Perennial Phil Ch 17 SUFFERING [5,2660]

Perennial Phil Ch 17 SUFFERING [5,2660]괴로움 수난

THE Godhead is impassible; for where there is perfection and unity, there can be no suffering. 

The capacity to suffer arises where there is imperfection, disunity and separation from an embracing totality; 

and the capacity is actualized to the extent that imperfection, disunity and separateness are accompanied by an urge towards the intensification of these creaturely conditions. 

For the individual who achieves unity within his own organism [?] and union with the divine Ground, there is an end of suffering. 

The goal of creation [?] is the return of all sentient beings out of separateness and that infatuating urge-to-separateness which results in suffering, 

through unitive knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal Reality.

Definition of impassible (Entry 1 of 2)

1a: incapable of suffering or of experiencing pain

b: inaccessible to injury

2: incapable of feeling : IMPASSIVE

The elements which make up man produce a capacity for pain. The cause of pain is the craving for individual life. Deliverance from craving does away with pain. The way of deliverance is the Eightfold Path.

The Four Noble Truths of Bua'a!Ajs,n

The urge-to-separateness, or craving for independent and indi­vidualized existence, can manifest itself on all the levels of life, from the merely cellular and physiological, through the instinc­tive, to the fully conscious. 

1. It can be the craving of a whole organism for an intensification of its separateness from the environment and the divine Ground. 
2. Or it can be the urge of a part within an organism for an intensification of its own partial life as distinct from (and consequently at the expense of) the life of the organism as a whole. 

1. In the first case we speak of impulse, passion, desire, self-will, sin; 
2. in the second, we describe what is happening as illness, injury, functional or organic disorder. 260  261     

In both cases the craving for separateness results in suffering, 

not only for the craver, but also for the• craver's sentient environment

—other organisms in the exter­nal world, or other organs within the same organism. 

In one way suffering is entirely private; in another, fatally contagious. 

No living creature is able to experience the suffering of another creature. 

But the craving for separateness which, sooner or later, directly or indirectly, results in some form of private and unshareable suffering for the craver, also results, sooner or later, directly or indirectly, in suffering (equally private and unshareable) for others. 

Suffering and moral evil [?] have the same source—a craving for the intensification of the separate­ness which is the primary datum of all creatureliness.

It will be as well to illustrate these generalizations by a few examples. Let us consider first the suffering inflicted by living organisms on themselves and on other living organisms in the mere process of keeping alive. 

The cause of such suffering is the craving for individual existence, expressing itself specifi­cally in the form of hunger. Hunger is entirely natural—a part of every creature's dharmc. 

The suffering it causes alike to the hungry and to those who satisfy their hunger is inseparable from the existence of sentient creatures. 

The existence of sen­tient creatures has a goal and purpose which is ultimately the supreme good of every one of them. 

But meanwhile the suffer­ing of creatures remains a fact and is a necessary part of creatureiness. 

In so far as this is the case, creation is the beginning of the Fall. The consummation of the Fall takes place when creatures seek to intensify their separateness beyond the limits prescribed by the law of their being. 

On the biological level the Fall would seem to have been consummated very frequently during the course of evolutionary history. Every species, ex­cept the human, chose immediate, short-range success by means of specialization. But specialization always leads into blind alleys. It is only by remaining precariously generalized that an organism can advance towards that rational intelligence which is its compensation for not having a body and instincts per­fectly adapted to one particular kind of life in one particular kind of environment. 

Rational intelligence [?] makes possible unparalleled worldly success on the one hand and, on the other, a further advance towards spirituality 

and a return, through unitive knowledge, to the divine Ground.262 

Because the human species refrained from consummating the Fall on the biological level, human individuals now possess the momentous power of choosing either selflessness and union with God, or the intensification of separate selfhood in ways and to a degree, which are entirely beyond the ken of the lower animals. Their capacity for good is infinite, since they can, if they so desire, make room within themselves for divine Reality. 

But at the same time their capacity for evil is, not indeed in­finite (since evil is always ultimately self-destructive and there­fore temporary), but uniquely great.

 Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation. Being rational and free, human beings are capable of being diabolic. This is a feat which no animal can duplicate, for no animal is sufficiently clever, sufficiently purposeful, sufficiently strong-willed or sufficiently moral to be a devil. (We should note that, to be diabolic on the grand scale, one must, like Milton's Satan, exhibit in a high degree all the moral virtues, except only charity and wisdom.)

Man's capacity to crave more violently than any animal for the intensification of his separateness results not only in moral evil and the sufferings which moral evil inflicts, in one way or another, upon the victims of evil and the perpetrators of it, but also in certain characteristically human derangements of the body. 

Animals suffer mainly from contagious diseases, which assume epidemic proportions whenever the urge to reproduc­tion combines with exceptionally favourable circumstances to produce overcrowding, and from diseases due to infestation by parasites.

 (These last are simply a special case of the sufferings that must inevitably arise when many species of creatures co­exist and can only survive at one another's expense.) 

Civilized man has been fairly successful in protecting himself against these plagues, but in their place he has called up a formidable array of degenerative diseases hardly known among the lower animals. 

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Most of these degenerative diseases are due to the fact that civilized human beings do not, on any level of their being, live in harmony 

• [with Tao, or 
• the divine Nature of Things.]

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263 They love to intensify their selfhood through gluttony, 

there­fore eat the wrong food and too much of it; 

they inflict upon themselves chronic anxiety over money and, because they crave excitement, chronic over-stimulation; 

they suffer, during their working hours, from the chronic boredom and frustration im­posed by the sort of jobs that have to be done in order to satisfy the artificially stimulated demand for the fruits of fully mechan­ized mass-production. 

Among the consequences of these wrong uses of the psycho-physical organism are degenerative changes in particular organs, such as the heart, kidneys, pancreas, intestines and arteries. 

