Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
13 - ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
Summary
I have a recurring image, the elders of some city overlooking a plain gathered at the walls, gravely. It is night and someone is holding up a torch. The gates remain open. They are calm, but know they will probably be put to the sword. One of them says quietly, I can hear them coming …
Evagrius Ponticus (Simon Tugwell, 1984, 25ff) described the trains of thought (logismoi) which distract us during prayer and daily life. They need to be overcome, like the Buddhist ‘hindrances’, for the sake of entering the mind's ‘native light’. Sadly Evagrius' nice taxonomy grew into the Seven Deadly Sins, a description which belongs to a different mind-set. In fact they are the natural expression of the present state of our energies at this point in our evolution. They are ‘passions’:
Evagrius, rather mysteriously, says that once we have reached a certain degree of passionlessness, the mind becomes aware of its own native light.
One should respond to the premises of the philosophers with the diagnostic intent of the spiritual writer, which is really what a philosopher should be. We should be concerned to liberate each other. It turns out, I am pleased to notice, that the ‘fruit of passionlessness is love’. Such a statement is essentially empirical, but it can hardly be tested immediately by reference to one's own present experience, since it is the forms of our experience that are being interrogated by such claims, as I keep saying. You would have to wait until you had become ‘passionless’: which is not the same as ‘emotionless’, far from it.
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- Information
- Transformations of MindPhilosophy as Spiritual Practice, pp. 230 - 255Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000