The Turning

The last essay ended with an agreement among the traditions: the obstacle to unitive knowledge lies in the knower, and because it is something we do, it can be undone. This essay is about the undoing, or at least its beginning. The Greek word for it gives this journal its name. Metanoia is usually translated “repentance”, but it means a change of mind in the widest sense, a turning of the whole understanding. Before any practice, discipline or insight, the traditions describe a turning: a moment, or a long season, in which a person faces a different way.

Turning the whole soul§

Plato gives the clearest image. In the Republic, Socrates compares human beings to prisoners chained in a cave, facing a wall on which shadows move. They take the shadows for reality, because they have never seen anything else. Education, he says, is not putting sight into blind eyes, as some suppose. The power of seeing is already in the soul. What is needed is to turn the whole soul around, away from the world of becoming toward the world of being, as one would turn the whole body to bring the eye from darkness into light (Plato 1871, VII, 518b–d).

Two details matter. The eye is not given something new; it is turned toward what was always there to see, which fits the diagnosis of the last essay. And it is the whole soul that turns, not the eye alone. A change of opinion, by itself, is not the turning Plato means. The prisoner who is turned around first finds the light painful and wants to look back at the shadows. The turning involves the desires and the will as well as the intellect, and so it is slow, and it hurts.

Returning§

The Abrahamic traditions speak of the same movement as a return. The Hebrew teshuvah, usually rendered “repentance”, means returning. When the Gospel of Mark summarizes the preaching of Jesus, the first word is the verb of metanoia: repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.¹1 Mark 1:15; the Greek is metanoeite, “change your minds”, “turn”. The Arabic tawba also means a turning back, and the Qurʾān uses the same root for God: when Adam turned to God, God turned toward him, for he is the one who relents, the merciful (Palmer 1880, 2:37). The turning is two-sided. The human being turns back, and is met by a God who is already turning.

The Imitation of Christ puts the alternative bluntly. You are miserable wherever you are, and whichever way you turn, unless you turn to God.²2 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 1.22.1, translated by William Benham: “Thou art miserable wheresoever thou art, and whithersoever thou turnest, unless thou turn thee to God. Why art thou disquieted because it happeneth not to thee according to thy wishes and desires? Who is he that hath everything according to his will? Neither I, nor thou, nor any man upon the earth. There is no man in the world free …” Read in context From the chapter “On the contemplation of human misery”, in William Benham’s translation. The point is not that ordinary life is miserable in itself, but that no direction except one leads anywhere in the end.

What sets it off§

The traditions remember the turnings of their founders and saints, and the stories have a common shape. Something breaks the ordinary surface of life, and through the break a question appears that can no longer be ignored.

The Buddhist legend tells of a prince kept from every sight of suffering, who on four excursions from his palace saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic, and left home to seek the end of suffering. The tradition has a word for what he felt: saṃvega, a shock of urgency at the sight of how things are. The story is told of the Buddha in the later biographies and, in an early discourse, of a Buddha of the distant past; its force lies less in its history than in its pattern, which every reader recognizes.

Al-Ghazālī, the most celebrated teacher of his age, describes in his autobiography a crisis that began as a question about certainty and ended in his body: his tongue dried up so that he could not lecture, and he left his chair in Baghdad to take up the Sufi path (al-Ghazālī 1909). Augustine, after years of intellectual searching, describes a day in a garden in Milan when he heard a child’s voice chanting “take and read”, opened the letters of Paul, and found that the struggle of years was over (Hippo 1838, VIII.12).

Not every turning is dramatic. Emerson’s began as a question about his own age, which lived, he thought, at second hand: the generations before beheld God and nature face to face, and we only through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?³3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, paragraph 0.1: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a …” Read in context The opening of Emerson’s Nature (1836). The turning can be a sentence one cannot stop asking.

The Kaṭha Upaniṣad frames the moment as a choice. The good is one thing and the pleasant another, it says; both bind a person, and both present themselves to everyone. The wise choose the good, and the foolish the pleasant (Müller 1884, Kaṭha I.2.1–2). The boy Naciketas, offered every pleasure by Death himself, refuses them, and asks instead what happens to a human being after death. His refusal is the turning.

Meeting§

Many turnings come through a person. Rūmī was a learned teacher of law and theology in Konya when, in 1244, he met the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, and his life and work were transformed; much of his lyric poetry was written in Shams’s name (Rūmī 1898). The traditions take such meetings seriously. The presence of someone further along the path can do what no argument can: show that the path is real, by its fruits in a human life.