Asserting their partial self­hood in a kind of declaration of independence from the organ­ism as a whole, the degenerating organs cause suffering to themselves and their physiological environment. 

In exactly the same way the human individual asserts his own partial selfhood and his separateness from his neighbours, from Nature and from God—with disastrous consequences to himself, his family, his friends and society in general. 

And, reciprocally, a dis­ordered society, professional group or family, living by a false philosophy, influences its members to assert their individual selfhood and separateness, just as the wrong-living and wrong-thinking individual influences his own organs to assert, by some excess or defect of function, their partial selfhood at the expense of the total organism.

The effects of suffering may be morally and spiritually bad, neutral or good, according to the way in which the suffering is endured and reacted to. 

In other words, 

1. it may stimulate in the sufferer a conscious or unconscious craving for the intensi­fication of his separateness; or 
2. it may leave the craving such as it was before the suffering; or, finally, 
3. it may mitigate it and so become a means for advance towards self-abandonment and the love and knowledge of God. 

Which of these three alternatives shall be realized depends, in the last analysis, upon the sufferer's choice This seems to be true even on the sub human level. 264 

The higher animals, at any rate, often seem to resign themselves to pain, sickness and death with a kind of serene acceptance of what the divine Nature of Things has decreed for them. 

But in other cases there is panic fear and struggle, a frenzied resistance to those decrees. 

To some extent, at least, the embodied animal self appears to be free, in the face of suffering, to choose self-abandonment or self-assertion. 

For embodied human selves, this freedom of choice is unquestionable. 

The choice of self-abandonment in suffer­ing makes possible the reception of

 grace—

1. grace on the spirit­ual level, in the form of an accession of the love and knowledge of God, and 
2. grace in the mental and physiological levels, in the form of a diminution of fear, self-concern and even of pain.

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When we conceive the love of suffering, we lose the sensibility of the senses and dead, dead we will live in that garden.[?]

St. Catherine of Siena

He who suffers for love does not suffer, for all suffering is forgot.

Eckhart

In this life there is not purgatory, but only heaven or hell; for he who bears afflictions with patience has paradise, and he who does not has hell.

St. Philip Neri

Many sufferings are the immediate consequence of moral evil [?], and these cannot have any good effects upon the sufferer, so long as the causes of his distress are not eradicated.

Each sin [?]  begetteth a special spiritual suffering. A suffering of this kind is like unto that of hell, for the more you suffer, the worse you become. This happeneth to sinners; the more they suffer through their sins, the more wicked they become; and they fall continually more and more into their sins in order to get free from their suffering.

The Following of Christ

265

The idea of vicarious suffering has too often been formulated in crudely juridical and commercial terms. 상상하여 느끼는, 대신하여 받는

A has committed an offence for which the law decrees a certain punishment;
B voluntarily undergoes the punishment; justice and the law­giver's honour are satisfied; consequently A may go free. 

Or else it is all a matter of debts and repayments. 

A owes C a sum which he cannot pay; 

B steps in with the cash and so prevents C from foreclosing on the mortgage. 

Applied to the facts of man's suffering and his relations to the divine Ground, these conceptions are neither enlightening nor edifying. 

The ortho­dox doctrine of the Atonement 속죄 attributes to God character­istics that would be discreditable even to a human potentate, and 

its model of the universe is not the product of spiritual insight rationalized by philosophic reflection, but rather the projection of a lawyer's phantasy. 

But in spite of these deplor­able crudities in their formulation, the idea of vicarious suffer­ing and the other, closely related idea of the transferability of merit are based upon genuine facts of experience. 

The selfless and God-filled person can and does act as a channel through which grace is able to pass into the unfortunate being who has made himself impervious to the divine by the habitual craving for intensification of his own separateness and selfhood. 

It is because of this that the saints are able to exercise authority, all the greater for being entirely non-compulsive, over their fellow-beings. 

They 'transfer merit' to those who are in need of it; but that which converts the victims of self-will and puts them on the path of liberation is not the merit of the saintly individual—a merit that consists in his having made himself capable of eternal Reality, as a pipe, 

by being cleaned out, is made capable of water; 

it is rather the divine charge he carries, the eternal Reality for which he has become the conduit. 

And similarly, in vicarious suffering, it is not the actual pains experi­enced by the saint which are redemptive—for to believe that God is angry at sin and that his anger cannot be propitiated except by the offer of a certain sum of pain is to blaspheme against the divine Nature. 266  

No, what saves is the gift from beyond the temporal order, 

brought to those imprisoned in selfhood 

by these selfless and God-filled persons, 

who have been ready to accept suffering, in order to help their fellows. 

The Bodhisattva's vow is a promise to forgo the immediate fruits of enlightenment and to accept rebirth and its inevitable concomitants, pain and death, again and again, until such time as, thanks to his labours and the graces of which, being selfless, he is the channel, all sentient beings shall have come to final and complete deliverance.

(in Mahayana Buddhism) a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so through compassion for suffering beings.

I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy colour between the North and the East, and was informed that this mass was human beings, in as great misery as they could be, and live; and that I was mixed up with them and henceforth I must not consider myself as a distinct or separate being.

John Woolinan

Why must the righteous and the innocent endure undeserved suffering? 

For anyone who conceives of human individuals as Hume conceived of events and things, as 'loose and separate,' the question admits of no acceptable answer. 

But, in fact, human individuals are not loose and separate, and the only reason why we think they are is our own wrongly interpreted self-interest. 

We want to 'do what we damned well like,' to have 'a good time' and no responsibilities. Consequently, we find it convenient to be misled by the inadequacies of language and to believe (not always, of course, but just when it suits US) that things, persons and events are as completely distinct and separate one from another as the words by means of which we think about them. 

The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature and to our fellow-men. 

