Merely to bear witness

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When we discuss, as I did the other day, the question of free will and determinism, it is all too easy to get caught up in intellectual debate, but this was not my intention. I wrote then, “Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time.” To see this directly for oneself, rather than think about it, is the beginning of our actual awakening.

But the state of accepting realisation that Spinoza refers to in his Ethics as “blessedness” is not arrived at by debate or dialectic, despite Spinoza’s own sometimes misleading phrase “the intellectual love of God”. It is simply the immediate embrace of this “radical acceptance”, in Tara Brach’s phrase, of what actually is.

In her book, Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes:

The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing” [Dzogchen].

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet if we remain still enough to see that all that appears – sense objects,  thoughts, feelings, memories – are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed – from which all change proceeds.

Biological fate

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In Ch.1 of her 2019 book The Science of Fate, (annoyingly, the Kindle edition is not paginated) Hannah Critchlow writes:

The science that suggests we are all, to a large extent, at the mercy of our neurobiology, driven in the direction of certain decisions and behaviours, susceptible to certain conditions, is very compelling. On one level every one of us, however uniquely complex and valuable, is also simply a human animal whose principal… is to interact with others to exchange information that will contribute to the collective consciousness and, if we’re lucky, pass on our genetic material. Deep drives are at work to further those basic goals and they are largely beyond our control.

Even what we think of as the more individuated aspects of our behaviours, the ones that we feel instinctively must be the product of nurture more than nature and more under our own conscious control, are formed at a deep level by innate factors we were born with and that were reinforced in our earliest years. Our personality, our beliefs about ourselves and the way the world works, how we respond in a crisis, our attitude to love, risk, parenting and the afterlife: any of the highly abstract opinions and character traits you care to mention are deeply shaped by how our brain processes the information it receives from the world. When we start to probe the idea of being a free agent in control of our life in the light of what neuroscience is now showing us, it can feel as if the space available for free will is shrinking fast and we’re stuck in a loop that refers us back endlessly to a prior stage of preordained experience.

Ideas such as this have the power to evoke sometimes quite spectacular emotional reactions in those who hear them for the first time, or are reminded of past unhappy encounters with the likes of Spinoza, who have called into question our often unthinking assumptions about free will. There is a deeply visceral dislike, in many people, of the idea that our personal sovereignty might be in any way impugned. We long to be able to say, with all the conviction of William Ernest Henley, “I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul.”!

Critchlow herself, a page or two later, points out:

During my lifetime there will be significant discoveries, applications and ramifications. It’s possible that, as we discover more about the neurobiology of belief formation and prejudice, we might be able to boost our openness to new ideas, say, with massive consequences for reducing conflict at every level.

Not that it will be straightforward. Our predecessors were shaken to the core by the ideas of Newton, Darwin and Einstein. They had to re-evaluate humanity’s place in the universe. Perhaps neuroscience is now demanding of us that we embark on a similar journey of thought disruption. We as a society will certainly have to consider the implications and ethics of its insights.

But the matter of free will seems to me really to be a not matter so much of ethics, or even metaphysics, as it is a simple misunderstanding of the workings of our minds. Sam Harris (Free Will, 2012, p.49):

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can’t make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions. However, I think that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an illusion—our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality. Rather, we are mistaken about our experience. Not only are we not as free as we think we are—we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Contemplative practice is, as Harris himself explains at length in Waking Up, by far the most practical way (at least for those of us who are not professional neuroscientists!) to understand the inescapability of this illusion. Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time. Benedictus Spinoza saw this:

Because God [Deus sive Natura] is infinite substance, everything follows from God’s essence with the same necessity that the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. In Spinoza’s words, “things could not have been produced by God in any other way, nor in any other order.”

True freedom, for Spinoza, is not the ability to choose otherwise, but the ability to act from the necessity of one’s own nature, in harmony with God/Nature. Thus, freedom is understanding necessity.

Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, 2 November 2025

This may sound harsh, but it is not. The “freedom [of] understanding necessity” is a state of such crystalline stillness and clarity that Spinoza himself referred to it as “blessedness”. In Zen terms, Satori might be the right word; for the Taoist, it is the joy of accordance with the Tao:

To live a Taoist life is to become fully aware of our body, mind, and world—and of awareness itself. Our presence shines more and more brightly. To live in alignment with the Tao is to relish the inner peace, joy, and contentment that arise…

(Elizabeth Reninger)

Bowing to rocks

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The longer I keep on with this contemplative life the more it seems to me that a life apart from the main current of consensus reality, as well as apart from formal religion, is essentially a spirituality embedded in the everyday.

