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Stuart Sandberg

Prayer Unbinding Desire: The Meditation Teaching and Practice of John Main

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PAPER

     In every individual and collective act of humanity the most terrible and poignant possibilities of human freedom are found in assertions that divide or connect. Duality abounds in the natural order: in the heavens and the earth, light and darkness, life and death. In the human body, two legs come together in one torso, two arms are joined at the chest in which there is one heart and the divisions of the lower body come together in one head that is inclined toward the heavens. This physical encounter between duality and unity is also evident in the energy centers or chakras of yoga and the meridians of acupuncture in which health is measured by how energy is balanced and disease by excess or deficiency.

     Accommodating as we are by necessity to the polarities of nature, it is the violent vagaries of human nature that unsettle us: the kid who laughs as he shouts “nuke em” at antiwar demonstrators, the professor calmly presenting his rationalization for torture, the transgressive tolerance of those who need to blaspheme, and the raging religious who act out revenge. In the multicultural landscape of the world today where fundamentalist, secularist, and relativist can all become aggressive about their certitudes, what tears and what holds together the fabric of humanity is a question that interrogates everyone. And what is that fabric if it is not the consciousness of each person as it participates in the consciousness of the whole in refusing or choosing what heals or destroys?

     However, not everything is oppositional. Even as our politics, religions and science seem to promote ever more virulent antagonisms and mechanisms of violence, at a deeper level there seems to be emerging a new understanding of a more integral spiritual and scientific coherence. A new convergence of disciplines is revealing how central consciousness is to how humans participate in the creation of what is real. The most startling expression of this awareness is in the counterintuitive discoveries of quantum physics. What these mathematically and empirically verified theories are revealing is that at the most basic level of subatomic particles there is no material thing there but quanta or packets of energy that can be known either as particles or waves.

   What has been discovered in numerous experiments is that at this subatomic level the observer influences what is observed so that consciousness participates in what is known and what is real. The paradoxical consequences of quantum theory were summed up by one of its discoverers, Niels Bohr, when he said, “If it does not boggle your mind, you understand nothing.”  Inasmuch as we live in a culture that still believes in a Newtonian universe where separate entities are ruled by laws of cause and effect, it is difficult to imagine, especially for scientists, how consciousness can have anything to do with it. Having assumed for a few centuries that mind and matter have little to do with each other, physics is now telling us that matter, energy and mind are part of each other, even when scientists along with the rest of us find it hard to believe. Two physicists, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, nicely summarize the state of the puzzle in Quantum Enigma, Physics Encounters Consciousness:

     Quantum theory works perfectly; no prediction of the theory has ever been shown in

     error. It is the theory basic to all physics, and thus to all science. One third of our

     economy depends on products developed with it. For all practical purposes, we

     can be completely satisfied with it.

        But if you take quantum theory seriously beyond practical purposes, it has baffling

     implications. It tells us that physics’ encounters with consciousness demonstrated for

     the small, applies to everything. And that “everything” can include the entire universe.

     Copernicus dethroned humanity from the cosmic center. Does quantum theory suggest

     that in some mysterious sense, we are a cosmic center? (p,201)

     When it is possible for physicists to use quantum mechanics without paying attention to quantum consciousness, as many do, some dismiss speculation about it as what physicist Steven M. Barr calls, “New Age quackery.” The interference of belief in what is or is not included in the science of physics itself is an example of the influence of consciousness on what can be known. Not only physics, however, is turning to consciousness as a major participant in how humans know. Philosopher, Ervin Laszlo in his book, Science and the Akashic Field, An Integral Theory of Everything, offers a vision of reality that begins with puzzles in various fields of science besides physics, such as cosmology and biology. They reveal “unsuspected forms and levels of coherence that come to light in the physical world and in the living world, as well as in the mind and consciousness.” (p.4)

     Since it is through the coherence of our consciousness that we experience a universe, it is possible to describe or provide maps of consciousness on the basis of perception and behavior. In many books, and especially his latest, Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber describes ways to locate various spiritual perspectives in what he calls states and stages of consciousness. The states of consciousness are available to everyone: the waking state is everyday lived experience; the dream state is dreaming while asleep and other subconscious or energy forms; the causal state, is deep dreamless sleep, or being without thoughts; the witness state is the detached observer of all other states; and the non-dual state is the ground or unity of all other states. Because the scope of consciousness is relative to culture there are also stages of consciousness that evolve and expand from the narrow egocentric or magical, to the ethnocentric, mythic, to the world centric rational, to the global centric pluralistic, to the transglobal integral, and finally to the illumined or over-mind. In Wilber’s integral post-metaphysics every perspective has a cosmic address that includes a state and stage of consciousness. As with every map, one can question what has been left out and whether reality is as schematic as Wilber describes. What he provides for discussion, however, is a way of recognizing observable manifestations of consciousness and what he believes is progress in states and stages.

