Meditation in Christianity
About This Book
Meditation in Christianity is Swami Rama's exploration of the contemplative and meditative dimensions within the Christian tradition — presented with the perspective of a yogi who had trained deeply in Eastern contemplative science and who could therefore recognise in the Christian mystical literature the same inner processes and states of consciousness that the yogic tradition describes in its own vocabulary. The book argues that genuine meditation is not an Eastern import alien to Christianity but was present from the beginning of the tradition in the practices of the Desert Fathers, the apophatic theology of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics, the Hesychast tradition of Byzantine Christianity, and the specifically contemplative prayer taught by John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila.
Swami Rama's cross-traditional perspective allows him to illuminate the Christian contemplative practices with a precision that comes from actually knowing what the inner states being pointed toward are like — not from studying descriptions of them at second hand but from direct experience. His presentation of what the Christian mystics mean by terms like 'recollection,' 'the prayer of quiet,' 'the dark night of the soul,' and 'union' is informed by his understanding of the corresponding states in the yogic taxonomy: samadhi, pratyahara, the dark night corresponds to specific yoga challenges, and so on. The result is a work that serves both Christian contemplatives seeking a clearer map of their own tradition's inner science and students of Eastern meditation interested in the universality of the contemplative states across all genuine traditions.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the meditation practices of the Desert Fathers: the specific methods of interior prayer, the use of short repeated phrases (the precursors of mantras in the Christian context), the cultivation of hesychia (inner stillness), and what these practitioners were actually doing in their prolonged periods of solitary contemplation
• Grasp the Hesychast tradition: the Byzantine Christian practice of inner prayer centred on the repetition of the Jesus Prayer ('Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner') and its relationship to the pranayama and mantra practices of the yogic tradition
• Recognise what the great Carmelite mystics — John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila — were describing in their accounts of the stages of prayer: the correspondence between Teresa's 'mansions' and the states of consciousness the yogic tradition describes as different grades of samadhi
• Learn Swami Rama's reading of Meister Eckhart's apophatic mysticism: the 'Godhead beyond God,' the 'desert of the Godhead,' the annihilation of the personal self in the ground of being — and how these are the same realisations described in the Upanishadic tradition as Brahman, the Absolute beyond all attributes
• Appreciate what a genuine comparative mysticism reveals: not that all traditions are 'the same' in a reductive sense, but that the inner states that all genuine mystical traditions are pointing toward converge in a territory that is recognizable across different cultural vocabularies and that can serve as the basis for genuine spiritual dialogue
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