Rodney Smith, in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010, wrote:

When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment once performed by Krishnamurti: I placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.

The Buddha statue, the zafu [cushion] we sit upon, the saintly picture or poem, the states of mind accessed in meditation, solitude, or even nature itself, can all become accentuated beyond the ordinary by infusing them with special attention. When we invest the sacred into specific conditions, we feel spiritual only when we are having those experiences. The rest of life goes spiritually unnoticed…

 It is… in the middle of our total involvement that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.

The alert reader will probably have picked up something of this in my own writing, where I describe with such affection the window where I normally sit to practice! (Of course, there is a healthy side to this too: keeping to a routine, spatially as well as temporally, takes away the unnecessary complication of deciding the where and the when of sitting.) But practice is not special – it is the simplest and more ordinary thing to do; and a life lived in the mindfulness it affords is not a life of drama and strangeness so much as a life more deeply than ever embedded in ordinary things, in other people, and in the countless plants and animals, fungi and minerals with whom we share our world.

It is not that the insights and presence that come with practice are not sacred; it is more that though their sacredness all the everyday accidents and affects of life can be seen in their actual, intrinsic sacredness, and unless we live in and for them, we cannot realise the truth that lies within us all: that we all rest in the same ground, and are ripples on the same stream. Each of us, human or mouse, ant or mountain, is born and dies according to our time; and yet it is the one isness from which we are born, within which we live, and to which we shall return.

There is something

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There is something
that contains everything.
Before heaven and earth
it is.
Oh, it is still,
unbodied,
all on its own,
unchanging,

all-pervading,
ever-moving.
So it can act as the
mother
of all things.
Not knowing its real name,
we only call it the Way.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25, tr. Ursula le Guin

There is a mystery in stillness that cannot be classified, explained or described. It is outside knowing, not to be contained in words or thoughts. Why would we even mention it, if it were not before and beneath, above all things that are?

As we live in the everyday reality we know, the things we see and hear, touch and smell and taste are images in the mind, icons that helpfully stand for whatever actually is. We tend to think that what they seem to be is what they are, standing for nothing else but how they look, sound, feel, smell or taste. They are useful, indeed benign (Dennett), user illusions; they seem to be what is really there; but they are not. They allow us to interact with each other, and with things, but they are generated as appearances, icons, within our own brains – and like any interface, they can be subject to errors. (An example from close to home: I have severe retinal damage in one eye, and as a consequence, I suffer from visual release hallucinations. These appear like perfectly concrete things – in my case usually animals of one kind or another – within the normal setting of our home. They are not, repeat not, “imaginary”. They appear indistinguishable from the real thing – an actual cat, for instance – except that if I focus on them directly (my good eye works just fine) they disappear without a trace. But they were real while they were there: just as real as my desk, or the rather chunky printer that sits on it.)

Perhaps we were always supposed to be able to see that what we take for reality is only appearance; perhaps we were all supposed to be what we now call contemplatives, or mystics, but we forgot. Perhaps our habitual taking of appearances for true being is a computational brain function that has over many generations got out of hand. Or perhaps we contemplatives are just weird anyway.

If we sit still, without trying to make sense of anything; sit pointlessly, not aiming to achieve anything at all, we can see for ourselves that bright something – no thing – before all things, and know it for our true home, before we or any thing was born. “Oh, it is still, unbodied, all on its own, unchanging,..”

Wolf Moon

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This afternoon the Wolf Moon rose over the tall trees behind the garden, butter-yellow and gleaming in the late daylight, seeming far brighter than the setting sun. Somehow it tugged at our hearts to see it there in the clear air, appearing to hang above the feathery treetops like a memory from another time.

There seems to be something atavistic in our being human that responds to “signs in the sky” – the moon especially – from some pre-scientific place we’ve long since forgotten to be consciously aware of. Wolves have been absent from England since around 1390, and yet the very phrase “Wolf Moon” resonates with some ancient yearning in us. The cold air itself seems to long for something lost.