If every human being were constantly and consciously in a proper relationship with his divine, natural and social environ­ments there would be only so much suffering as Creation makes inevitable. 

But actually most human beings are chronically in an improper relation to God, Nature and some at least of their fellows. 267 

The results of these wrong relationships are mani­fest 

1. on the social level as wars, revolutions, exploitation and  disorder;
2. on the natural level, as waste and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources;
3. on the biological level, as degenerative diseases and the deterioration of racial stocks; 
4. on the moral level, as an overweening bumptiousness; and 
5. on the spiritual level, as blindness to divine Reality and complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human existence. 

In such cir­cumstances it would be extraordinary if the innocent and righteous did not suffer—just as it would be extraordinary if the innocent kidneys and the righteous heart were not to suffer for the sins of a licorous palate and overloaded stomach, sins, we may add, imposed upon those organs by the will of the gluttonous individual to whom they belong, as he himself belongs to a society which other individuals, his contem­poraries and predecessors, have built up into a vast and en­during incarnation of disorder, inflicting suffering upon its members and infecting them with its own ignorance and wickedness. 

The righteous man can escape suffering only by accepting it and passing beyond it; and he can accomplish this only by being converted from righteousness to total selfless­ness and God-centredness, by ceasing to be just a Pharisee, or good citizen, and becoming 'perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' The difficulties in the way of such a transfiguration are, obviously, enormous. But of those who 'speak with authority,' who has ever said that the road to complete deliverance was easy or the gate anything but 'strait and narrow'?

Perennial Phil Ch 18 FAITH [4,1653] 믿음, 신앙 필요없다

Perenial Phil Ch 18 FAITH [4,1653]

THE word 'faith' has a variety of meanings, which it is important to distinguish.

 

1] In some contexts it is used as a synonym for 'trust,' as when we say that we have faith in Dr. X's diagnostic skill or in lawyer Y's integrity. 

Analogous to this is our 'faith' in authority—the belief that what certain persons say about certain subjects is likely, because of their special qualifications, to be true. 

2] On other occasions 'faith' stands for belief in propositions which we have not had occa­sion to verify for ourselves, but which we know that we could verify if we had the inclination, the opportunity and the neces­sary capacities. 

In this sense of the word we have 'faith,' even though we may never have been to Australia, that there is such a creature as a duck-billed platypus; we have 'faith' in the atomic theory, even though we may never have performed the experiments on which that theory rests, and be incapable of understanding the mathematics by which it is supported. 

3] And finally there is the 'faith,' which is a belief in propositions which we know we cannot verify, even if we should desire to do so---propositions such as those of the Athanasian Creed or those which constitute the doctrine of the Immaculate Concep­tion. This kind of 'faith' is defined by the Scholastics as an act of the intellect moved to assent by the will.

Faith in the first three senses of the word plays a very im­portant part, not only in the activities of everyday life, but even in those of pure and applied science. Credo ut itzteiigam —and also, we should add, at agam and at viivam. Faith is a pre-condition of all systematic knowing, all purposive doing and all decent living.

 Societies are held together, not primarily by the fear of the many for the coercive power of the few, but by a widespread faith in the other fellow's decency. Such a faith tends to create its own object, while the widespread mutual mistrust, due, for example, to war or domestic dissen­sion, creates the object of mistrust. 

269 Passing now from the moral to the intellectual sphere, we find faith lying at the root of all organized thinking. 

Science and technology could not exist unless we had faith in the reliability of the universe—unless, in Clerk Maxwell's words, we implicitly believed that the book of Nature is really a book and not a magazine, a coherent work of art and not a hodge-podge of mutually irrelevant snippets. 

To this general faith in the reasonableness and trustworthiness of the world 

the searcher after truth must add two kinds of special faith—

1. faith in the authority of quali­fied experts, sufficient to permit him to take their word for statements which he personally has not verified; and 
2. faith in his own working hypotheses, sufficient to induce him to test his provisional beliefs by means of appropriate action. 

This action may confirm the belief which inspired it. Alternatively it may bring proof that the original working hypothesis was ill founded, in which case it will have to be modified until it becomes conformable to the facts and so passes from the realm of faith to that of knowledge

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The fourth kind of faith is the thing which is commonly called 'religious faith.'

The usage is justifiable, not because the other kinds of faith are not fundamental in religion just as they are in secular affairs, but because this willed assent to propositions which are known to be unverifiable occurs in religion, and only in religion, as a characteristic addition to faith as trust, faith in authority and faith in unverified but veri­fiable propositions. 

This is the kind of faith which, according to Christian theologians, justifies and saves [?]. In its extreme and most uncompromising form, such a doctrine can be very dangerous. Here, for example, is a passage from one of Luther's letters. .

Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter sed fortius crede et gaua'e in Chrirto, qui victor est peccati, mortis et mundi. Peccandum est quam diu sic sumus; vita /iaec non est kabitatio justitiae. 

('Be a sinner and sin strongly; but yet more strongly believe and rejoice in Christ, who is the conqueror of sin, death and the world. So long as we are as we are, there must be sinning; this life is not the dwelling place of righteous­ness.')  270 

   To the danger that faith in the doctrine of justification by faith may serve as an excuse for and even an invitation to sin must be added another danger, namely, that the faith which is supposed to save may be faith in propositions not merely unverifiable, but repugnant to reason and the moral sense, and entirely at variance with the findings of those who have ful­filled the conditions of spiritual insight into the Nature of Things. 

'This is the acme of faith,' says Luther in his De Servo ..4rbitrio, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many, is merciful; 

that He is just who, at his own pleasure, has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that He seems to delight in the torture of the wretched and to be more deserving of hate than of love. 

If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith.'