Plato records the opposite case, a turning refused. In the Symposium, Alcibiades, brilliant, rich and drunk, praises Socrates by confessing what Socrates does to him. Socrates is the only person who ever made him ashamed; listening to him, he feels he can hardly endure the life he is leading, and so he stops his ears and runs away.⁴4 Plato, Symposium, paragraph 165, translated by Benjamin Jowett: “And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth's sake. I say, that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries' shops, holding pipes and flutes in …” Read in context Alcibiades on Socrates, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation. The scene is painful because it is familiar. The call is heard, and recognized, and declined, not out of disbelief but because answering it would cost too much. The traditions do not pretend that the turning is easy, or that hearing the call is the same as answering it.

Longing§

Beneath every one of these stories lies a desire that is not satisfied by what usually satisfies desire. The traditions call it longing, and they treat it as the engine of the path. Ramakrishna told a disciple that God is reached when one longs for him as a drowning man longs for air (Ramakrishna 1942). Tagore gives the same longing a quieter voice: the song he came to sing remains unsung; he has not seen his face nor heard his voice, only his footsteps on the road before the house; he lives in the hope of a meeting that has not yet come.⁵5 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 13, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart. The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by. I have …” Read in context Tagore’s translation of his own Gitanjali.

Longing is easily dismissed as a mood. The traditions see it as evidence. If the forgetting of the last essay were complete, there would be nothing to long for. That something in us is homesick for a home we cannot name is, for them, the first sign that the forgetting is not total, and the first thread by which the way back can be followed.

Who turns whom?§

The traditions divide on a question that every honest seeker eventually asks: is the turning something I do, or something done to me? Augustine, who had tried for years to turn by his own strength, answered that God did it. You called and cried out, he writes, and broke through my deafness; you shone, and dispelled my blindness (Hippo 1838, X.27). Tagore asks for the same breaking-in: when the heart is hard and parched, come with a shower of mercy; when the beggarly heart sits crouched in a corner, break open the door.⁶6 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 39, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy. When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song. When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest. When my beggarly heart sits crouched, …” Read in context Tagore’s translation.

Other traditions place more weight on the seeker’s own resolve. The Buddha’s last words, as the tradition reports them, urge his followers to work out their liberation with diligence (The Buddha 1881, Mahāparinibbāna Suttanta). Most traditions hold both at once, and their best teachers refuse to resolve the tension. The turning is chosen, and it is a gift; it requires effort, and the effort is itself a response to a call. A later essay in this series returns to the question, which runs through every stage of the path.

Not once, but always§

Conversion stories make the turning sound like a single event. The traditions’ manuals for the long road say otherwise. The Imitation of Christ asks its readers to renew their resolve daily, as if each day were the first day of their conversion, and to pray that this day they may make a good beginning, because so far they have done nothing.⁷7 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 1.19.1, translated by William Benham: “The life of a Christian ought to be adorned with all virtues, that he may be inwardly what he outwardly appeareth unto men. And verily it should be yet better within than without, for God is a discerner of our heart, Whom we must reverence with all our hearts wheresoever we are, and walk pure in His presence as do …” Read in context From the chapter “Of the exercises of a religious man”. The Zen tradition’s ten ox-herding pictures, a classic map of the path, begin with the herdsman searching for an ox he has never in fact lost, and the search is not abandoned after the first picture; every stage is a further turning.

This matters because the turning is not a credential. A person who once had a vivid conversion may still be facing the wall of the cave in most of their life. The turning that counts, in the traditions’ own terms, is the one made again this morning, and tomorrow.

Turning for the wrong reasons§

The traditions are realistic about why people begin. Most turn out of fear, or need, or the wish for something: relief from suffering, the reward of heaven, special experiences, a better self. None of the traditions refuses such beginners, but all of them expect the motive to be purified along the way. Rābiʿa of Basra, the eighth-century Sufi, is remembered for a prayer that states the goal with startling severity: if I worship you for fear of hell, burn me in hell; if I worship you in hope of paradise, exclude me from it; but if I worship you for your own sake, do not withhold from me your eternal beauty.⁸8 The prayer is attributed to Rābiʿa in later Sufi collections, notably ʿAṭṭār’s Memorial of the Saints; as with most sayings of the early Sufis, it cannot be traced to her with certainty.

A modern teacher gave the danger a name. The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa called it spiritual materialism: the use of spiritual practice to strengthen the very self it is meant to see through, collecting experiences, teachings and attainments as one might collect possessions.⁹9 Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala, 1973). The turning, on this account, is not complete when one starts to seek the real. It is complete only when one stops seeking it for one’s own sake, and that may take the rest of the path. The first turning is toward the light; the later ones are turnings of the motive with which one faces it.

What the turning is not§

It is not adopting a new set of opinions. One can change religions, or acquire one, without turning in this sense at all; and one can turn without changing one’s outward affiliation in the least. It is not an emotional high, though emotion often comes with it and passes. And it is not contempt for the world. The prisoner in Plato’s cave is turned toward the light, and is later sent back down into the cave to help the others. The turning is away from the shadows, not from the people who still watch them.