     Another way of talking about consciousness is described in Power VS. Force and other books by David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. of the Institute of Advanced Spiritual Research. Using kinesiology, a form of muscle testing that can obtain the truth or falsehood of any statement, Hawkins tested over 250,000 people to calibrate their levels of consciousness. On an arbitrary scale of 1 to 1,000, specific words describe the emotional energy of different levels that we can only summarize here. Some of the words describing consciousness below 100 are shame, guilt, apathy and grief; 100 is fear, 125, desire, 150, anger, 175, pride, and 200, the courage to tell the truth. Hawkins finds seventy-eight percent of people are below 200, meaning that their lives are ruled by control, force, cause and effect and the belief that happiness and trouble come from outside themselves. The words describing progress from 200 to 500 are based on telling the truth about oneself and include, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, and reason. Below the level of 500, which is love, consciousness is still dualistic but above 500 and especially 540, which is unconditional love, energy merges with the divine will that is unitive in mercy, forgiveness and compassion.

     What Laszlo, Wilber, and Hawkins tell us about consciousness convey how fundamental it is for human life to exist by engaging in what gives meaning, coherence and integrity. For all the attention given to arguments about natural selection and how animals did or did not evolve in the past, the critical question faced by humanity today is how it can evolve now before it succumbs to its own self-destructive forces. Rivalrous beliefs, empowered by the deadly inventions of science and technology have contributed substantially to the violence of conflicts in the past.     A human future will depend on a self-critical willingness to question every assertion of faith and reason whenever they want to justify violence. Transforming human consciousness will require not only an understanding of the sources of human rivalries and conflict but a way for them to be overcome.

     If we can say that human freedom is only limited by its own refusal to choose what is more true, or more whole, or more responsive to the needs of each and of all, then it is worth considering both where those refusals come from and what choices can transcend them. No single theory can adequately describe what it is that drives humanity to persistent rejection and reactivity. Neither natural science nor the social sciences, including psychology, nor philosophy and theology have provided a commonly accepted explanation of what it is about humans that increase their propensity for violence compared to other species. Since there is something specific to human consciousness that allows for both choosing self-transcendence or succumbing to conflict, there is a need to continue exploring what the structures are that advance or hinder progress in consciousness. If what is unique about human consciousness is its freedom to choose, the nature of desire and what it chooses will be basic to any theory or practice that promises integrity. A major contribution to the understanding of conflictual consciousness has been formulated in the mimetic theory of Rene Girard. As a way of continuing the discussion of desire begun by Girard, the meditation practice and teaching of John Main offer an example of transformation and conversion that can contribute to the formation of a more integral understanding of consciousness.

      In moving beyond linear and instinctual notions of desire, Girard studies a triangular pattern in which the commonly observed link between acquisitive and conflictual desire is explained. Based on his study of literature, anthropology, and the Bible, Girard exposes a universal structure in which a subject imitates the desire of a model or mediator and becomes a rival with him for the desired object. The more models of desire become shifting rivals, obstacles and objects of desire themselves, they create the attraction and repulsion that has come to be known as a double bind. Awareness of this mechanism is not enough to stop it, or to raise one’s level of consciousness, but it might lead to asking what will.