 Revelation (which, when it is genuine, is simply the record of the immediate experience of those who are pure enough in heart and poor enough in spirit to be able to see God) says nothing at all of these hideous doctrines, to which the will forces the quite naturally and rightly reluctant intel­lect to give assent. 

Such notions rnare the product, not of the insight of saints, but of the busy phantasy of jurists, who were so far from having transcended selfness and the prejudices of education that they had the folly and presumption to interpret the universe in terms of the Jewish and Roman law with which they happened to be familiar. 'Woe unto you lawyers,' said Christ. The denunciation was prophetic and for all time.

The core and spiritual heart of all the higher religions is the Perennial Philosophy; and 

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the Perennial Philosophy can be assented to and acted upon without resort to the kind of faith about which Luther was writing in the foregoing passages. 

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There must, of course, be faith as trust—for confidence in one's fellows is the beginning of charity towards men, and confidence not only in the material, but also the moral and spiritual relia­bility of the universe, is the beginning of charity or love-knowledge in relation to God. 271  

There must also be faith in authority—the authority of those whose selflessness has quali­fied them to know the spiritual Ground of all being by direct acquaintance as well as by report. 

And finally there must be faith in such propositions about Reality as are enunciated by philosophers in the light of genuine revelation—propositions which the believer knows that he can, if he is prepared to fulfil the necessary conditions, verify for himself. 

But, so long as the Perennial Philosophy is accepted in its essential simplicity, there is no need of willed assent to propositions known in advance to be unverifiable. 

Here it is necessary to add that such unverifiable propositions may become verifiable to the extent that intense faith affects the psychic substratum and so creates an existence, whose derived objectivity can actually be discovered 'out there.' 

Let us, however, remember that an existence which derives its objectivity from the mental activity of those who intensely believe in it cannot possibly be the spiritual Ground of the world, and that 

a mind busily engaged in the voluntary and intellectual activity, which is 'religious faith,' cannot possibly be in the state of selflessness and alert passivity which is the necessary condition of the unitive know­ledge of the Ground. 

That is why the Buddhists affirm that 

• 'loving faith leads to heaven; 
• but obedience to the Dharma leads to Nirvana.' [?]

In Hinduism, dharma is the religious and moral law governing individual conduct and is one of the four ends of life.

Faith in the existence and power of any supernatural entity which is less than ultimate spiritual Reality, and 

in any form of worship that falls short of self-naughting, will certainly, if the object of faith is intrinsically good, result in improvement of character, and probably in posthumous sur­vival of the improved personality under 'heavenly' conditions. 

But this personal survival within what is still the temporal order is not the eternal life of timeless union with the Spirit. 

This eternal life 'stands in the knowledge' of the Godhead, [?]

not in faith in anything less than the Godhead.

The immortality attained through the acquisition of any objective condition (e.g., the condition—merited through good works, which have been inspired by love of and faith in, something less than the supreme Godhead—of being united in act to what is worshipped) is liable to end; for it is distinctly stated in the Scriptures that karma is never the cause of emancipation.[?]

Shankara272

Karma is the causal sequence in time, from which we are delivered solely by 'dying to, the temporal self and becoming united with the eternal, which is beyond time and cause. 

For 'as to the notion of a First Cause, or a Causa Sui' (to quote the words of an eminent theologian and philosopher, Dr. F. R. Tennant), 

'we have, on the one hand, to bear in mind that we refute ourselves in trying to establish it by extension of the application of the causal category, 

for causality when univer­salized contains a contradiction; 

and, on the other, to remem­ber that the ultimate Ground simply "is." 

Only when the individual also 'simply is,' by reason of his union through love-knowledge with the Ground, can there be any question of complete and eternal liberation.

Perennial Phil Ch 16 PRAYER [6,2932]

Perennial Phil Ch 16 PRAYER [6,2932]

THE word 'prayer' is applied to at least four distinct procedures—petition, intercession, adoration, contemplation. 

1. Petition is the asking of something for ourselves. 
2. Intercession 중재is the asking of something for other people. 
3. Adoration 동경is the use of intellect, feeling, will and imagination in making acts of devotion directed towards God in his personal aspect or as incarnated in human form. 
4. Contemplation 묵상is that condition of alert passivity in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

Psychologically, it is all but impossible for a human being to practise contemplation without preparing for it by some kind of adoration and without feeling the need to revert at more or less frequent intervals to intercession and some form at least of petition. 

On the other hand, it is both possible and easy to practise petition apart not only from contemplation, but also from adoration and, in rare cases of extreme and unmiti­gated egotism, even from intercession. 

Petitionary and inter­cessory prayer may be used—and used, what is more, with what would ordinarily be regarded as success—without any but the most perfunctory and superficial reference to God in any of his aspects. 

To acquire the knack of getting his petitions answered, a man does not have to know or love God, or even to know or love the image of God in his own mind. 

All that he requires is a burning sense of the importance of his own ego and its desires, coupled with a firm conviction that there exists, out there in the universe, something not himself which can be wheedled or dragooned into satisfying those desires. 

If I repeat 'My will be done,' with the necessary degree of faith and persistency, the chances are that, sooner or later and some­how or other, I shall get what I want. 

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“Thy will be done” means 'may Gods will be done'. It is the will of God that should be done in the world, not man's will, because God is the one who created the heavens and the earth, man, and everything else in it that has life.

What is the meaning of 'thy will be done' in The Lord's Prayer?

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What does my will be done and They will be done ? mean?

So.. "My will be done" means that the speaker is saying that what he want (his will) is what should happen. "They will be done" means that it will happen.

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261 252    

Whether my will coincides with the will of God, and whether in getting what I want I shall get what is spiritually, morally or even materially good for me, are questions which I cannot answer in advance. 

Only time and eternity will show. 

Meanwhile we shall be well ad­vised to heed the warnings of folk-lore. Those anonymous realists who wrote the world's fairy stories knew a great deal about wishes and their fulfilment. 

