GOING ON BEYOND: MEDITATION & MYSTICISM IN THE WORLD FAITHS

This lunchtime half a dozen of us gather at the offices of Christians Aware in Saxby Street, to review the Faith Awareness course offered in the last spring term ("Mindfulness and Wisdom") and discuss what might be offered in that slot starting January 2013.

We settle on the title, “Going on Beyond: Meditation and Mysticism in the World Faiths”.

It was agreed that this course focus less on theory and more on practice than previous courses and not be so academically inclined.

The course will start (as is customary) with a couple of introductory sessions led by Ian Grayling and Kevin Commons which will set out the faith neutral background:

• Fowler’s higher stages of Faith - going beyond the limits of the rational mind
• Zohar & Marshall on numinous and mystical experience
• Possibly some material from Alister Hardy’s religious experience research unit
• Meditation or contemplative prayer as an aid to going on beyond
• Introduction to meditation practice – focusing on physical posture and the breath

A series of inputs from speakers representing a selection of the main world faiths who will:

• Set out the practice of meditation or contemplative prayer in their own tradition
• Provide a brief story of a revered person from their own tradition as an exemplar of the particular practice
• Provide instruction on the form of meditation or contemplative prayer used in their own tradition
• Lead a 15 minute exercise based on the practice
• Answer questions from the audience arising from their own brief experience of the practice that evening

A final round-up session will take an overview of the whole course and will promote the interfaith meditation group hosted by the Buddhist group at Leicester University.

Chairs will be available for the formal meditation session.  People wishing to sit on the floor will be asked to bring along their own meditation equipment if necessary.

MINDFULNESS & WISDOM 3: WISDOM & THE CONCEPT OF "STAGES OF FAITH"

At Christchurch, Clarendon Park, for the third session in the course, "Mindfulness & Wisdom", offered by Christians Aware as part of their Faith Awareness programme. The eight-week course has been devised by Ian Grayling and Kevin Commons from the Leicester Serene Reflection Meditation Group.

Our topic this evening: "Wisdom and the Concept of 'Stages of Faith'".

To quote Bob Dylan (not something I often do, faithful reader) "I'm not there". At the time of this meeting, I'm swanning around the Frederick Gore Retrospective III at The Gallery in Cork Street, London, being mistaken for a successful documentary film producer.

So, thanks to Kevin for sending me notes of this evening's session, so I could maintain the blog for the course. 

Ian began the session by inviting responses from attendees, who'd been left at the end of the last session 2 to consider aspects of their faith and its history that demonstrate "spiritually intelligent or spiritually dumb behaviour." The principal issue arising from this discussion was that there had been plenty of examples of spiritually dumb behaviour exhibited by key figures or institutional bodies within the faith traditions represented in the group. There was further elaboration of this point with reference to failure to recognise the interdependence of humanity and an attachment to independence.

Kevin then introduced the main topic of the evening, which involved looking at James Fowler's Stages of Faith, which are as follows:

• Stage 0 "Primal or Undifferentiated" faith (birth to 2 years), is characterised by an early learning of the safety of their environment (i.e. warm, safe and secure vs. hurt, neglect and abuse). 
• Stage 1 "Intuitive-Projective" faith (ages of three to seven), is characterized by the psyche's unprotected exposure to the Unconscious.
• Stage 2 "Mythic-Literal" faith (mostly in school children), stage two persons have a strong belief in the justice and reciprocity of the universe, and their deities are almost always anthropomorphic.
• Stage 3 "Synthetic-Conventional" faith (arising in adolescence) characterized by conformity.
• Stage 4 "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-20s to late 30s) a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for their beliefs and feelings.
• Stage 5 "Conjunctive" faith (mid-life crisis) acknowledges paradox and transcendence relating reality behind the symbols of inherited systems.
• Stage 6 "Universalising" faith, or what some might call "enlightenment".

Kevin reminded us how our behaviour seems to change from "dependence, through independence to interdependence", which points to a line of human development that had surfaced during the first two weeks of the course and indicated how Fowler, a Christian theologian and developmental psychologist, takes this idea further in his work. He made a very brief presentation of Fowler's taxonomy, pointing to its connection with the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, that had been touched on in the Mindfulness and Morality course last year. A chunk of time was allocated for participants to study a printed summary of the Fowler's stages and the points of transition between them. Kevin pointed out how stages 1-3 built authority on external factors, whereas internal factors become the source of authority from stage 4 onwards and the independence involved in this becomes the springboard to notions of interdependence in stages 5 and 6.

An atmosphere of quite reflection was built up as individuals considered whether the material presented was borne out by their own spiritual journey. The plenary discussion which followed suggested that what Fowler has to say strikes a chord with many people.