In Western traditions, meditation is about receiving insight and understanding of higher truths. This is the same old crap that eviscerates the power of connecting to the Spirit Realm. It’s an effort to force the Spirit to accommodate the human reliance on intellect, the same blasphemous nonsense we see throughout the history of Western Christianity. We end up with a large number of modern evangelical and fundamentalist teachers warning people not to get involved in meditation, when we have copious examples of biblical patriarchs meditating on God’s revelation.
As usual, I have to warn you that precise clinical definitions and resulting generalizations cannot provide full coverage, but at least we can slice off the baloney and keep the bones of truth.
First, let’s restate the context. Truth is not some objective body of knowledge that the human mind can grasp. Truth is God Himself, His living Person. Insofar as God can be said to exist, His existence is rooted outside our universe. Our universe is a bubble within the broader creation; we cannot even fully comprehend our universe, much less what is beyond it. I typically refer to whatever is outside human space as the Spirit Realm, and our plane of existence is the Fallen Realm. To oversimplify, I could as easily say the Realm of the Flesh, but that implies a broader concept of this plane of existence before and after the Fall. As we now live our lives, the Fall is a permanent feature of human existence from now until The End.
Whatever else a reader might draw from the Genesis narrative, a critical element in the first few chapters is that the fundamental nature of the Fall is the human preference for excluding input that does not subject itself to human logic. Not just Aristotle’s logic, but the much broader range of reasoning we can see throughout human history. Aristotle simply represents a rather extreme statement of what humans can do with their intellect by pointedly excluding the validity of revelation. Prior to Aristotle, it seems to have never been so bluntly stated, but a great many men evinced a willingness to reject any part of revelation that might restrain their sinful lusts. The narrative of the Fall represents the human reliance on intellect and reason as the master of all decisions. It’s a rejection of God’s revelation, the very definition of sin.
God’s revelation comes typically in the form of Laws that indicate something of God’s character. The whole point is getting as close as your human nature will permit, not to some bunch of ideas, but to God Himself. He granted the Law Covenants as His chosen means of approaching Him on the human plane of existence. He bluntly states in Scripture that the Law was not the point, but that it served as the means to awakening in mankind the awareness of accountability. If you can embrace that sense of accountability, you are already about as close as any human can get to whatever good things He has to offer on this plane of existence. It is not all the real world stuff He promised, but the desire itself that is the chief reward.
That this all indicates something on a much higher plane that is beyond description and beyond human intellect was originally a common human understanding. Our Western world is the first and only civilization that lacks such an assumption, primarily because our rejection is the very foundation of our civilization. Our entire intellectual history assumes you must refuse the context of God’s revelation, which makes rejection of revelation instinctive. In other words, it raises to the status of deity man’s demand that God come down to his level, refusing to meet God where He resides. It doesn’t work that way, and Western Civilization is completely at odds with reality, even while truculently claiming that this huge lie is reality.
This is why so many Christians are confused about meditation. Meditation does not strive to reach revelation as a goal, even if you imagine that goal as incremental. Stepping outside the toxic idiocy of Western intellectual assumptions, we recognize that revelation is in essence a living link to God, insofar as He makes it possible. Jesus said very plainly (if you can learn to think Hebrew) to Nicodemas that if you only have your intellect, you cannot have revelation. Receiving revelation requires a birth into the Spirit Realm, the awakening of a distinctly separate component of human nature which is by default dead. At the time that Christ discussed this, the path to such a birth pretty much required you travel up that long struggle through Moses’ Law into a state of mind that was ready to seek a death of the flesh nature in order that the spirit might be born. The spirit becomes the executive in the human soul and the mind is demoted to the place of service. (Please note that Jesus lamented how the Hebrew scholars had completely lost their way, teaching human traditions in place of revelation — they had become Hellenized, or rationalized, completely losing their ancient mystical approach.)
In Christ, that order is reversed. The Law was no longer required to get there; spiritual birth became possible without first subjecting one’s life to the Law. But it still assumes you would want to then use the Law to condition your mind to rightly obey the spirit. At the same time that Christ purchased spiritual birth, He also made it a point to revivify the Law in His person. He personified what the Law was supposed to accomplish; He becomes the true meaning of the Law. Now the Law Covenants are read through the lens of Christ’s life as a man.
In the Old Testament, meditation was an effort to subject the mind to the demands of revelation. Revelation became more clear, but the struggle was to train the mind to instinctively look to the Law for the answers to what the man experienced. It was a contemplation of life against the meaning of the Law Covenants. In the New Testament, it is the contemplation of life against the person of Jesus Christ. He cannot be reduced to a set of intellectual principles. Knowing Him includes knowing the Law, the Law presented as a path to a person who was remote. In Christ, He is no longer remote. The requirement on our end is both bigger and easier than it was for Old Testament saints.
To be more spiritual is not some greater level of intellect. It is not Mr. Spock with a smiling face and friendly manner, where the greatest good is simply conquering emotions with reason. Spiritual growth is conquering reason and emotions both, by touching something even higher yet. Meditation is an effort to train the mind to obey the Spirit, and the Spirit of God is hardly confined to mere proposition. The favorite phrase “propositional truth” is a red flag of heresy and blasphemy. It is nothing more than blocking out the Spirit of God by denying that there is anything from God that is higher than the intellect. For people who love that term, they may well be spiritual dead, and might as well be, since they have rejected God’s own revelation in His Son.