They knew, first of all, that in certain circumstances petitions actually get themselves answered; but they also knew that God is not the only answerer and that if one asks for something in the wrong spirit, it may in effect be given—but given with a vengeance and not by a divine Giver. 

Getting what one wants by means of self-regarding petition is a form of hubris거만, which invites its condign and appropriate nemesis. 

As nouns the difference between arrogance and hubris is that 

arrogance is the act or habit of arrogating, or making undue claims in an overbearing manner; that species of pride which consists in exorbitant claims of rank, dignity, estimation, or power, or which exalts the worth or importance of the person to an undue degree; proud contempt of others; lordliness; haughtiness; self-assumption; presumption while 

hubris is excessive pride, presumption or arrogance (originally toward the gods).

--

nemesis. a downfall caused by an inescapable agent.

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Thus, the folk-lore of the North American Indian is full of stories about people who fast and pray egotistically, in order to get more than a reasonable man ought to have, and who, receiving what they ask for, thereby bring about their own downfall. 

From the other side of the world come all the tales of the men and women who make use of some kind of magic to get their petitions answered —always with farcical or catastrophic consequence. Hardly ever do the Three Wishes of our traditional fairy lore lead to anything but a bad end for the successful wisher.

Picture God as saying to you, 'My son, why is it that day by day you rise and pray, and genuflect, and even strike the ground with your forehead, nay, sometimes even shed tears, while you say to Me: "My Father, my God, give me wealth!" 

If I were to give it to you, you would think yourself of some importance, you would fancy you had gained something very great. 

Because you asked for it, you have it. But take care to make good use of it. Before you had it you were humble; now that you have begun to be rich you despise the poor. 

What kind of a good is that which only makes you worse? For worse you are, since you were bad already. And that it would make you worse you knew not; hence you asked it of Me. I gave it you and I proved you; you have found—and you are found out! 

253

Ask of Me better  things than these, greater things than these. Ask of Me spiritual things. Ask of Me Myself.'

St. Augustine

O Lord, I, a beggar, ask of Thee more than a thousand kings may ask of Thee. Each one has something he needs to ask of Thee; I have come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.

Ansari of Herat

In the words of Aquinas, it is legitimate for us to pray for any­thing which it is legitimate for us to desire. There are some things that nobody has the right to desire—such as the fruits of crime or wrong-doing. 

Other things may be legitimately desired by people on one level of spiritual development, but should not be desired (and indeed cease to be desired) by those on another, higher level. 

Thus, St. François de Sales had reached a point where he could say, 'I have hardly any desires, but if I were to be born again I should have none at all. 

We should ask nothing and refuse nothing, but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence 신의 섭리without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us.' 

But meanwhile the third clause of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by mil­lions, who have not the slightest intention of letting any will be done, except their own.

The savour of wandering in the ocean of deathless life has rid me of all my asking;As the tree is in the seed, so all diseases are in this asking.

Kabir

Lord, I know not what to ask of thee. Thou only knowest what I need. Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. Father, give to thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. Smite or heal, depress me or raise me up: I adore all thy purposes without knowing them. I am silent; I offer myself up in a sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.

Fénelon

254 

(A dervish was tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah, on the ground that Allah never answered, 'Here am I.' The Prophet Khadir appeared to him in a vision with a message from God.)

Was it not I who summoned thee to my service?

Was it not I who made thee busy with my name?

Thy calling 'Allah!' was my 'Here am I.'

Jalal-uddin Rumi

I pray God the Omnipotent to place us in the ranks of his chosen, among the number of those whom He directs to the path of safety; in whom He inspires fervour lest they forget Him; whom He cleanses from all defilement, that nothing may remain in them except Himself; yea, of those whom He indwells com­pletely, that they may adore none beside Him.

Al-G/za,a1i

About intercession, as about so many other subjects, it is William Law who writes most clearly, simply and to the point.

By considering yourself as an advocate with God for your neigh­bours and acquaintances, you would never find it hard to be at peace with them yourself. It would be easy for you to bear with and forgive those, for whom you particularly implored 간청하다the divine mercy and forgiveness.

William Law

Intercession중재is the best arbitrator of all differences, the best pro­moter of true friendship, the best cure and preservative against all unkind tempers, all angry and haughty passions.

William Law

255

You cannot possibly have any ill-temper, or show any unkind behaviour to a man for whose welfare you are so much con­cerned, as to be his advocate with God in private. For you cannot possibly despise and ridicule that man whom your private prayers recommend to the love and favour of God.

William Law

Intercession, then, is at once the means to, and the expression of, the love of one's neighbour. And in the same way adora­tion is the means to, and the expression of, the love of God—a love that finds its consummation in the unitive knowledge of the Godhead which is the fruit of contemplation. It is to these higher forms of communion with God that the authors of the following extracts refer whenever they use the word 'prayer.'

The aim and end of prayer is to revere, to recognize and to adore the sovereign majesty of God, through what He is in Himself rather than what He is in regard to us, and rather to love his goodness by the love of that goodness itself than for what it sends us.

Bourgoing

In prayer he (Charles de Condren) did not stop at the frontiers of his knowledge and his reasoning. He adored God and his mysteries as they are in themselves and not as he understood them.

Amelote

'What God is in Himself,' 'God and his mysteries as they are in themselves'—the phrases have a Kantian ring. But if Kant was right and the Thing in itself is unknowable, Bourgoing, Dc Condren and all the other masters of the spiritual life were engaged in a wild-goose chase. But Kant was right only as regards minds that have not yet come to enlightenment and deliverance. To such minds Reality, whether material, psychic or spiritual, presents itself as it is darkened, tinged and refracted by the medium of their own individual natures. 156 But in those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit there is no distortion of Reality, because there is no separate selfhood to obscure or refract, no painted lantern slide of intellectual beliefs and hal­lowed imagery to give a personal and historical colouring to the 'white radiance of Eternity.' 

