CS Lewis created a small work titled “Meditation in a Toolshed.” He took a look at the ability of people to assess meaning from the outside of things. I felt his message was useful for our discussion on the merits of Meditation. Other than the final paragraph, this essay is a long quote from CS Lewis.
Lewis said — I was standing today in a dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood, that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead, I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking inside the beam and looking at the beam are quite different experiences. But this is only a remarkably simple example of the difference between looking [inside something] and looking at [something].
A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes of casual chat with her is more precious than all the favors that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognized biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking [inside] the sexual impulse and looking at it [from a distance].
[This distinction] raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look [inside] it and another when you look at it [from the outside]. Which is the ‘true’ … experience? Which tells you most about the thing? … It has been assumed [by progressives] … that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people, but to anthropologists; that if you want the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some ‘ideology’ (such as medieval chivalry … ), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.
There [is a] fatal objection to discounting [the participants view]. … You discount the person’s ability … to think accurately. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it ‘is’ (whatever ‘is’ means) such-and-such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning … unless he had ‘been inside’ by actually suffering. If he had never [suffered], he simply would not know what he was looking at.
The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside. This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life-giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honor, and the like, without having been inside any of them.
The answer is that we must never allow the [degradation] to begin. … The inside vision … must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one, all thought (including this thought — itself) would be valueless. As you might guess, this is self-contradictory thinking. Thinking in a circle.
I presented this notion of inside looking vs outside looking with the belief it could influence our decision to dig deep into scripture through meditation (intensive study) vs casual reading of scripture (as if we are reading the news). Meeting God face to face is far better than sipping lemonade on the sidelines. Reading is the right place to start. But eventually, we can benefit from meditation on scripture.
I choose Jesus.
Shalom Talk 