"The Existential Altar Which Simply Is": A Quote On Contemplation By Thomas Merton

     "Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish, or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial 'doubt.' This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious 'faith' of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false 'faith' which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our 'religion' is subjected to inexorable questioning. This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray on contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas. Hence it is clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe--for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia. Contemplation is no pain-killer. What a holocaust takes place in the steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, cliches, slogans, rationalizations! The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply 'is.'

     "In the end, the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because 'God is not a what,' not a 'thing.' That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no 'what' that can be called God. There is 'no such thing' as God because God is neither a 'what' nor a 'thing' but a pure 'Who.' He is the 'Thou' before whom our inmost 'I' springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo 'I am.'"

--from New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Where's Waldo?

Passing the Test at the Quarter Mark

Nothing figurative in the title. Last week, I had to take my American Board of Family Medicine Recertification exam--an eight hour death march. Almost four hundred questions. One terrible headache. Other than the actual marathon, this was the biggest single thing that I had to accomplish over these twelve months, a focal point of time, energy and concern. Three months in, it's been the real world coming to call, to see if I'm competent to hang my shingle, treat patients, earn a living, support my family, and have enough spare time to ponder the deeper things and blog about it, which is what I've hoped to be the main thrust of my 40th year. As long as this test has been looming, it's been tough to claim any emotional (or physical) space or time to really sink myself into a spiritual routine. But that's part of the whole trick, trying to strike a pragmatic balance in the real world while reaching out into both the infinite Cosmos and the messy chambers of my heart.

I think board certification is a good idea. Society and patients need a way to evaluate and certify a doctor's competency. Cool. I just wish there was a better way to do it, because this way stinks, in no way measuring my clinical competence. It's more about regurgitating information and outguessing the question writers. Which is a shame, because at this point, eight years into my clinical practice, I feel like I've really hit my stride as a physician, with a seasoned clinical intuition and style to match a solid knowledge base. Plus, as far as I'm concerned, the key to being a successful doctor today is not about regurgitation or being an encyclopedia. It's about knowing how to expertly diagnose and treat 80% of the problems that people present to you with, and then for the other 20%? It's about knowing what you don't know, when to be concerned, when to get help, how to access and filter accurate information, and then how to compassionately apply your clinical judgment sharpened through real-world experience to the highly specific, intimate context of that distressed patient sitting in front of you. I'm not Dr. House, but I'm a good doctor, and I wish that these tests could both certify and celebrate that.

I counted them up, and between three COMLEX exams, two USMLEs, three residency inservice exams, my initial family medicine board certification, ABIHM certification earlier this year, and now my family medicine board recertification, that this was my eleventh time taking a standardized certification test. COMLEX was the worst, as we had to answer eight hundred questions over two days, with paper and the old No. 2 pencil. Now at least we have computerized testing, which has lots of advantages, but the one major disadvantage of having to stare at a computer screen for eight straight hours. Thus the headache. With each of these exams, I've left the test wondering if I passed, only to find out a few weeks later that I actually did pretty well.

Which is probably why my overarching feeling after leaving the testing center last week was anger. I just get mad at these tests, and the sadists who write them. Their motivation appears to be to write the longest case scenarios with the most irrelevant red herrings, and then to ask the most confusingly worded question possible.

My favorite representative question on this test went something like this:

A pregnant couple comes to your office and asks you a question about what type of dog they should get. You reply that the BEST evidence indicates that which of the following is NOT true: 

A) Large dogs bite more often than small dogs

B) Between the ages of 2 and 5, most bites occur on the lower extremities.

C) A dog bite ALWAYS requires antibiotics as part of a treatment plan

D) None of the above.

What???? Seriously??? So this terrible exam question--that is evaluating nothing about my clinical acumen by asking about a scenario I have never encountered for which no amount of studying could prepare me--includes confounding specifiers and vague qualifiers that impossibly muddy the waters, and then it phrases the actual question in a way that today I still can't figure out what the hell they actually want to know. You want the BEST evidence that one of these is NOT true--come again?