For such minds, as Olier says, 'even ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in his purity.' The Thing in itself can be per-ceived—but only by one who, in himself, is no-thing.

By prayer I do not understand petition or supplication which, according to the doctrines of the schools, is exercised principally by the understanding, being a signification of what the person desires to receive from God. 

But prayer here specially meant is an offering and giving to God whatsoever He may justly require from us.

Now prayer, in its general notion, may be defined to be an elevation of the mind to God, or more largely and expressly thus: prayer is an actuation of an intellective soul towards God, ex­pressing, or at least implying, an entire dependence on Him as the author and fountain of all good, a will and readiness to give Him his due, which is no less than all love, all obedience, adoration, glory and worship, by humbling and annihilating the self and all creatures in his presence; and lastly, a desire and intention to aspire to an union of spirit with Him.

Hence it appears that prayer is the most perfect and most divine action that a rational soul is capable of. It is of all actions and duties the most indispensably necessary.

Augustine Baker

257

Lord, teach me to seek Thee and reveal Thyself to me when I seek Thee. For I cannot seek Thee except Thou teach me, nor find Thee except Thou reveal Thyself. Let me seek Thee in longing, let me long for Thee in seeking: let me find Thee in love and love Thee in finding.

 Lord, I acknowledge and I thank Thee that Thou hast created me in this Thine image, in order that I may be mindful of Thee, may conceive of Thee and love Thee: but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except Thou renew it and create it anew. Is the eye of the soul darkened by its infirm­ity, or dazzled by Thy glory? Surely, it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by Thee. Lord, this is the unapproachable light in which Thou dwellest. Truly I see it not, because it is too bright for me; and yet whatever I see, I see through it, as the weak eye sees what it sees through the light of the sun, which in the sun itself it cannot look upon. Oh supreme and unapproachable light, oh holy and blessed truth, how far art Thou from me who am so near to Thee, how far art Thou removed from my vision, though I am so near to Thine! Everywhere Thou art wholly present, and I see Thee not. In Thee I move and in Thee I have my being, and cannot come to Thee, Thou art within me and about me, and I feel Thee not.

St. Ans6lm

Oh Lord, put no trust in me; for I shall surely fail if Thou uphold me not.

St. PAilip Neri

To pretend to devotion without great humility and renunciation of all worldly tempers is to pretend to impossibilities. He that would be devout must first be humble, have a full sense of his own miseries and wants and the vanity of the world, and then his soul will be full of desire after God. A proud, or vain, or worldly-minded man may use a manual of prayers, but he cannot be de­vout, because devotion is the application of an humble heart to God as its only happiness.

William Law

The spirit, in order to work, must have all sensible images, both good and bad, removed. The beginner in a spiritual course com­mences with the use of good sensible images, and it is impossible to begin in a good spiritual course with the exercises of the spirit. 
258 
Those souls who have not a propensity to the interior must abide always in the exercises, in which sensible images are used,and these souls will find the sensible exercises very profitable to themselves and to others, and pleasing to God. And this is the way of the active life. But others, who have the propensity to the interior, do not always remain in the exercises of the senses, but after a time these will give place to the exercises of the spirit, which are independent of the senses and the imagination and con­sist simply in the elevation of the will of the intellective soul to God.... The soul elevates her will towards God, apprehended by the understanding as a spirit, and not as an imaginary thing, the human spirit in this way aspiring to a union with the Divine Spirit.

Augustine Baker

You tell me you do nothing in prayer. But what do you want to do in prayer except what you are doing, which is, presenting and representing your nothingness and misery to God When beggars expose their ulcers and their necessities to our sight, that is the best appeal 호소 항소 애원 they can make. But from what you tell me, you sometimes do nothing of this, but lie there like a shadow or a statue. They put statues in palaces simply to please the prince's eyes. Be content to be that in the presence of God: He will bring the statue to life when He pleases.

St. FrwzçoLc de Sales

I have come to see that I do not limit my mind enough simply to prayer, that I always want to do something myself in it, wherein I do very wrong.. . . I wish most definitely to cut off and separate my mind from all that, and to hold it with all my strength, as much as I can, to the sole regard and simple unity. By allowing the fear of being ineffectual to enter into the state of prayer, and by wishing to accomplish something myself, I spoilt it all.

St. Jeanne Chantal

So long as you seek Buddhahood, specifically exercising yourself for it, there is no attainment for you.[?]

Yung.c/&ia Thsk

29

'How does a man set himself in harmony with the Tao?' 'I am already out of harmony.'

Si/,-t'ou

How shall I grasp it? Do not grasp it. That which remains when there is no more grasping is the Self.

PancAadasi

I order you to remain simply either in God or close to God, without trying to do anything there, and without asking anything of Him, unless He urges it. 

 St. François de Sales

Adoration is an activity of the loving, but still separate, indi­viduality. Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being. 

The highest prayer is the most passive. 

뭔가를 바라지 않는 (간절한) 기도, 

"나"라는 것이 없어지는 기도, 

"신성"에 가까와지는 기도

Inevitably; for the less there is of self, the more there is of God. 

That is why the path to passive or infused contempla­tion is so hard and, for many, so painful—a passage through successive or simultaneous Dark Nights, in which the pilgrim 순례자must die [?]

• to the life of sense [?] as an end in itself, 
• to the life of private and even of traditionally hallowed 신성한 thinking and be­lieving, and finally 
• to the deep source of all ignorance and evil, the life of the separate, individualized will.[self?]

Perennial Phil Ch 15 SILENCE [4,1108]

Perennial Phil Ch 15 SILENCE [4,1108]

The Father uttered one Word; that Word is His Son, and He utters Him for ever in everlasting silence; and in silence the soul has to hear it.

