorter phrase, or mantram, during the rest of the day (when recitation of a long passage is impractical), and there are six other ethical or behavioral guidelines, such as slowing down and doing what we do with issue 3, june 2003

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one-pointed attention, all of which concern the ‘rest of the day’ (all this is well described in his best-selling Meditation). But the use of a mantram, the practice known as japam in India, which can eventually become a background vibration that goes on indefinitely, tuning our consciousness at every moment, is really a form of “praying without ceasing,” a practice which developed over centuries in Eastern Christian spiritual tradition.27 Dadisho (a contemporary of Isaac who lived as a monk in northern Iraq) says, “Pray without ceasing—and without distraction.”28 All these disciplines support and are supported by meditation, and again the early Christian path and that of Sri Easwaran—a translation of ancient Indian methods into modern settings—seem to run quite parallel.

But that must be the subject of another study.

Conclusion Because words lie close to the springs of thought, the use of words to go beyond words, i.e., the use of words as “focalizers” for ever-deepening concentration, is a discovery common to Eastern and Western traditions of mystical cultivation. The mind is the key: to bring it under control and eventually to a kind of willed suspension is, always and everywhere, the spiritual endeavor. The way that we in commercialized industrial societies today ignore the mind, standing by helplessly while our thought-process is scattered and its content trivialized is the hallmark of modern “civilization”; the inevitable result, under which we are now groaning, is materialism, violence, and misery. In this connection, the decline of literacy itself, and in particular the shift of our enormously powerful commercial media from words to imagery, which was primarily the work of television, may have been a critical step in our turning away from the process worked out by the heroic solitaries of Egypt and the Syrian East—a process that, as I have tried to show, has been inevitably rediscovered in various pockets of our own needful world.29 It is painful in this connection to reflect that the homeland of Isaac’s spirituality and its spiritual culture is in process of being destroyed by violence. As late as the 1930s one Iraqi describes: My father was an Imam. There was a bookstore-café in Baghdad’s old city. There, every day, I met rabbis, Christian priests, Sunnis and Shiites who all came to debate theology. Controversy reigned supreme, but in an atmosphere of brotherly cheer.”30 All this is soon to be destroyed by Saddam and his enemies. ❧

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Notes 1

Syriac, still spoken by a few thousand villagers in the area today, is very close to Aramaic, the spoken language of much of Palestine in the time of Jesus. “Aram” was actually an archaic word for Syria in the region.

2 Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Studies Publications, 1987), p. 271.

3 Ibid., p. 251. The condensed usage of the word “here” as symbol for all mortal concerns is very common in the Indian scriptural tradition, both Hindu and Buddhist.

4 See also Discourse XXII: “You see how varied are the terms used by the Fathers of spiritual matters. Precise terms can be established only for earthly matters; for matters concerning the New World . . . all there is is a single straightforward awareness which goes beyond all names, signs, etc.” Ibid., p. 257.

5 The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984), p. 320. This translation, primarily from Greek

by Dana Miller, includes the newly discovered second half of the Saint’s surviving writings.

6 Brock, p. 254.

7 The first Western writer to use “within” in this way was Plato, but it was not until the Christian period that the metaphor gained any currency.

8 Ascetical Homilies, p. 321.

9 The easiest way to find out more about the program, and about the activities of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation that he founded in 1960 to make it widely available, is to visit the website www.nilgiri.org.

10 A.J. Wensinck, Mystical Treatises of Isaac of Nineveh (Wiesbaden: Saendig Reprint Verlag, 1923–1969), p. 322.

11 Brock, p. 71.

12 Wensinck, p. 89.

13 He is also the first, as far as I am aware, to point out that “the body functions in space, the mind functions in time.”

14 Ancient Homilies, p. 300.

15 Brock, p. 296.

16 Ibid., p. 297.

17 Ibid., p. 72.

18 Ancient Homilies, p. 307.

19 Brock, p. 253.

20 Ancient Homilies, p. 366.

21 Cf. Meditation (Tomales, Calif.: Nilgiri Press, 1991), pp. 53f., The Dhammapada (Tomales, Calif.: Nilgiri Press, 1986), p. 51, et alibi.

22 Brock, p. 283. issue 3, june 2003

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Easwaran, to be sure, did suggest that after many, many years of practice there may come times not when the words stop or should be abandoned but rather when they “open up and take us in.” When St. Isaac and his early Christian confrères described this third stage, or at least the stepping off beyond conceptual thinking, they would often call it “silence,” but it was not an utter eradication of self, a “void” or the Sufi fana they were describing: it had an affect. It was often accompanied by the outward sign of tears; there was an affect involved, which was usually identified as “wonder.”

24 James, Principles of Psychology (1952), pp. 274f. Cf. also, among many other mystical testimonies, Ignatius Bryanchaninov, “The soul of prayer is attention. As a body without soul is dead, so is prayer without attention,” in Sergius Bolshakoff, Russian Mystics (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1977), p. 150.

25 Katha Upanishad I.iii.13; cf. Sri Eknath Easwaran and Michael Nagler, The Upanishads (Tomales, Calif.: Nilgiri Press, 1987), p. 89.

26 Ancient Homilies, p. 300.

27 See esp. Aleksei Pentkovsky, ed., The Pilgrim’s Tale (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), and the thorough study by Irénée Hausherr, The Name of Jesus (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1978).

28 Brock, p. 309.

29 I might point out here also that it was precisely television, primarily CNN, which bears the main responsibility for trivializing the Gulf War in the minds of most Americans.

30 Quoted in Alain Delair, “The End of Iraq’s Christians?” in World Press Review (January 2003), p. 22.

About the Author Michael Nagler is a long-time resident and workshop presenter at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. He is the founder and former chair of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of California at Berkeley, where he recently retired from faculty positions in classics and comparative literature. He has written and lectured widely on nonviolence; his latest volume, Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future (Berkeley Hills Books), received an American Book Award in 2002.

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