Schlagwort: practice

There is a question I have been sitting with since the first session of my new reading course, one of those questions that seems, at first glance, almost technical — a question about psychology, or phenomenology, or cognitive science — and then slowly reveals itself to be something much less comfortable. The question is this: if you train yourself, through sustained practice, through repeated bodily gesture, through the daily choreography of attention, to feel the presence of God — is what you end up feeling real?

I want to resist the too-quick answer. The too-quick answer — yes, of course it’s real, all feeling is real — is satisfying in a way that should make us suspicious. And the other too-quick answer — no, it’s obviously manufactured, the product of conditioning — is equally satisfying in a way that should make us even more suspicious, because it relies on a fantasy of pristine experience, feeling that arrives from nowhere, untouched by culture or habit or repetition, which is not a description of any experience anyone has ever actually had. Both answers are ways of closing down the question before it gets interesting.

What got me, in the session, was something William James said — not in the session itself, but in the background of it, like a voice from another room. James argued, notoriously, that we do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry. The physical state precedes and produces the emotional one. Run from the bear, and the running is the fear, or rather the fear is nothing over and above the body doing what running bodies do: heart speeding, breath thinning, attention narrowing to a single point. Take away the physical cascade and you have not pure fear remaining; you have nothing. This is a disorienting position if you hold it long enough, because it suggests that there is no emotional bedrock beneath or behind the body’s performances, no inner state to which the gestures merely correspond. The gesture goes all the way down.

If James is right, then the question of whether trained religious feeling is “genuine” begins to dissolve — not because the question doesn’t matter, but because it is resting on a distinction that does not hold. Trained feeling just is feeling, eventually. The pianist who has practised a passage ten thousand times does not execute it less genuinely than she would have in some hypothetical state of spontaneous mastery. The body’s knowledge is not diminished by its acquisition. Tanya Luhrmann, who has spent years studying how people learn to experience God as real and present — through particular techniques of prayer, particular ways of attending to inner sensation, particular methods of interpreting the vague and ambiguous traffic of the mind — reaches something like the same conclusion from the other direction. The training doesn’t produce a fake. It produces a new capacity. The scaffolding, once erected, disappears into what it made.

And yet. There is something in this that the tradition itself refuses. Not all Muslim traditions, not in any monolithic way, but something recurring and insistent: the concept of niyya, of intention, which Islamic jurisprudence places before and beneath every act of worship. A prayer performed correctly — every posture, every word, every timing — but performed without genuine orientation toward God, is not merely a lesser prayer; it is, in certain readings, no prayer at all. The form can be perfect and the substance absent. This is not a small claim. It means that the tradition draws a line between the outer performance and the inner reality that practice is supposed to produce, and insists that the two are not identical, cannot be rendered identical by repetition alone. You cannot train your way into sincerity. Or if you can, something has gone wrong with our understanding of sincerity.

I find this genuinely difficult. Not as an external observer of a tradition that is not mine, but as a question about what I think experience is. Because the Islamic insistence on niyya is not obviously wrong. There is something we recognise in the person who has gone through all the motions without any of them meaning anything, who has accumulated all the correct forms without the thing the forms are supposed to carry. And we recognise it partly because there is a difference visible even from outside — something in the quality of attention, in what Luhrmann elsewhere calls “absorption,” in whether the body seems inhabited or merely operational. The tradition is pointing at something real even when it insists on a distinction that James would unsettle.

Perhaps the trouble is with the word “genuine.” We use it as though it were simple, as though there were a clearly identifiable thing — an experience, a feeling, a state — that either has the property of genuineness or doesn’t. But genuine in relation to what? Genuine compared to what standard? If I ask whether a trained experience of divine presence is genuine, I am already assuming that I know what an untrained experience of divine presence would feel like, that I have access to some baseline against which the trained version can be measured and found wanting or sufficient. But no one has that baseline. There is no pre-cultural, pre-habituated, body-free access to experience of any kind, let alone experience of the transcendent. The question of whether manufactured feeling is real may be a question that has a hidden impossibility built into it: the impossibility of the unmanufactured.

What I keep returning to, though, is a different problem, one that I find more troubling than the philosophical one. Even if we grant that trained feeling becomes real feeling — even if we accept that there is no meaningful distinction between acquired and native experience once the acquisition is complete — there remains a question about authority. Who decides? When a community develops highly specific practices for inducing particular states, and those practices are effective, and the states are real in the sense that they are genuinely felt and genuinely transformative — who determines which states count as God’s presence and which count as something else? The training doesn’t just produce experience; it produces experience with a name, an interpretation, a place in a structure of meaning that someone built and someone maintains. The felt presence is real. The naming of it is a claim. And claims can be wrong, or contested, or politically useful in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of the experience they describe.

I don’t know how to resolve this. I am not sure it can be resolved, exactly, so much as held — with sufficient discomfort, without the relief of a conclusion. What I want to say to the students reading Stjernholm this coming week is: pay attention to the moments when he describes practice producing experience. Notice whether you believe him. Notice what would have to be true about your own relationship to feeling and authenticity for his descriptions to make sense. And then notice whether your answer changes when the practice in question is not someone else’s unfamiliar religious form but something you do every day — the song you play when you need to feel something, the route you walk when you need to think, the posture you unconsciously adopt when you want to seem confident. We are all, always, already training ourselves to feel particular things. The question of whether God is on the other side of the training might be the smaller question. The larger one is what we think we are doing every time we use a practice to produce a state — and whether we would be comfortable calling that prayer.

The videos we watched/listened to during the session: