I'm starting a mediation course in 2 weeks for which I have to read at least 3 books, and I thought this would be an excellent excuse to start my book reviews again. Unfortunately, the first book I read, "Le médiateur de l'âme" by Jacqueline Morineau, is, to put it kindly, not my style.

The problem is that Jacqueline Morineau wrote two books and I was only able to get the second from Fnac. Her first work is, as far as I can tell, about her approach to mediation, while her second is an autobiography with, and I can't emphasise this enough, a heavy focus on spirituality and Christianity. I could spend ages ranting about how much it gives me the ick to read about original sin, and I will, because fantasising about that was half the reason I kept slogging through this bloody book in the first place.

Let's start with a taster:

Paradoxalement, c'est dans l'obéissance que l'homme découvrira sa liberté. Il aura besoin de la perdre pour pouvoir la retrouver quand il aura abandonné sa prétention de posséder "l'arbre de la connaissance", et de décider ce qui est bien ou mal. Quand la voix de la raison aura conclu une alliance avec la voix de la conscience, le dialogue engagé lui permettra, au moment crucial, de faire un choix en toute liberté et d'accepter ou de refuser ce qui lui est proposé.

It is in obedience to a higher power that you will find liberty? My philosophy teacher at school once noted that Francophone writers love to play with paradoxes (e.g. "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains"). A decade later and I am still convinced that this is a stupid practice the French keep up because half of them actually don't know what the shit they're saying and the other half are incapable of explaining themselves otherwise. To disturb this delicate balance would bruise the egos of both groups and so this insanity continues to the present day.

It feels gratuitous to drop quotes out of context like this and poke fun at them, and I like free stuff so I will:

Le tombeau vide du Ressuscité offre à l'homme l'accès à l'inaccessible. Ce vide devient le signe de toute plénitude, mais il fallait vivre le chemin de la croix pour en arriver à cette substitution. Il fallait que le fils de l'homme le vive dans sa chair pour que notre souffrance, notre condition mortelle soient transmutées en vie éternelle, et que les ténèbres deviennent lumière. Là, se trouve le miracle pour le croyant. Nous sommes devenus fils de lumière quand, de ce lieu, a jailli l'espérance qui donne un sens à la vie.

Half way through the book Morineau explains how at the turn of the millenium she became a born again Christian. The story itself is interesting, and that is true whenever Jacqueline (or Jackie) tells her own story. Once the conversion story is out of the way there's a lot of this sort of stuff, and I just find it really boring. I read paragraphs 3 times in a row because I did not register what she's writing, I'm transported back to mass and I'm desperately fidgeting or falling asleep.

With some effort, I am nonetheless able to extract some useful ideas from all this though. Morineau often does link spirituality to mediation, and an example can be found in the previous quote where she talks about emptiness. This is a recurring theme, particularly when she talks about zen:

Ayant beaucoup pratiqué la fuite, j'avais expérimenté combien elle pouvait être inutile. Le vide n'était pas la fuite, mais il produisait son contraire, le face-à-face avec soi-même ; il était source d'un élargissement de conscience de mon être.

I understand this emptiness as one that allows clarity, like the absence of fog that allows you to see the view from your window. It also allows you to embrace new ideas, which is crucial in mediation if the mediants (? médiants en français) are to come up with creative solutions to their conflict.

Morineau also describes this openness and creativity as child-like. I get where she's coming from, but at times she seems to have a reverence for the child-like state that I think is misplaced:

Diverses traditions fixent à sept ans l'âge de raison. Dans notre symbolique c'est le chiffre de l'absolu, de la spiritualité, de la perfection, sous entendant par là que l'enfin a, enfin, accès à une dimensions supérieur de lui-même. De toute évidence, la petite fille, qui parlait au soleil, n'était pas en lien avec l'arbre de la connaissance, elle n'était pas sous la domination de la raison. Son état "d'être" lui donnait un grand bonheur; état de grâce qui la renvoyait à ce qu'on appelle le paradis, quand la petite fille pouvait vivre en complète harmonie avec ce qui l'entourait et avec elle même.

She goes on to compare the transition from childhood to adulthood to original sin:

[L'histoire du pêché originel] est révélatrice du moment crucial où l'être humain perd le bonheur, fondateur de sa condition première, pour tomber dans un état où il découvre la peur et la honte, c'est-à-dire la souffrance. La médiation est très révélatrice de la crise qui est au coeur de l'expérience humaine dans le sens étymologique du mot : nécessité de choix, de discernement. Elle se situe à un moment important de la vie, quand la séparation vécue renvoie les plaignants à un questionnement vital sur eux-mêmes.

By admiring and revering children and child-like perspectives Morineau fails to see the downsides. For example, Morineau praises how children naturally live in the present, but this also means they are not great caretakers (of people, institutions, ecosystems, ...) since that requires understanding of the past and future. They are easily tricked or manipulated because naturally trusting. My point of view is that a balance is necessary. A child-like, tabula rasa mind state is definitely useful for some things but awful for others.

(Honestly I don't like the words I am using right now, they don't feel right, but I'm writing this quickly in a café and it will have to do.)

Despite my ick towards Christianity and my education as a rational engineer, I do see the value of spirituality and Morineau does a decent job of exposing this. My approach to spirituality is not to believe that there truly are spirits, things not of this world or higher powers. However, it is clear to me that humans have an innate need for meaning or purpose, and they have created countless stories to satisfy this need throughout the ages. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Our quest for meaning is in itself, to me, magical.

More than magical, it is necessary in order to live a good life. In reading Morineau, I was reminded of Gabor Maté's book on addiction, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts", in which he argues that the path to sobriety must also be a spiritual one. The book title itself is a reference to a Buddhist concept of hungry ghosts, humans who are not truly living because they spend their days searching to satiate the spiritual void inside of them. I was also reminded of the energy and drive that irrational convictions provide us when watching a video on the Cathars. They fervently believed that they were in the right, a belief that fuelled their resistance and drove many of them to suffer horribly. They even pitied their persecutors since their souls had been born into minds and bodies that had strayed far from the truth. I'm surely getting details wrong, but I don't think that I need to spend much effort arguing that religious fanaticism is an extremely powerful human force, since many other examples exist.

My final takeaway from Morineau's book was her life story. She lost her parents, grandparents and child within a couple of years when she was in her early twenties. This experience was so devastating that she attempted to take her own life. Despite this, she was, over the course of a very long life, able to "heal" herself, by which I mean live a life of purpose. Her's and many other stories are a reminder that we are capable of healing and growing, given the right conditions, enough time and the willingness to do so. We won't all succeed, at least not to the extent we may hope, and that's fine, but it is possible, and that is enough motivation to keep trying.

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