... on its metalled ways

An interesting discussion of Pierre Hadot in our small seminar group this morning, and the idea of spiritual exercises and their relationship with philosophy, in particular the idea of living in the moment and living as though this is the last day of your life. What is the point of such a practice? I think that its rationale has to rest in a prior lived experience that enters the culture as a known, empirical possibility, a prior lived experience that is known also to be fugitive, fleeting and unstable, even though it seems to provide a standard by which one judges what happens in its absence. So the practice is dependent on a kind of nostalgia, a wanting to return to one's home as John Moriarty might have put it in Nostos. Naturally this can lead to a kind of willed activity that is ultimately futile. And there are approaches to meditation that are merely narcissistic or auto-erotic as good pope Benedict once complacently opined of meditation itself. But to dismiss them in these ways is to misunderstand their function as practices ... C mentioned the experience of someone's death and the intensity of perception that followed it. A perspective that opens up and then is lost. But it is more than just a perspective opening up. That sounds too much like a simple hedonism, even though it is surely a healthy hedonism, to add to the narcissism and the auto-eroticism. I think the real point is the quietening of the passions and what they give way to, or, rather, make way for, not a merely vacant and neutral space, but a loving awareness of the world, responsiveness to others, that is occluded by the red light of the passions, and in whose absence we destroy ourselves. I remembered those fantastic words of Dennis Potter about the plum tree below his window in Ross: 'I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be ... the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous'. But we need the acute experience of contingency to find ourselves there. The sea is rising and the sheep dyke will not protect us.