     As we observe the human condition in its various forms of integrity and disintegration, as much as instinct and appetite play an important role, it is desire that most specifically determines the character of human agency. In an early essay Girard described the almost magical transcendence of desire, as well as its ephemeral satisfactions: “Desire is not of this world….It is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is to be initiated into a radically foreign existence.”  The more chimerical its promises, the more poisoned its rewards: “To desire is to believe in the transcendence of the world suggested by the Other. As soon as it yields to the desire that lays siege to it, the enchanting totality reveals itself to be illusory. It bursts like a soap bubble at the slightest contact, but the mirage springs up anew a bit further on.” (Oedipus Unbound, p.1)

     What Girard finds again and again in literature is the triangle of desire in which the object is at the upper point of the triangle and the subject and mediator are the two legs. The wider the base and the further the distance of the desired object, the more the mediated desire is external, meaning there is less opportunity for acquisitive desire to become conflictual. For Don Quixote there is no way for him to become a rival with his model of chivalry, Amadis, whose exploits he imitates but can not compete with since he only knows them  from reading. On the other hand, the closer the subject and the mediator are to the object desired and to each other in the triangle, what Girard calls internal mediation, the more acquisitive desire turns into rivalry and conflict.

     It is this situation which is the subject of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust, whose characters are what Girard in a later interview calls hypermimetic . (The Girard Reader, p.64) The characters these novelists are portraying suffer from the progressive loss of externally mediated desire. Girard quotes Stendhal in The Memoirs of a Tourist where he “warns his readers against what he calls the modern emotions, the fruits of universal vanity: ‘envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred.’” Girard goes on to comment, “If the modern emotions flourish, it is not because ‘envious natures’ and ‘jealous temperaments’ have unfortunately and mysteriously increased in number, but because internal mediation triumphs in a universe where the differences between men are gradually erased.” (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, p.14) The progress of this loss of difference is that, as they become victims of the loss of a genuine Other to desire, they are drawn into the dance of mimetic desire with the hidden mediator a universal partner:

     The romantic vaniteux always wants to convince himself that his desire is written in

     the nature of things, or which amounts to the same thing, that it is the emanation of a

     serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi divine ego. Desire is no longer rooted

     in the object perhaps, but it is rooted in the subject: it is certainly not rooted in the Other.

     The objective and subjective fallacies are one and the same; both originate in the image

     we have of our own desires. Subjectivisms and objectivisms, romanticisms and realisms,     

     individualisms and scientisms, idealisms and positivisms appear to be in opposition but

     are secretly in agreement to conceal the presence of the mediator. All of these dogmas

     are the aesthetic or philosophic translation of world views peculiar to internal mediation.

     They all depend directly or indirectly on the lie of spontaneous desire. They all defend                                

     the same illusion of autonomy to which modern man is passionately devoted.

     (Deceit, pp.15-16)

     The pervasive influence of mimetic desire, especially in its internally mediated form, conspires to continually undermine all human relationships. The mimetic aspect of desire that is evident in most creatures, Girard says, is exacerbated in humans so that only by cultural constraints can it be channeled in constructive directions. “Man cannot respond to that universal human injunction, ‘Imitate me!’ without almost immediately encountering an inexplicable counter order: ‘Don’t imitate me!’ (which really means, “Do not appropriate my object’).” Neither subject nor disciple can understand why they continually are thwarting each other because they are not aware of how the desire of one reflects the other. Referring to the concept that Gregory Bateson developed in his theory of schizophrenia (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp201-27), Girard asserts, “Far from being restricted to a limited number of pathological cases, as American theoreticians suggest, the double bind – a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives – is an extremely common phenomenon. In fact, it is so common that it might be said to form the basis of all human relationships.” (Violence and the Sacred, p.147)

     If mimetic desire is as daunting as Girard’s theory suggests, an obvious question is what alternative is there? In his theory, religion and culture derive from the violence of a group against a scapegoat. In directing the violence accumulated from rivalrous desires against one vulnerable victim, the group is relieved of its internal conflict and experiences peace. The tomb of the dead scapegoat is the origin of the primitive sacred to which the people are drawn and repelled. It is the origin of sacrificial rituals, the myths that transform the victim into a god, the prohibitions that contain the contagion of desire and all distinctions that maintain order and peace for the group. As much as these sacrificial systems provide distinctions and constrain the rivalries that desire continues to generate, they are rooted in violence and still rely on victims to maintain their power. 

