Wakefulness and illumination

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[W]akefulness as it’s expressed in monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam takes people beyond those religions. When people wake up, they lose the sense of being identified with — and the need to belong to — a particular religious tradition. They begin to feel an all-embracing empathy and compassion that takes them beyond the divisions of religious or ethnic groups. As a result, such awakened individuals, even when they are affiliated with one particular religion, are usually ecumenical and open to other faiths. They see all religious and spiritual traditions simply as different paths to the same destination, or different views of the same landscape. Unlike conventionally religious people, they don’t see their tradition’s beliefs as “the truth” and try to defend them against opposing views.

Partly because of this, awakened individuals throughout history have had an uneasy relationship with the religious traditions they were affiliated with. Conventional religious leaders struggled to make sense of mystics’ awakened interpretations of religious teachings and often viewed them as blasphemous. Whereas conventionally religious people conceive of God as a personal being who oversees the world from another dimension of reality, religious mystics see God as an immensely powerful and radiant energy that pervades the whole world. And most radically, religious mystics don’t see this God as separate from themselves. God is the essence of their own being so that, in a sense, they are also God…

When a person becomes awakened, their experience effects the whole of humanity, in the same way that when a light is turned on it illuminates the space all around it.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.42-43, 45

For so much of my life I have struggled to make sense of my own instinct for the contemplative life; to accept that my own cumulative experiences of illumination might in fact amount to a kind of awakening; and crucially, that that wakefulness might have significance beyond my own narrow self and its concerns. Perhaps this, more than anything, has been the reason I expended so much effort trying to find a home for myself within organised religion, and why the attempt always proved fruitless in the end, either through my own self-sabotage or through the misunderstandings of others.

I say this, I think, not so much to justify my own somewhat chequered history as to, hopefully, provide a crumb of reassurance to anyone reading this who might find themselves in similar straits.

A couple of chapters later (ibid., p.74) Steve Taylor writes:

When wakefulness occurs in the context of spiritual or religious traditions, a person has a readily available framework (together with the guidance of others who have experienced wakefulness) to help them understand their state. Without such support, naturally wakeful people may experience some confusion and doubt. They may feel threatened by their spiritual impulses and try to repress them. It may take them several years to understand and accept their innate wakefulness fully.

Naturally awakened people who live in cultures that don’t support a spiritual understanding of the world are in particular danger of this difficulty. The values of their culture may clash with their awakened impulses. We all absorb cultural influences as we grow up, and it may take several years for naturally wakeful people to work off their cultural conditioning so that they can begin to live authentically. They may feel a powerful impulse to live a different kind of life — to turn away from materialism and hedonism, to simplify their lives and spend more time in solitude, for example — but it may be a number of years before they feel confident and autonomous enough to follow the impulse. Until then, they may feel an intense sense of frustration because their innate wakefulness can’t express itself.

For me at least, the process seems to have taken most of a lifetime; and yet, hesitant at it has been, its progress has been curiously inexorable. Awakening does have its own momentum; even my own persistently bombu foolishness has not proved equal to the task of impeding it.

It may be that not only has this impulse towards awakening been present in the lives of individual women and men throughout history, but that there is an evolutionary impulse in humanity itself. In which case, the crazy reverses seen so often in the ongoing processes of civilisation may somehow parallel the ones seen in the lives of so many of us contemplatives. Humanity may yet get there; and yet there is no there to get, is there? There are no objects or objectives, no destination: there are only swirls within the eddies in the stream of coming-to-be. The light glints on the bright water, flickers and is gone – no, there it is again, and gone. The only constant is change; and yet there is no changing from, nor changing to. No thing; only change, becoming; every thing and every self is no more than an appearance, fleeting and lovely, nothing more.

Mysteries and metaphors

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It seems that everything we can say about the contemplative life is metaphor. Indeed, it might not be stretching it to suggest that what we can say about pretty much anything is actually metaphor. However attached we are to the idea of plain speaking, even the most direct words applied to the most straightforward objects or circumstances are picture language, mere scratchings after what is in itself ineffable.

Elaine Aron:

Why the word path? Life path, spiritual path—we use path so much in this way that it has almost ceased to be a metaphor. Life, like a path, has ups and downs, detours, roadblocks, and so forth. The metaphor works for me…

But paths are more than maps of passive journeys. They involve choices, or at least noticeable changes in direction…

The beginning of a life often looks more like a moving sidewalk. You were born. No choice there. And you started to move along, to grow from a child’s body into an adult’s. Biology sees to that. Your society, through your family, saw that you received an education (you are reading this), so that you would be useful in some way, able to support yourself and contribute to the larger good. Depending how far along you are, biology and culture has supported your interest in finding a mate and having children, working at a job, and then retiring and maybe helping raise grandchildren. That’s the moving sidewalk, and of course we all add our unique touches to the trip, but maybe you made some larger choices… Maybe you decided not to have children or never to retire. Maybe you took up sailing and sailed around the world, or you raised parakeets and even made a living at it.