St. John of the Cross

The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will be often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us. . .. Rhetoric and fine language about the things of the spirit is a vainer babble than in other matters; and he that thinks to grow in true goodness by hearing or speaking flaming words or striking expressions, as is now much the way of the world, may have a great deal of talk, but will have little of his conversa­tion in heaven.

William Law

He who knows does not speak;
He who speaks does not know.

Lao Tru

UNRESTRAINED and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous. 

'But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.' Matthew 12:36–37 -

--

 idle words - empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk

--

What does it mean that we will give an account to God?

The reference to us giving an account of ourselves to God means 

- that moment of judgment isn't something pronounced against us from on high, the judgment we pronounce on ourselves will be an expression of our own full awareness of who we are, who we have been, and what we have done with our lives.18 Jan 2017

---

This may seem a very hard saying. And yet if we pass in review the words we have given vent to in the. course of the average day, we shall find that the greater number of them may be classified under three main heads: 

• words inspired by malice and uncharitableness towards our neighbours; 
• words inspired by greed, sensuality and self-love; 
• words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason, 
• but merely for the sake of making a distract­ing noise. 

 utter foolishness

--

These are idle words; and we shall find, if we look into the matter, that they tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity. And if the unspoken words of our mind's endless, idiot monologue are counted, the majority for idleness becomes, for most of us, overwhelmingly large.247248 

All these idle words, the silly no less than the self-regarding and the uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light. The guard of the tongue (which is also, of course, a guard of the mind) is not only one of the most difficult and searching of all mortifica-tions; it is also the most fruitful.

When the hen has laid, she must needs cackle. And what does she get by it? Straightway comes the chough 붉은 부리까마귀 and robs her of her eggs, and devours all that of which she should have brought forth her live birds. And just so that wicked chough, the devil, beareth away from the cackling anchoresses, and swalloweth up all the goods they have brought forth, and which ought, as birds, to bear them up towards heaven, if it had not been cackled.

Moderniqed from the Ancren Riwle
You cannot practise too rigid a fast from the charms of worldly talk.

Fénelon

What need of so much news from abroad, when all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within us?

William Law

249

My dear Mother, heed well the precepts of the saints, who have all warned those who would become holy to speak little of them­selves and their own affairs.

St. François de Sales

(in a letter to St. Jeanne tie C/iantal)

A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.

Chuang Tu

The dog barks; the Caravan passes.

Arabic Proverb

It was not from want of will that I have refrained from writing to you, for truly do I wish you all good; but because it seemed to me that enough has been said already to effect all that is need­ful, and that what is wanting (if indeed anything be wanting) is not writing or speaking—whereof ordinarily there is more than enough--but silence and work. For whereas speaking distracts, silence and work collect the thoughts and strengthen the spirit. As soon therefore as a person understands what has been said to him for his good, there is no further need to hear or to discuss; but to set himself in earnest to practise what he has learnt with silence and attention, in humility, charity and contempt of self.

St. John of the Cross

Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classifica­tion) distinguished three degrees of silence—

• silence of the mouth, 
• silence of the mind and 
• silence of the will. 

• To refrain from idle talk is hard; 
• to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; 
• hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. 

• Physical noise, 
• mental noise and 
• noise of desire
• —we hold history's record for all of them. 

And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. 

That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the'radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes.

 And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. 

It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, con­tinually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. 

And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's central core of wish and desire.

 Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to pre­vent the will from ever achieving silence.

Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass-production is universal craving. 

Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground.

Perennial Phil Ch 14 IMMORTALITY AND SURVIVAL [3,1512]

Perennial Phil Ch 14 IMMORTALITY AND SURVIVAL [3,1512]
불명 존속

IMMORTALITY is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground;

survival is persistence in one of the forms of time. 

Immortality is the result of total deliverance. 

Sur­vival is the lot of those who are partially delivered into some heaven, 

or who are not delivered at all, but find themselves, by the law of their own untranscended nature, compelled to choose some purgatorial or embodied servitude even more painful than the one they have just left.

Goodness and virtue make men know and love, believe and delight in their immortality. When the soul is purged and en­lightened by true sanctity, it is more capable of those divine irradiations, whereby it feels itself in conjunction with God. It knows that almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death. It knows that God will never forsake His own life, which He has quickened in the soul. Those breathings and gaspings after an eternal participation of Him are but the energy of His own breath within us.

John Smith, the Platonist

I have maintained ere this and I still maintain that I already pos­sess all that is granted to me in eternity. For God in the fullness of his Godhead dwells eternally in his image—the soul.

Eckhart

Troubled or still, water is always water. What difference can embodiment or disembodiment make to the Liberated? Whether calm or in tempest, the sameness of the Ocean suffers no change. 

Yogavasistha

242 243

To the question 'Where does the soul go, when the body dies?' Jacob Boehme answered: 'There is no necessity for it to go anywhere.'

The word Tathagata (one of the names of the Buddha) signifies one who does not go to anywhere and does not come from any­where; and therefore is he called Tathagata (Thus-gone), holy and fully enlightened.

Diamond Sutra

Seeing Him alone, one transcends death; there is no other way.

Svetasvatara Upanishad

God, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life....

Book of Common Prayer

I died a mineral and became a plant.

I died a plant and rose an animal.

I died an animal and I was man.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar

With the blessed angels; but even from angelhood

I must pass on. All except God perishes.

When I have sacrificed my angel soul,

I shall become that which no mind ever conceived.

O, let me not exist! for Non-Existence proclaims,

'To Him we shall return.'

Jalal-uddin Rumi

===

나는 광물로 죽어 식물이 되었다. 

나는 식물로 죽고 동물을 살아났다. 

나는 동물로 죽었고 나는 인간이 되었다.