     For Girard the Bible provides a unique source for revealing the victimage systems that are ordinarily hidden in religion and culture. He discusses Abraham not sacrificing Isaac, the story of Joseph and his brothers, Solomon’s wisdom in determining the mother of the baby, the Psalms in which the victim finds a voice, the Suffering Servant in Second Isaiah, and Job as a victim of his people. The Gospels and the New Testament reveal most clearly the reversal of the ordinary justification of violence against the victim. While the God of sacrificial religion, who imitates human violence in vengeance and punishment, also appears, Girard describes the Bible as a “text in travail.”  The revelation that God is not on the side of the crowd that crucifies Jesus but is the one who is crucified only comes to consciousness in the Bible as in human history with the same difficulty that it comes to consciousness in us.

     Near the end of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the W orld, Girard recommends Jesus and the Gospels as an alternative model for “the prisoners of violent imitation”. He says of Jesus that, “His role, though understandable, is paradoxical, since he offers not the slightest hold to any form of rivalry or mimetic interference. There is no acquisitive desire in him. As a consequence, any will that is really turned toward Jesus will not meet with the slightest of obstacles. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. With him, we run no risk of getting caught up in the evil oppositions between doubles….‘He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.’ (1 John 2;6)” (p.430)

     In the full expanse of Girard’s theory and its application to many historical, literary and anthropological texts the pervasive force of mimetic desire and its inclination towards rivalry, conflict and violence may seem to overwhelm the alternative offered by imitating Jesus.

When asked by Rebecca Adams in a 1994 interview about the possibility of freedom from mimetic desire and whether it entailed “the bondage of the will,” Girard rejects the idea saying that he believes in “freedom of the will.” He goes on to say, “mimetic desire, even when bad, is intrinsically good, in the sense that far from being merely imitative in a small sense, it is the opening out of oneself.”  Since his concern is primarily with reading texts, he says, “writers are obsessed with bad, conflictual mimetic desire, and that’s what they write about—that’s what literature is about. I agree with Gide that literature is about evil. That doesn’t mean evil is the whole of life….Mimetic desire is also the desire for God.”(The Girard Reader, pp.62-64)

     In another interview James Williams asks Girard about the resistance that interferes with our knowing how desire operates in us: “Just as we ignore or evade knowing ourselves as scapegoaters, so also we ignore or evade our penchant for mimetic rivalry.” Girard responds,

“Yes, a deeper knowledge and self-examination are required. The knowledge of mimesis is really tied to conversion. That is why the matter of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is so important. A personal knowledge, fully rational and yet not always accessible to reason, is needed.” When Williams mentions breaking away from the mimetic predicament, Girard responds, “You must change your personality.” Williams asks “But that also requires mimesis, does it not? A mimesis that is good, a mimesis of love.” After Girard mentions some reservations he has about the words, desire and mimetic desire, Williams says “In other words, mimesis is always along a continuum.” (The Girard Reader. p.268)

     If we can read between the lines of what Girard and Williams are discussing, it would seem that human desire, “while being deeply rooted in our biology,” is also a faculty that is open to self-transcendence. However much imitation is ordinarily inclined toward the polarizing consciousness of rivalry, scapegoating and the double bind, for there to be “a mimesis of love,”  some desire must be left behind in order for the other to exist. This is clearly evident in the message and the model of Jesus. If it is true as Girard says, “Mimetic desire is also the desire for God,” then the fulfillment of that desire has to be more than mimetic. In the meditation teaching and practice of John Main, we can find an example of how what begins in imitation, progressively unbinds self-conscious conflictual desire by faith and the personal experience of the God of Jesus who is love.

      Born to Irish parents in London in 1926, John Main was educated by Jesuits, served in the army, entered a religious order which he left and returned to Ireland where he studied law at Trinity College. Joining the British Colonial Service, he served as a Chinese translator in Malaya where he met a Hindu monk, Swami Satyananda, who had been enrolled as a child in a Catholic mission and was the founder of an orphanage school and ashram in Kuala Lumpur. He asked the Swami to teach him meditation and for a year and a half went to meditate with him once a week.  Years later in 1976 speaking to the monks at Gethsemani Abby in Kentucky he would say, “For the swami, the aim of meditation was the coming to awareness of the Spirit of the universe who dwells in our hearts and he recited these verses from the Upanishads. ‘He contains all things, all works and desires, all perfumes and tastes. And he enfolds the whole universe and, in silence, is loving to all. This is the Spirit that is in my heart. This is Brahman.’” (Christian Meditation, p. 13)