Answering such a question correctly has nothing to do with whether or not I'm a good doctor, and yet it is weighted equally with the other 399 questions I had to answer that day. You hit that question seven hours into a test of similarly terrible questions, and that means clumps of hair are about to be pulled, screens punched, keyboards tossed. Or at least inner screams of rage are being unleashed.

But I kept it together, and based solely on my experiences with the other ten similar exams, I'm pretty sure I did just fine, even though it feels like I failed.

My point in including this post in my "40th Year Quest": mostly to vent, and to celebrate. Now that I'm done with the test (and the marathon), I have no major looming deadlines or events, and I can enjoy the upcoming holiday season with my fambly, and start to focus on the other more rewarding aspects of this journey: meditation, reading, service, nutrition, yoga, exercise, strengthening relationships, exploring other religions, finalizing my unified field theory equation.

It starts tomorrow with a three day meditation retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center outside of Boulder. Time to get my zen on.

Man, If I Only Knew . . .

This Onion article kind of sums up my blogging attempts here . . .

Man, If I Only Knew Back In High School What I Still Have No Clue About

Cocoons and Midlife Crises

"Jung believed that 'every midlife crisis is a spiritual crisis, that we are called to die to the old self (ego), the fruit of the first half of life and liberate the new man or woman within us.' Here is a hidden and misunderstood turning point of the soul, I thought. Sadly, not every person will maneuver its convoluted mazes. Would I? 

I recalled Jung's words in 'Stages of Life':

'Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning--for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.'

Jung divided life into two phases. The first phase, or 'morning' is reserved for relating and orienting to the outer world by developing the ego. The second half, or 'afternoon,' is for adapting to the inner world by developing the full and true self. The midlife transition between these two Jung likened to a difficult birth. 

The transition is difficult because it involves a real breakdown of our old spiritual and psychic structures--the old masks and personas that have served us well in the past but that no longer fit. It's anguish to come to that place in life where you know all the words but none of the music. 

In our youth we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the midlife junction these patterns begin to crumble. It feels to us like a collapsing of all that is, but it's a holy quaking."

"What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. And if you look carefully, you'll see that they're also the seedbed of creativity and growth--what allows us to do the daring and to break through to newness . . . Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions . . . yet the seduction is always security rather than venturing . . . When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons."

--from When The Heart Waits, by Sue Monk Kidd

"If I decide to become a butterfly . . . what do I do?"

"Watch me," came the reply. "I'm making a cocoon. 
It looks like I'm hiding, I know, but a cocoon is no escape. 
It's an in-between house where the change takes place . . . 
During the change, it will seem . . . that nothing is happening, 
but the butterfly is already becoming. 
It just takes time."

--from Hope For The Flowers by Trina Paulus

Huxley, the Eternal Ground, and Other Quotes

"It is because we don't know Who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been."--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

I've been reading a book called, "What Is Enlightenment?" that contains a large excerpt from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, who's most famous for writing "A Brave New World." My previous image of Huxley was that of a cantankerous intellectual and pessimist, and that's partly true, but not at all a fair description of this intellectual giant. Later in life, even as a professed agnostic, he became deeply interested in understanding the spiritual dimension--famously by experimenting with mind-altering drugs. But much beyond that, he surveyed all the major world religions, systems of thought, and mystical traditions and tried to sort out their commonalities, describing "the eternal Ground" beneath all of them. That's what The Perennial Philosophy refers to:

"The metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being — the thing is immemorial and universal. 

Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe. 

If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, and who, because they had modified their merely human mode of being, were capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge."

That's good stuff. That's a bit of what I'm trying to do on this 40th year quest. I've found some other pithy quotes from Huxley, shared below. One final thought about Huxley: he died on Nov 22, 1963, the same day as C.S. Lewis, and of course the assassination of JFK. This was also just as the Beatles rose to prominence. I can't help but think that, had their trajectories intersected more substantially, he and John Lennon would have been best buds, not to mention sharing the same optician.

"The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning one's self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one's self."--Aldous Huxley