The Transfer: The Basic Practice in Mystical Meditation
Notes Toward the Renewal of the Spiritual Life (3)
I am spending this winter on a spiritual sabbatical in an ashram in northern Germany, and my days are taken up with meditation, yoga, and chanting. In between I am also preparing and giving talks on mysticism during my residence here. It’s been a few years since I taught regularly in the college classroom, so I feel like I did decades ago when I prepared to teach my first classes at a university. It’s a good place to be because it calls up the creative enthusiasm that goes into developing a course for the first time. In the creative flux of course preparation, there is often a flood of fresh insights and new ideas for teaching. Here, at the ashram, they often come while meditating.
Over the last few days, the phrase the transfer has been passing through my mind when I sit down to meditate. The metaphor of the transfer suggests a basic movement in meditation that occurs when there is a transfer of attention from a less subtle to a more subtle dimension of experience and existence. In this movement of transference, a less spiritual aspect of experience is exchanged for a more spiritual aspect. This basic practice in mystical meditation is a contemplative tool for overcoming distractions, which allows the meditator to become inwardly focused on higher realities.
I had a chance to put the transfer into practice when I sat down to meditate this morning in a dimly lit yoga hall and temple room here at the ashram. As I sat in the stillness, I noted that my mind was unfocused. It was clouded over with dream images and random thoughts about my body’s comfort, the presence of the many other people in the hall, and plans for the day—a typical state of the unfocused mind! It was going to be difficult to meditate in a mental state where wave after wave of jumbled thoughts were crashing against the shore of my mind. That’s when I put the technique of the transfer into play. Before explaining how it works, I want to say a few words about some of the spiritual texts that have inspired my thoughts about the transfer.
The Brahma Sūtras, which summarize the teachings of the Upaniṣads, indicate that meditators should not identify themselves with symbols because we are the Self (ātman), or Brahman, which is being itself (न प्रतीके न हि सः na pratīke na hi saḥ — 4.1.4). The idea here is that taking something less than the supreme reality itself as that reality obscures our understanding of our true Self, which is free from every limitation. While we can take the mind, the sun, or space as limited symbols of ātman or Brahman, we should not view our essential self as being identical with these lesser ontological realities.
It was while reading Śaṅkara’s interpretation of this text that the contemplative procedure of the transfer came clearly into view in my mind. When I transferred my attention from the contents of my mind to Brahman, I experienced a transfer of energy, consciousness, and intentionality from the body and the mind to being itself. This transfer was a mystical moment of exchange in which the lesser self—my everyday sense of myself as a brain-generated mind in a physical body—changed places with the higher Self (ātman, Brahman) and there was an entrance into spaceless and timeless delight and freedom. A bright intuition of reality was kindled in the moment of the transfer, and, for a time, the illusion of being identical with my body and mind vanished. Although we can take aspects of the physical and mental worlds—sound, color, the sky, space, beauty, and bliss—as stepping-stone symbols of ultimate reality, in the transfer we exchange these limited symbols of being for an encounter with unveiled being itself.
The philosopher Simon Critchley in his recent book, Mysticism, suggests what I call the transfer in his dialectical interplaying of the concepts of creation and decreation in the writings of Simone Weil, Julian of Norwich, and Anne Carson. In Critchley’s view, mysticism is the undoing of our created selves in the light of an overarching reality, which precedes us as the ontological ground in which we exist. This view corresponds to my understanding of mysticism as exchanging the physical body and the mass of images and thoughts that make up the mind for the prior reality of being itself in its undivided fullness and emptiness.
A third example of the transfer comes from Contemplative Prayer, the last book that Thomas Merton prepared for publication shortly before his early death. After the concept of the transfer entered my awareness, I soon remembered that the idea of the mystical transfer and the word itself has made its way into my awareness while reading and rereading this book over the decades since I bought my first copy in a Manhattan bookstore in 1971. For copyright reasons, I won’t directly quote the passage, but its essence is that the Sanjuanist night of the senses, which purges the soul of spiritual pride and greed for spiritual experiences, is the point of transfer where the soul gives itself without reserve to the ultimate spiritual reality, the divine, or God.
Now, with these texts as background, I want to give an example of the transfer at work in a simulation of my meditation session this morning:
Having seated myself in a comfortable position that I could maintain for a half hour, I closed my eyes and become aware of my breath.
For the next few minutes, I merely observed the natural flow of my breath.
I continued to bring my attention back to the flow of my breath until thinking slowed and thoughts become less numerous.
When the mind became somewhat still, I transferred my attention from the physical process of breathing to my awareness of breathing.
This subtle shift in awareness is like suddenly looking at the glass of a window instead of looking through the window.
With my awareness focused on the awareness of breathing, I soon detected a subtle quality infusing my breath. It was like a splash of brightness, calmness, or delight in my mind.
At this point, I transferred my attention from my awareness of the breath to this subtle sensation.
Next, I condensed this subtle sensation into a ball of pleasant sensations.
For me, this point of intensity takes on various names such as God, Krishna, Shiva, the Buddha, Jesus, Mary, and various saints and spiritual guides from different spiritual communities.
To refine and deepen this focused state of mind, I aspired toward the divine aided by the inner chanting of a short mantra and a focused prayer of dedication.
As I chanted and prayed in this focused manner, I sensed the mind and the body merging into and vanishing in a cloud of light on the borderland of the divine—of ultimate reality.
I transferred my focused attention to that plain of divine freedom and brightness and sat for the remaining time of the meditation session in a condition of freedom and profound insight.
Before rising from my meditation seat, I offered the spiritual benefits of my practice to the other beings with whom we share the gifts and challenges of this existence.
As the day went on, I noticed an increased sensitivity to the divine light as it plays through the forms and beings of the physical world.
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helpful reflections and meditation guide, Ken...
trans-fer... carried across
Thanks for reading!