     What John Main learned from the Swami was very simple and was the model for his own practice: “To mediate you must become silent. You must be still. And you must concentrate. In our tradition we know one way in which you can arrive at that stillness, this concentration. We use a word that we call a mantra. To meditate, what you must do is to choose this word and then repeat it, faithfully, lovingly and continually. That is all there is to meditation.” (p.14) In order to root the mantra in your heart the minimum is to meditate for a half hour in the morning and a half hour sometime in the evening. The mantra he taught, “…is like a harmonic. And as we sound this harmonic within ourselves we begin to build up resonance. That resonance then leads us forward to our own wholeness…We begin to experience the deep unity we all possess in our own being. And then the harmonic begins to build up a resonance between you and all creatures and all creation and a unity between you and your creator.” (Pp.14-15)

     After returning to Trinity College to teach law, John Main, influenced by his meditation practice, in 1957 became a Benedictine monk at Ealing Abbey in London. He was advised by his spiritual director to follow a more intellectual method of prayer, which he did. Though he found freedom in letting go of his mediation out of obedience, he also felt the growing frustration of his increasingly busy life. After studying theology in Rome and teaching in London, while he was headmaster of St. Anselm’s School in Washington, D.C. he discovered the teaching of a fourth century monk who had been a major influence on St Benedict. John Cassian had learned in Egypt to pray with the repetition of what he called a formula. John Main writes, “It was with very wonderful astonishment that I read, in his Tenth Conference of the practice of using a single short phrase to achieve the stillness necessary for prayer; ‘The mind thus casts out and represses the rich and ample matter of all thoughts and restricts itself to the poverty of the single verse.’”  (p.18) What he found in Cassian was not only approval for praying with a mantra, but a model for himself of the pilgrimage to find the meaning of Christian prayer: “…in all prayer it is the Lord God Himself who is the prime-mover – His first movement being to send us His Son, Jesus. So if we are truly within Cassian’s  ‘Catholic tradition’ we begin to apprehend that Christian prayer is in essence disposing ourselves so that the murmur of the prayer of Jesus may arise in our hearts.” (p.21) From 1975 until his death from cancer in 1982 John Main practiced and taught meditation in Christian Meditation Centers in London and Montreal. He wrote letters and gave many talks that were transcribed on tapes and in print were collected in books that provide the substance of his teaching.

     In this short summary of John Main’s life some of the main themes of his teaching appear. They illuminate what might be described as a continuum that begins with human mimetic desire but is only fulfilled in receptivity to God’s love. His pilgrimage begans as an imitation of the Swami.  The more it beccame an imitation of Jesus and the desire of others for God trhe more it is  motivated by a faith that experiences the priority of God’s agency transforming and dissolving human desire. Fundamental to what John Main learned from the Swami was the centrality of experience without which beliefs, theories, techniques were relatively useless.  The simple directions on how to meditate by saying the mantra from beginning to end and how it functions as a harmonic form the basis for much of his own teaching. Using the Aramaic word, maranatha, from the New Testament meaning “Come Lord” or “the Lord comes”, he came to understand the true content of the harmonic in Christian Trinitarian terms. It provided a practice that supported the conversion that is called for in the Gospel.

     By providing a resonance that is a source of unity within oneself and with all of creation and with God, saying the mantra provided a way of transforming consciousness in which becoming whole oneself is a necessary process in entering into unity with God: “The truly religious understanding of man is not found in terms of reward and punishment, but in terms of wholeness and division.” (Word Into Silence, p.14) Wholeness can never be a matter of fear or force. As Lawrence Freedman writes in an introduction to John Main, Essential Writings, “He thought that any discipline that was not freely embraced led to the slavery of fear. What saddened him about much institutionalized monastic life was its prevailing climate of fear and culture of conformity. He did not advocate unrestrained self-indulgence, but there were cases where it might be better to do the wrong thing rather than, out of fear, to repeat the right thing for the wrong reason. Like Cassian, he knew that one learned from facing one’s desires and fears rather than repressing or disguising them. Experience, not fear, was the best teacher. (p. 37)

    As profound as the human need for integration is, mimetic desire as Girard describes it as dependent on the model as mediator, is invariably ensnared by rivalry and conflict so that a double bind plays havoc with love. Even though John Main is less concerned with analyzing the cause of the problem, he recognizes the persistence of its contradictions: “Truth, integrity, wholeness. The ancient writers called them ‘oneness’. We often fear the power of oneness – and with good cause. It is not less than the power of the living God which no dividedness or disharmony can withstand. We are, all of us, absurdly attached to our disunity and alienation.” (Monastery Without Walls, p.192). Within the matrix of human desire, mimetic as it is, the core contradiction that is the cause of so much suffering and ultimately despair, is found in the nature of desire itself. Because what Girard calls metaphysical desire begins with a hunger for being, wanting not only the object of desire, but the desiring of the model/mediator as well, it is doomed to want what it can only achieve by losing itself in the other. Without a faith that transcends desire, the model becomes an obstacle and the one desiring is sent back to his own emptiness.

