I'm thinking these days about stillness, order and calm in one's mind and soul. It's something I desperately need, but given my job and my interests, find hard to locate and achieve. But I've been reading a book called "The Instinct to Heal" by the psychiatrist David Servan-Schreiber, who discusses the effectiveness of non-traditional therapies. I was particularly interested in his chapter about medical discoveries involving the heart's role in helping govern the nervous system. It was revealing how the method and practice of the Jesus Prayer, which is a basic part of Orthodox Christian spirituality, can be clinically shown to be healing. Don't get me wrong, Dr. Servan-Schreiber never once mentions the Jesus Prayer. But he talks about the amazing results doctors have seen in people who do the kind of rhythmic breathing and meditation that is required when you pray the Jesus Prayer in the way of the Desert Fathers. There's something physiological that happens; it's as if the heart coheres, and the nervous system is rebooted and refocused by the committed practice of stillness and meditativeness. It turns out that "Be still and know I am God" is actually a good prescription for basic health.
When I was on the road to Orthodoxy, I was very faithful to saying the Jesus Prayer daily, for nearly half an hour. It had an astonishing impact on my physical and mental health. My wife said I was a different person then -- that I was so much more calm and focused, as opposed to my usual jangly, at wit's end self. Of course as is usual with me, I got lazy, and quit praying it, with the expected result. But lately, having read the Servan-Schreiber book and having talked with a doctor friend about the importance of stillness, I've returned to the Jesus Prayer. I cannot recommend it highly enough, not only for your soul, but for your body.
I wrote in "Crunchy Cons" about the experience I had of living alone one winter out in a friend's house in the country. There was no TV there, and no newspaper. This was before the days of the Internet, so the only contact I had with the world was the twice-daily newscasts on NPR (the Baton Rouge NPR station back then played classical music all day). It was just me and my books and my thoughts and my rosary. Having moved there from Washington, DC, the detox period was tough. I was jumpy all the time, craving some sort of stimulation. But eventually, I got used to the quiet. I got used to prayer, and focusing on reading, and on stillness as a normal state. It was like waking up out of a dream. I came to understand through experience how my everyday life in the world served not to deepen my understanding, but rather to prevent understanding and a deeper connection via endless distraction. I had become addicted to the constant input of stimuli, and it made finding truth and experiencing interior harmony and participating in the life of God difficult.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I was talking with a visiting friend about the sensory processing disorder that my oldest son struggles with, and that a surprising number of kids we know have. I suggested that perhaps human beings aren't evolutionarily prepared to be in a modern environment, with so many stimuli bearing in on us constantly. Yet this column from NPR's Dick Meyer, inspired by the recent study showing that the more media a kid consumes, the more likely he is to be unhealthy, challenges that hypothesis. Check this out:
The quantity of media is far more important than the quality. Sex, violence, booze, drugs and potty humor are not new things to the species; exposure to mass quantities of omnipresent electronic information and images 24/7 on multiple, portable devices is a new kind of stimulus for our old brains. We process mediated information and stimulus differently than unmediated, directly perceived input.This is what we complain about when we talk of information overload or info-glut. David Berreby, the author of Us & Them: The Science of Identity, suggested in a recent paper to a group of media ecologists that our anxiety doesn't come from absorbing more raw information than people in simpler times; it comes from absorbing a whole different kind of information -- mediated information.
For example, we feel swamped by how much information is instantly available on the front page of The New York Times or on NPR.org. But Berreby notes that a tribal African who hunted to survive would be swamped by information when seeing a wildebeest in a field: Male or female? Alone? Wind direction? Predators nearby? What kind of trees in the distant forest? None of this data is mediated, trivial or distant. We have (had?) a lot of Darwinian hard-wiring to process that kind of data.
That isn't true of media information: It doesn't engage all the senses. It is all crafted by humans, much of it deliberately intended to sell or market or be addictive -- or get our attention. It is harder to filter this information than unmediated information, harder to attend to only the important. "We aren't overwhelmed by information," Berreby said. "We're overwhelmed by information anxiety."
On Wednesday night, I was waiting for Matthew at the rock-climbing gym where he takes his climbing class. The gym plays loud music, tuned to a particular radio station that plays hard rock music (Metallica and the like). As I waited, I found the music making me extremely agitated. It was thudding, disharmonious and angry. It made me wonder what it does to the nervous system to spend your entire day exposed to this kind of sensory input (as distinct from the content of the songs). How does that get absorbed by the nervous system? What does it do to one's ability to achieve a state of inner stillness and coherence? And what does our constant TV watching, and Internet-surfing, do to us?
I think people like me congratulate ourselves on not being addicted to television. But if I watched as much TV as I spend online every day, I would think something was wrong with me. The Internet is TV for geeks.
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I just spent a few minutes praying the Jesus Prayer again and again. It felt like a cleansing and refreshing. Of course, then the phone rang.
But I noticed something. The hardest part for me to pray was "a sinner." Have mercy on me, a sinner. I've been a Christian for a long time, have failed too many times to count, have recognized many sins and weaknesses. Yet it is still so hard for me to admit that when all is said and done, I'm just a sinner.
Yet that is a saving grace. Have mercy, Lord.
I believe it's Ann Lamott who said her two favorite prayers are, "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" and "Help me, help me, help me!"
Leave the CNN volume off on the computer and tune into Ancient Faith Radio while at work. I listen to AFR in the evenings instead of watching tv. I'm not Orthodox but I find it helps calm my mind.
Contemplative prayer and meditation are indeed much needed antidotes to the madness of the present age. But I am reminded by this same Jesus who comforts me that "Whoever desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me."(Mk 8:34)
And after the delights and relaxation of my qigong and daoist meditation class, I remember the words of the philosopher William Barrett: "The marvelous images from Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which seduce us into the quietude of Being, cannot be a permanent halting place for the Westerner. Between myself and them are interposed the Bible and the Russian novel, from whose grip I can never free myself".
Seems to me that as pilgrims on our way home, we have to use the gifts of meditation as "food" for the journey, not snares for tarrying.
"I suggested that perhaps human beings aren't evolutionarily prepared to be in a modern environment, with so many stimuli bearing in on us constantly."
Oh no don't tell you have fallen for the illuminist's evolution propoganda too...
These pseudo intellectuals always think they are so much smarter than the Holy Fathers of the Church and Christ Himself.
Evolutionism is NOT condoned by the Orthodox Church.
Evolutionism is a heretical religious belief not a scientific theory.
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