Meditations

Howard H. Brinton

 

During the World Conference of Friends in September 1937, a small group met under a tree on the Swarthmore campus to learn something from each other regarding silent meditation and worship. As we did not have time to exchange fully our thoughts, we decided to try to do so by letter. This letter was to assume the form of mimeographed sheets. I was asked to reproduce and forward to the several participants such communications as I might receive. The communications arrived during October, but I have been late in doing my part. Apologies are hereby offered for this delay which is partly accounted for by the multitude of duties at Pendle Hill and the pressure from non-mystical (and hence more insistent) publishers of another publication in which I am collaborating.

Dorothy Johnson inquires as to what extent a sense of communion of worshipers with each other depends on the spoken word. Our group, which communes through this letter, depends on the spoken (or in this case, written) word alone. Might it not be possible, even though apparently using only words, for persons widely scattered in space and time to hold a real meeting for worship in which they write rather than speak their messages. Let our communications continue to be of a nature appropriate for utterance in a solemn meeting. To this meeting, let us welcome kindred spirits with the advice that all messages be brief, confined to a single thought, and such as arise out of real first-hand experience.

Elined Kotschnig says that perhaps we have been thinking of “meditation” when we mean “prayer”. I think that is true, for “meditation” implies the lonely thinker and “prayer” implies an out-reaching process in which we seek to overcome our isolation through communion with a greater Life than our own. Yet “prayer”, “meditation”, “worship”—in fact all words—fail us when we seek to describe in terms of thought an experience which takes us beyond self-conscious thinking. Here indeed is the inevitable limitation of our undertaking in this letter.

Perhaps there is not one silence but three silences, each with its own unique value. There is the silence in which there is no speech. This is the easiest to achieve. Here many things may happen,—meditation in which we seek to view events from some large, more inclusive viewpoint than that of our own limited self-interest; prayer, in which wereach upward toward God beseeching that He reach downwards toward us; the struggle for obedience of our will to the divine Will; adoration of the Holy in awe, reverence, and humility; communion with our fellow worshipers in which love dissolves the “fleshly screen” and we become intimately aware of the problems, aspirations, and accomplishments of our fellows.

There is the silence of the flesh in which our body attains complete relaxation. This is not easy to achieve and requires much practice. Even when we think we have released all physical tensions we may later discover somewhere a strain. To many persons complete physical relaxation is an important pre-requisite to successful meditation and worship. Let us not in seeking this, confuse the physical and the spiritual, a confusion which opens the door to an unhealthy occultism.

Finally there is the silence of thought, in which thought widens out to become something which is qualitatively different from thought. Here we find ourselves possessing a type of consciousness different from that in which we usually meet the routine problems of life. Here is peace, serenity, obedience, and the harmonious unity of mental forces.

Thought as silent has not ceased to exist, any more than in bodily relaxation physical processes have ceased; but it is truly “silent” because transmuted into spirit which is in the world but not of it. Spirit does not enter the world as one force among many, but seeks, from above, to unite all things into the organic unity of the One Divine Life.

 

Future Issues

No definite plans were made at the first and only meeting of our group regarding future issues of this letter, though it seemed to be assumed that there would be future issues. Will those who receive this, express to me their desires in this matter. I suggest that when, and if, some helpful communication comes to any of us in our own meditations that it be briefly put on paper and sent to me, and when a sufficient number of such offerings accumulate a new issue will occur. If I find no time to do the work I shall forward the material to another. Though the mystic consciousness is timeless, its verbal incarnations may be subject to a certain degree of periodicity. Contributions to the experience of this undertaking will be welcomed.

H.H.B.