     In his most recent book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard describes the essential contradiction of mimetic desire, how it can be the cause of so much harm and still be good:

“Even if the mimetic nature of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself. If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass.” On the one hand Girard says, “Humankind is that creature who lost a part of its animal instinct in order to gain access to ‘desire.’” On the other hand, “The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire we must have recourse to people around us; we have to borrow their desires.” (p.15) Even though it is desire that allows us to have the freedom to choose, that we need to choose by imitating others is also the root of  pervasive human violence. It is the sin of the world that keeps us in bondage to rivalry with God and each other. In Violence and the Sacred. Girard describes the true cost of this universal self-deception: “At the origin of any individual or collective ‘adjustment’ lies concealed a certain arbitrary violence. The well adjusted person is thus one who conceals his violent impulses and condones the collective concealment of them.” (p.177)  

     While Girard when he is questioned says that he believes in “freedom of the will” and that “mimetic desire, even when bad, is intrinsically good,” it is good when it imitates Christ imitating God in obedience, rather than Satan imitating God in rivalry. When Rebecca Adams presses him to acknowledge some other ways besides the imitation of Christ that mimetic desire might be good, he admits that “wherever you have that desire, I would say, that really active positive desire for the other, there is some kind of divine grace present,” and then adds, “Whether or not it is recognized as such.” (Reader, pp.62-65)  Therefore desire uninfluenced by grace, even when concealed by adjustment, always contains the potential for violence;  “really active positive desire for the other” is the liberation from mimesis that is receptive to the grace of God.

     If desire uninfluenced by grace is inherently rivalrous, the question is how can it ever achieve love for the other? In John Main’s writing, love is not an achievement of desire but an experience of prayer. While mimetic desire fragments and divides, authentic prayer integrates and unites. “Christians have often approached their spiritual life in terms of reward or possession. The enemy of all spiritual value is desire, seeking reward, seeking to possess. The spirit that unlocks the spiritual treasure is the spirit of poverty, a spirit of non- possession. Indeed in meditation, we learn to be dispossessed. (Silence and Stillness in Every Season, p.127)  Rather than the opposite of desire, prayer for John Main is the absence of desire that is reflected in the words which describe total receptivity to the presence of God, such as poverty, silence, and stillness: “The all-important aim in Christian meditation is to allow God’s mysterious and silent presence within us to become more and more not only a reality but the reality in our lives: to let it become that reality which gives meaning, shape and purpose to everything we do, to everything we are.” (Word, p.3) He describes this prayer life that replaces desire within us in Trinitarian relationships: “Prayer, then is the life of the Spirit of Jesus within our human heart, the Spirit through whose anointing we are incorporate in the Body of Christ and by which, in turn, we are returning fully awakened to the Father. We are praying when we are awakening to the presence of the Spirit in our heart.” (Word. p.39) What begins with what appears to be a desire for God is progressively transformed as one is drawn into the life of God: “God does not even experience himself; rather, God knows and is the ground of all knowing, all consciousness and all being. For God to experience himself suggests a divided consciousness, a limitation to divine consciousness and freedom. The knowledge God has of himself is one with God. God’s self knowledge is love.” (Monastery, p.218)

