Growing Zen

"Insight is an experience of the truth that cannot be simply given to another person in the way that one may communicate ideas or beliefs/ Insight is spontaneous and has the nature of a gift. It is surprising when it comes and yet obvious. It is joyful yet calm. The mastic tradition practices a form of spiritual reading (lecto divina as Saint Benedict called it), which is not the same as study or analytic reading and which is dedicated to the progressive awakening of insight in the practitioner. Like the Jewish tradition of reading the Bible, quality is preferred to quantity, depth to breadth. Reading in this way, one chooses a short passage and then continues to ruminate or "chew" over it. You go back over it many times, homing in more and more until you are left with a single word or short phrase, simultaneously arresting and awakening the mind to meaning. In this way, as the mind is stilled, one is brought to the threshold of meditation.

How to Read the Word

Origen, a third-century Christian teacher in the Alexandrian school of Christian philosophy, was the first to systematically describe the art of reading and interpreting Scripture as well as the first to describe how the mind's encounter with the Scriptures lifts the mind above itself. He identified the different levels of meaning (an exercise that was anathema to fundamentalists then as it is now) waiting to be experienced in the Scriptures.

He saw the reading of Holy Scriptures as a process of deepening consciousness and insight. The process begins with the literal meaning of the text, a meaning that requires both a sense of grammar and of history. But, beyond the "letter that killeth," which goes no further than its surface meaning, Origen pushed on toward the level of moral meaning. This level is reached by seeing the stories and characters of Scripture as "types" or symbols that teach us lessons within the context of our personal or social circumstances. The, Origen said, the "allegorical" or mystical meaning waits to be discovered as we are lifted above ourselves and absorbed into the Logos itself [Logos is the Spirit of Christ]. A good example of how this process works can be seen by exploring the different levels of meaning in the Bible term "Jerusalem": the word, the place, and the symbol. Jerusalem has a literal historical meaning. As the center of sacred presence and worship for three religions, it symbolizes the spiritual realities of the pilgrimage of our lives. As the "heavenly Jerusalem" it represents the goal of the spiritual journey."

-page 26-27 of the introduction to the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus. The intro was written by Laurence Freeman, OSB.