To sit still by the window in the moonlight is one of the loveliest things at this time of year. In the 8th century CE the Chinese poet Li Bai wrote:

At the foot of my bed, moonlight
Yes, I suppose there is frost on the ground.
Lifting my head I gaze at the bright moon
Bowing my head, thinking of home.

We were already home, watching the moon rise; and yet something of Li Bai’s nostalgia touches me in moonlight. What is it I am longing for? Ah, but it is a sweet longing, though. I don’t expect something to fulfil it. I am at peace in the moonlight. I don’t want anything, and yet. And yet in the New Year’s rising away from the solstice there is a yearning, even when there is no moon. Perhaps as I said there is something in our merely being human that carries with it wordless memories from times we cannot remember, far back before people built cities or wrote history.

Somehow our practice, and whatever philosophy we derive from it, has to leave room for these times of strange resonance. Dear old Li Bai, the poet and traveller of the Tang dynasty, evidently knew all about this.

Endings and beginnings

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So many blogs and newsletters across the internet at this time of year are looking back over the last 12 months, and on into the next 12, reflecting on the changes their writers have seen, and the things they expect to come. I don’t think I’d have much to add to this conversation per se. What interests me is the nature of endings and beginnings themselves, and whether they are what they usually seem to be.

So often we look at events as having discrete boundaries: they begin here, where there was nothing before, and they end there, leaving things different from how they had been. After the end of an event, there is a time when nothing is happening; and then, Boom! There’s another event just beginning out of the empty place that was waiting for it to begin.

If we sit still, though, and listen, what we find is that there is a ceaseless rippling of the bright water of the stream of coming-to-be. Sounds, and presence, and thoughts, and weight, without their own duration or dimensions. Where is the beginning of a wave, and its end? They are only arbitrary points on an oscilloscope trace: the wave waves. It has no beginning in reality, nor does it end. It waves.

Spinoza called these waves modes, and the stream substance: his one substance, God or nature (Deus sive natura) appearing in the modes of cats, or mountains, or people – rather as the Tao appears as “the ten thousand things” in the Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42). To see this, whole and undivided – as it is – is the end of fear, and the beginning of peace. May this peace be with you all, this coming year.

Simple alignment

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As I read books and articles by others on the path of inquiry and self-understanding, I am often struck by how often they begin with an autobiographical note; and how often that note concerns their authors’ early experiences with religion. A perfect example of what I mean would be Laurie Fisher Huck’s article ‘Goodbye God‘ in Tricycle Magazine, July 2022. She begins:

I first met God when I entered grade one at Holy Rosary, a Catholic elementary school, where the classes were so packed we had to crawl over one another to get to our seats. Towering black-robed nuns patrolled the aisles with rulers ready to smack naughty hands, and priests, who were known to be next to God, bestowed their blessings upon our little bowed heads. Obsequiousness was paid off in holy cards. 

I didn’t. As I have written elsewhere, I was brought up as the child of a single parent by a mother who quite explicitly taught me to steer clear of anyone who would try and convert me to one faith or another. She was adamant that I should grow up to make up my own mind about spiritual things.

Of course, once I went to prep school there were such things as assemblies, where among other things we had to memorise and repeat together the Lord’s Prayer, but that was about it. We had a weekly lesson entitled “Scripture”, but as far as I can remember it consisted of little but child-friendly presentations of Bible stories such as the life of Moses, and other accounts of Old Testament heroes. It made rather less impression on me than did reading Charles Kingsley’s accounts of Theseus and Jason the Argonaut in The Heroes, in the lovely dark blue leatherette-bound edition I had once received as a birthday present.

All this is merely a preamble to saying that when I came to investigate spirituality seriously for the first time in my late teens and early twenties, I had no religious upbringing to build on, or to overcome. But I am an Englishman: there is an osmotic cultural wash over all my thoughts, over even the way I experience things. When I encounter Buddhist or Vedantist teachings there is still a slight shock of the unfamiliar, and even now a tendency to translate terms and concepts – Rigpa, say, or Ishvara – into some sort of Western expression or framework.

The problem doesn’t arise, though, with Christian theology and mystical writing. I can pick up Cynthia Bourgeault or Richard Rohr and read them like a native – however alien some of their assumptions may be to me these days – something I still can’t do even with Westerners who have since become thoroughly embedded in Buddhist life and culture, like Daishin Morgan or Pema Chödrön.