내가 왜 두려워해야 할까? 내가 죽는다고 못했던 때가 언제 있었나? 

그러나 다시 한 번 나는 인간으로 죽어 축복받은 천사들과 함께 날아오르리라. 그러나 나는 천사의 신분에서 부터도 넘어야 한다. 하나님 외에는 다 멸망한다.

 내가 내 천사 영혼을 희생했을 때, 나는 아무 생각도 해본 적이 없는 사람이 될 것입니다. 

오, 내가 존재하지 않게 하소서! 

비존재(Non-Existence)는 '우리는 그에게로 돌아갈 것이다'라고 선언한다.

===

세진: 여기서 "하나님"은 보통 의미의 God이 아니다.

There is a general agreement, East and West, that life in a body provides uniquely good opportunities for achieving salvation or deliverance. Catholic and Mahayana Buddhist doctrine is alike in insisting that the soul in its disembodied state after death cannot acquire merit, but merely suffers in purgatory the consequences of its past acts. 

But whereas Catholic orthodoxy declares that there is no possibility of progress in the next world, and that the degree of the soul's beatitude is determined solely by what it has done and thought in its earthly life, the eschatologists of the Orient affirm that there are certain posthu­mous conditions in which meritorious souls are capable of advancing from a heaven of happy personal survival to genuine immortality in union with the timeless, eternal Godhead. 

And, of course, there is also the possibility (indeed, for most indi­viduals, the necessity) of returning to some form of embodied life, in which the advance towards complete beatification, or deliverance through enlightenment, can be continued. Mean­while, the fact that one has been born in a human body is one of the things for which, says Shankara, one should daily give thanks to God.244 

The spiritual creature which we are has need of a body, without which it could nowise attain that knowledge which it obtains as the only approach to those things, by knowledge of which it is made blessed.

St. Bernard

Having achieved human birth, a rare and blessed incarnation, the wise man, leaving all vanity to those who are vain, should strive to know God, and Him only, before life passes into death.

Srimad Bliagavatam

Good men spiritualize their bodies; had men incarnate their souls.

Benjamin Whickcote

245

More precisely, 

• good men spiritualize their mind-bodies; 
• bad men incarnate and mentalize their spirits. 

The completely spiritualized mind-body is a Tathagata, who doesn't go any­where when he dies, for the good reason that he is already, actually and consciously, where everyone has always poten­tially been without knowing. 

The person who has not, in this life, gone into Thusness, into the eternal principle of all states of being, goes at death into some particular state, either purga­torial or paradisal. 

In the Hindu scriptures and their commentaries several different kinds of posthumous salvation are distinguished. 

The 'thus-gone' soul is completely delivered into complete union with the divine Ground; but it is also possible to achieve other kinds of mulcti, or liberation, even while retaining a form of purified I-consciousness. 

The nature of any individual's deliverance after death depends upon three factors: 

1. the degree of holiness achieved by him while in the body, 
2. the particular aspect of the divine Reality to which he gave his primary allegiance, and 
3. the particular path he chose to follow. 

Similarly, in the Divine Comedy, Paradise has its various circles; but whereas in the oriental eschatologies the saved soul can go out of even sublimated individuality, out of survival even in some kind of celestial time, to a complete deliverance into the eternal, Dante's souls remain for ever where (after passing through the unmeritorious sufferings of purgatory) they find themselves as the result of their single incarnation in a body. 

Orthodox Christian doctrine does not admit the possibility, either in the posthumous state or in some other embodiment, of any further growth towards the ultimate perfection of a total union with the Godhead. But in the Hindu and Buddhist versions of the Perennial Philosophy the divine mercy is matched by the divine patience: both are infinite. For oriental theologians there is no eternal damna­tion; there are only purgatories and then an indefinite series of second chances to go forward towards not only man's, but the whole creation's final end—total reunion with the Ground of all being.

----

Preoccupation with posthumous deliverance is not one of the means to such deliverance, and may easily, indeed, become an obstacle in the way of advance towards it. 

There is not the slightest reason to suppose that ardent spiritualists are more likely to be saved than those who have never attended a séance or familiarized themselves with the literature, speculative or evidential. My intention here is not to add to that literature, but rather to give the baldest summary of what has been written about the subject of survival within the various religious traditions.  246 

In oriental discussions of the subject, that which survives death is not the personality. Buddhism accepts the doctrine of reincarnation; but it is not a soul that passes on (Buddhism denies the existence of a soul); it is the character.

'What we choose to make of our mental and physical constitution in the course of our life on earth affects the psychic medium within which individual minds lead a part at least of their amphibious existence, and this modification of the medium results, after the body's death, in the initiation of a new existence either in a heaven, or a purgatory, or another body.

In the Vedanta cosmology there is, over and above the Atman or spiritual Self, identical with the divine Ground, 

something in the nature of a soul that reincarnates in a gross or subtle body, or manifests itself in some incorporeal state. 

This soul is not the personality of the defunct, but rather the particularized I-consciousness out of which a personality arises.

Either one of these conceptions of survival is logically self-consistent and can be made to 'save the appearances'—in other words, to fit the odd and obscure facts of psychical research. 

The only personalities with which we have any direct acquaint­ance are incarnate beings, compounds Of a body and some un­known x. But if x plus a body equals a personality, then, obviously, it is impossible for x minus a body to equal the same thing. The apparently personal entities which psychical research sometimes seems to discover can only be regarded as temporary pseudo-personalities compounded of x and the medium's body.

These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive, and sur­vival may be the joint product of a persistent consciousness and a modification of the psychic medium. 

If this is so, it is possible for a given human being to survive in more than one posthumous form. 

His 'soul'—the non-personal ground and principle of past and future personalities—may go marching on in one mode of being, while the traces left by his thoughts and volitions in the psychic medium may become the origin of new individualized existences, having quite other modes of being.