Is Quaker 'worship' meditation?

 

The Quaker practice called “silent waiting” – the inner core of Quaker spirituality – the ground zero where the boundary between me-here-now and the so-much-more fold one into the other and join as one – the touching place of the divine – is the not unique in taking those whose practice it to the “still centre”, but is unique in how it approaches that place because of the tradition within which it is embedded. 

All  mystical paths lead to the still centre, regardless of the tradition they have grown up in: a place beyond words; a place of deep wordless knowing and communion; a state of union with the ground of being; with being itself.

For some the path of the via positiva is followed to arrive at the still centre. For some it is the via negativa that is followed. The via positiva using the wealth of symbols built up by their tradition; the via negative deconstructing, or doing away with, such symbols, as with the famous Zen saying “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him”.

Within some traditions such practices may be referred to as meditations with object or without object. Both end in the still centre: they differ only in where they start. With object focuses on an image, a story, a memory, a place or time, a koan, and works with that until it dissolves into the still centre. Without object simply rests with the breath, as in zarzen, until the still centre is found.

If there is focus on an object – a prayer, a passage from a book, an icon, an image (something much more common in the theistic faiths) then it is a contemplative pathway. If the focus is on the inward journey itself then it is meditative: mind watching mind until the pure light is found and rested in. Both are mystical paths - paths that go beyond where words can reach. 

Some traditions make finding the still centre the objective. Some identify it as the Buddha mind. Some as the point of deepest communion. Some traditions use finding the still centre as only a spiritual exercise, but not as their core practice. How it is integrated depends on the tradition that is followed, on the spiritual journey undertaken.

Taoists view still centre as the place where the practioneer can sense the movement of the winds of Tao: the place of being in harmony with the energy flowing all around: the eternal creative force of all things.

It was from a Taoist book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by his friend Richard Wilhelm, that C.G.Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of Analytic Psychology, discovered support for finding the still centre that his own investigations had suggested was so crucial to the process of individuation, as he termed the process of lifelong continuing maturation.

In 1934 a group of Geneva Quakers were introduced to Jung’s ideas by one of their number, Elined Kotschnig, who was training under one of Jung’s pupils to become an analyst. Later that year the whole group travelled to Zurich to meet Jung himself and his wife Emma, who was also a notable analyst. Emma later travelled to Geneva to to further introduce the group to Jung’s ideas. 

Jung believed that finding what he termed the Slebst, the wholeness of a person, was the way to personal growth, taking people away from their ego self to where a wider vision was to be found. The core of re-visioning was to be found by discovering the still centre. 

Jung placed the god-archetype there, as a latent potential, to be dressed in whatever guise worked for the individual. What mattered was its discovery and acceptance so it could do its work. It was not passive, but agent of change, of growth, of development, extending beyond the bounds of the ego self in to the collective, accumulated wisdom. The agent that Quakers referred to as “that of God within”, and Buddhists as “your inner Buddha nature”. It was a counterbalance to the ego, viewing the ego’s machinations from a deeper context. In time coming to guide action and word with greater wisdom.

Jung was notable in realising the importance of discovering and connecting with the spiritual dimension of life. He admired the Quaker practice of silent waiting, describing Quakers, in a letter to Irine Pickard, another of the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group, as being “the only tue Christian’s” because of it.

P W Martin, one of the core members of the Geneva-Jungian group, in his book about their discovery of Jung’s ideas and their application to their lives, Experiment in Depth (1955), chose the more nuanced translation of Jung’s Slebst as “the deep centre”. Yet another way of speaking of the still centre.

Quakers have used the still centre as a wellspring from which deeper understanding comes. It seasons and tempers them. Their collective approach is unusual, if not unique. It stems from the practice of the Seekers who George Fox stumbled upon. A practice inspired by the words of the Bible “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20, KJV)

The Quaker practice, amongst those who follow the tradition of unprogrammed meetings, typically has what has been described as a U-shape. An inward phase starting with “centring down” that leads towards the sill centre, followed by a journey outwards that may lead to ministry as a result of what has been encountered. Joycelyn Dawes in her book Discernment and Inner Knowing, making decisions for the best (2017), has elucidated this U-shaped as used among Quakers.

During Meeting for Worship there is openness as what may arise from the still centre. Similar, but more focused, is Worship Sharing. Both are inward journeys.

During Meeting for Business the inward phase carries the question of what needs to be discerned into the stillness and silence with each person alert to what the others are inspired to say. This parallel seeking often leads to one Friend saying of another’s words “My Friend speaks my mind”. 

Meetings for Clearness and Threshing Meetings follow the same U-shaped pattern, and are much valued tools of discernment amongst Quakers.

It is surrendering the ego mind to what the early Quakers called “that of God within”. Those of a more theistic bent still do; but the via positiva was always an easier path, having been built by centuries of tradition and being built into the primary texts of all the “religions of the book”. The ontological objections fired at the theistic edifice on which those traditions and texts were built seem to so many modern minds unanswerable; yet the experience of the still centre remains as tangible to them as to the theistic. It is beyond capture by words: it is a state of being.

The non-theistic traditions of the East are more sympathetic to the via negativa, which accounts for some of the attraction of Zen in particular to the Western mind: a way of a encountering the still centre without the ontological objections. Yet symbolically, as Jung realised, there is so much spiritual wealth to be had in the traditions of the West as they are more accessible to the Western mind: they are integral to the culture. Spiritual maturity came, he thought, with the realisation of the symbolic as a consequence of honestly encountering the still centre. It is there independently of all theologies as an undeniable fact of human life, of the the human mind, of the psyche.

The theistic non-theistic divide is an illusion in the light of the existence of the still centre deep in the mind. It is to be had for all, regardless how it is dressed. The via positive and via negativa just preferred paths depending on personality, inclination and history.. 

The Experiment with Light has carried these U-shaped Quaker practices beyond Quaker circles. It shares much common ground with Eugene T Gendlin’s Focusing (1978) and conforms with what the modern Tibetan Dzogchen pacticioneer, Dusana Dorjee, says in her book Neuroscience and Psychology of Meditation in Everyday Life: Searching for the Essence of Mind (2018), about finding the still centre.

Is Quaker “worship” meditation? In the sense that it involves inwardness and inward attention seeking connection beyond ruminative thought - a letting go of the egoistic stream of consciousness - to find the still centre and what arises there, then, yes it is a form of group or collective meditation.

But then that is only a matter of framing. It could equally be called payer, or contemplation. Terms more at  home in the Western traditions. Which ever, the Quaker collective approach is a unique, at least within Western spirituality.