Why is this? Certainly I have the greatest respect for Eastern thought, especially for philosophical Taoism, and much of Mahayana Buddhism, but somehow reading it usually fails to awake in me the kind of instant recognition I get from reading Christian mysticism, that sometimes strikes with the force of, say, the opening bars of a Bach fugue.

Uncomfortable though I am with much academic philosophy, it is often with great relief that I turn to philosophers like Benedictus Spinoza (a Portuguese Jew living in 17th century Holland), or AC Grayling in our own time. The more I continue with my own quiet practice of open awareness, the deeper my sympathy with (broadly!) mystical philosophers like Spinoza, Martin Heidegger or Paul Tillich.

But I am no more a philosopher myself than I am a teacher of nonduality. I am simply someone who spends time sitting quietly and writing about it. No, that is faux naïf. Of course I read, and think; but I have no formal qualifications or standing. All I can do is share a few things that have struck me as significant, or insights into matters that have been troubling me and have suddenly come clear. Perhaps the truth is really no more than that having begun blogging twenty years ago, I seem unable to give it up!

Be happy

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Happiness… appears at first to be a temporary experience that occurs from time to time, but when investigated turns out to be ever-present and always available in the background of experience.

As such, happiness is not a temporary experience that alternates with unhappiness. It is not the opposite of unhappiness, any more than the blue sky is the opposite of the clouds. Just as the clouds are the veiling of the blue sky, so unhappiness is the veiling of happiness.

Happiness is our very nature and lies at the source of the mind, or the heart of ourself, in all conditions and under all circumstances. It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.

We cannot know happiness as an objective experience; we can only be it. We cannot be unhappy; we can only know unhappiness as an objective experience.

Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware, p.8

It might be objected that happiness is a somewhat flippant concept when compared with more serious and weighty (dare I say, manly?) ambitions such as progress, or the acquisition of knowledge. But think for a minute: What would one wish to progress towards? Why acquire knowledge? The famous phrase from the US Declaration of Independence suggests, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, But these are objective measures; they mean nothing without our essential being; in Spira’s words, happiness itself.

In Spinoza’s system, an active emotion is an emotion that arises from our own adequate understanding (our power), not from external events. The highest active emotion is Joy (laetitia), which he defines as the “transition to a state of greater perfection.”

  1. When you achieve the Third Kind of Knowledge (the intuition), you are having the most “adequate idea” possible—you are understanding a part of the world (or yourself) as it truly is in the mind of God/Nature.
  2. This act of perfect understanding is the highest expression of your mind’s power.
  3. The feeling that accompanies this ultimate act of understanding is the ultimate Joy.
  4. Because this Joy is directed at its cause—the eternal, necessary order of God/Nature which you now intuitively grasp—Spinoza calls it the “Intellectual Love of God.”

(Google Gemini, response to user query, 4 November 2025)

I myself would probably choose the word “joy” over “happiness”; but surely Spinoza and Spira are saying the same thing, essentially.

In my own experience – and an experience is, as Spira points out, necessarily second-hand, a mere carrier for the instant – the dropping away of the clouds, whether of unhappiness or of craving or simple self-regarding, reveals a bright stillness that is nothing other than the open ground itself, endlessly beyond life or death or identity. It is no thing, being itself, and holds all the “ten thousand things” (Laozi) in its isness. To know that – which is to say, be that – is the parting of the clouds Spira describes; Spinoza’s “blessedness” (Beatitudo). It is not so much an epistemological shift as an ontological one: not what (or how) one knows, but what one knows one is.

Ordinary lives

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I find myself at the moment unable to get away from a recognition that the impulse to the contemplative life is at bottom an impulse to an ordinary life.

We are so often taught that we should aspire to extraordinary things: to public recognition, to great acts of service, or great works of imagination or reason or commerce; and yet our humanity belongs in the little things, in the everyday acts of simple kindness, in the touch of the moving air, bird-shadows on cropped grass, in the quiet between places.

This ordinary hiddenness is the natural place of one who finds themselves on the contemplative way. Our everyday lives are our practice quite as much as any formal times of meditation or prayer (however we understand that almost inescapable word).

A hidden life is not a life that has failed to reach its potential, but a life that has found its home in the ordinary occasions of life among others, in the quietness of simple things, in the lives of the sparrows in the shrubbery, the wren in the ivy bank. These are the territory of plain contentment, and the source of contemplation itself.