     If we can speak of prayer as unbinding desire, for John Main its power to do this comes not from belief but from faith: “Much of our religious response is indeed based primarily on our beliefs. But I have come to feel that what we ‘believe’ is not really that important. Belief is like the tip of the iceberg. What matters is faith. For the Christian this means our deep commitment to Christ to the point of self-transcendence, at the very bedrock of our being.” (Word Made Flesh, p.48) The reality of faith, prayer and meditation is the bedrock of our being because it is only through self-transcendence that we escape the solitary illusions of our desires. Self-transcendence requires that one have a self and enough faith in oneself and willingness to be loved: “The basic faith you need is that you are, that you are valuable and that you are valued. This is the faith that you are lovable and that you are loved.”(The Way of Unknowing, p.75) It is faith that transforms or unbinds desire and allows us to let go of the ego as our rebellious imitation of God so that the living God can make us whole. “Meditation is the prayer of Faith precisely because we leave ourselves behind before the Other appears, and with no pre-packaged guarantee that he will appear. The essence of all poverty is this risk of annihilation. This is the leap of faith from ourselves to the Other – and it is the risk involved in all loving.” The renunciation of self that Jesus asks for makes it possible to find oneself loved, but there is a cost. “Now only a little experience of the practice of meditation reveals for you that the process of self-impoverishment is a continuous and continually more radical experience….For when we begin to realize the totality of the commitment involved in deep, self-surrendering prayer, there is a strong temptation to turn back…to evade the call to total poverty, to give up meditation, to give up the ascesis of the mantra and to return to self-centered rather than God-centered prayer. (Christian Meditation, p.35)

     When Girard is questioned about whether he is advocating the renunciation of mimetic desire he seems to be caught in a double bind. He says that the Puritans and the Jansenists have overdone  renunciation but, “The idea that renunciation in all its forms should be renounced once and for all may well be the most flagrant nonsense any human culture has ever devised.” He goes on to say that the renunciation of desire and leaving the world is more Buddhist while Christianity goes into the world and exposes sacrificial origins and anticipates the renunciation of the Cross. (Reader, p.63)  The value of renunciation is dependent on whether it is an act of self-giving love or a self-seeking technique to achieve a certain goal. Without faith Jesus creates a double bind because he is saying imitate me by sacrificing yourself, but there is no guarantee that if you renounce yourself that the Other will appear. If there were a guarantee, it would not be faith, but when it is a genuine act of faith in love, the emptiness of self-giving provides an opportunity for grace.

     John Main mentions those who feel that the renunciation necessary for meditation can be harmful: “People fear that the silence of meditation is regressive. But experience and tradition teach us that the silence of prayer is not the pre-linguistic but the post linguistic state, in which language has completed its task of pointing us through and beyond itself and beyond the whole realm of mental consciousness. The eternal silence is not deprived of anything nor does it deprive us of anything. It is the silence of love, of unqualified and unconditional acceptance. We rest there with our Father who invites us to be there, who loves us to be there and who has created us to be there.”(Silence, p.126) “The paradox of silence is that it can be either a silence that is vibrant with God’s presence, vibrant with his love, vibrant in summoning us beyond ourselves,” or it can be a “silence of absence and loss…a sense-less silence, and faith is forced to greater depths by senselessness in any form.”(Unknowing, p.6) “The two silences are both of them equally powerful in teaching us: the silence of revelation fills us with wonder and the silence of absence teaches us fidelity. The Word is present in both.” (p.8)

     The contemporary world progressively encounters an opposition between on the one hand a unified world that is a global village and on the other hand a clash of values, religions, ideologies and civilizations. The great human puzzle will continue to be finding the roots of conflict and the ways they can be removed. Inasmuch as this awareness is always a personal question first, since freedom must be chosen and cannot be imposed, the insights of Rene Girard provide a new perception of what the Bible reveals, and therefore a new freedom to choose a way that leads to integrity rather than violence. Through his openness to the spiritual truth of Hindu meditation and recovery of a form of apophatic prayer from Cassian, the Cloud of Unknowing and other sources in the Christian contemplative tradition, John Main provides a model for imitating Christ that promises to unbind the conflicts generated by desire.

     The brutal consequences of acquisitive and conflictual desires rage on in corporate predation, domestic violence, personal addictions, religious and preemptive war. It will not be in fighting greed and violence but in the Spirit informing consciousness that an alternative is possible: “Our faith is our patience, our openness to what already is, because we are not waiting so much for God to arrive as for ourselves to realize He is with us in Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us. What we have to learn is not to ‘make God happen’ but to become sufficiently still, sufficiently silent, to allow the consciousness of Jesus, His Spirit within us, to expand and push back the frontiers of our limitations, to reveal to us that we are in God.” (Silence, p.27)