Time is what a path and a moving sidewalk have in common. Time has been taking you forward toward the end point.

(Spirituality through a Highly Sensitive Lens, pp.51-52)

To speak of a spiritual path has become as much a cliché as a metaphor, smelling of patchouli oil and self improvement. And yet it is hard to find another expression for whatever it is. But perhaps there is more to the threadbare phrase that even Aron suggests here. Her “moving pavement” reminds me of Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit – “thrownness” – the unique set of limitations of birth and time and society which each of us has inherited. Our choices are real, perhaps, but they are far more constrained than most of us would admit. Our spiritual path is what it is because of who we are; all the yearning we can yearn will not allow us to walk another’s.

It may be that our truest compass is merely to acknowledge this fact. “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” (Isaiah 30:21 NIV) And the voice is that of our own authentic self, “who we are” at our barest essence: who we are in silence, in the stillness of our practice. The way is not another’s map, and the directions are not another’s doctrines. All we can do is to step out onto the mountain in the night wind, and listen.

The consolation of no exit

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We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

– Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview, with thanks to Joan Tollifson

To understand, with Cohen, that freedom lies in the embracing of necessity, is to realise that peace exists only in the radical acceptance of what actually is. We are all in the same mortal boat: no one here gets out alive; and compassion arises simply from this realisation.

For myself, I have come to see that understanding the inevitability of causality is the foundation not only of peace but of forgiveness. “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” (Spinoza, Ethics, 1a4) – and so this present moment that seems to be myself could not have been otherwise.

To sit still, and watch, is the beginning and end of practice. All we have come to be is here now, in this arrangement of limbs, this pattern of breathing, these half-heard sounds from beyond the closed window. The small birds flit between branches; the Weymouth bus is pulling away from the stop into the light evening traffic, and there is no wind. None of this could have been otherwise, and the blessed silence slips between every instant, complete and endless.

Sein zum Tode (being-towards-death)

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It is towards death that we are always living, from the instant we are born if not before. What we are is mortal; life itself exists only inasmuch as it will die. And this is not a tragedy.

We treat death like a defect, an unfortunate end to the story. It’s an event that happens at some point and ends the party. We don’t see it for what it is for Heidegger: the most fundamental structure of our being, defining every single moment…

If death is merely a future event, it has no power over our present actions. We can ignore it until it knocks at the door. This perspective makes us forget the preciousness of the moment and leads us to structure our lives as a succession of obligations and distractions…

Do not understand death as an end, but as the “possibility of the absolute impossibility of existence.” It is not a distant threat, but the ever-present possibility that all other possibilities end. This realization is not frightening, but liberating. It lends infinite depth to every second. Every breath, every conversation, every project begun derives its value precisely from the fact that it is not a given. Failure is then not the end of the world, but part of a finite, precious process. Just as Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl bracketed the world in order to penetrate to the essence of things, so the awareness of death brackets the trivialities of everyday life in order to penetrate to the essence of life.

Valentin Graf, ‘Heidegger Sein zum Tode einfach erklärt: Profis setzen den Tod als Strategie-Bef‘

To “live towards death” like this is not morbid: as Valentin Graf points out, it is peace and freedom. All that we are tends towards this end; it is the one thing common to all humanity – indeed to all that lives. All that is will end. Only isness itself – Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura – does not, since it is the open ground of being-itself, from which all that is derives. The river flows, and is in its flowing; the lovely eddies on the bright surface come and go; their transitoriness is their very nature.

The year I was due to go to school I contracted bacterial meningitis, and spent some time – over Christmas and New Year! – in a coma. When I had recovered enough to talk, my mother made no attempt to conceal from me how afraid she’d been of losing me. This struck me as odd, but somehow right. The time between falling ill, which I remembered quite well, and waking up one sunny morning in the little bedroom upstairs, surrounded by my favourite soft toys, was an utter blank. Where had I been? I had no sense of anything – not blackness, not dreams; nothing. An absence of me, entirely, and of all else besides.

The mental picture, the concept, of not being alive any longer I don’t suppose I like any better than anyone else; but the experience of being close to death seems to be quite different. There have been times since that long childhood illness when I have been plausibly close to death, and yet I have not found myself afraid: I have found myself surprised; and I have lived since then in that glad knowledge.

Death is an old friend. To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing: what is there to fear? Death follows us, yes, but he is our very own death; dear, familiar, kind, and faithful.

Further along the path of disenchantment

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Our age is more dominated by scientific theory than was Spinoza’s; but only a fond illusion persuades us that it is more guided by the truth. We have seen superstition triumph on a scale that would have startled Spinoza, and which has been possible only because superstition has cloaked itself in the mantle of science. If the heresies of our day are, like Nazism and communism, the declared enemies of religion, this merely confirms, for the student of Spinoza, their superstitious character, and confirms, too, Spinoza’s insight that scientific objectivity and divine worship are the forms of intellectual freedom. Spinoza, like Pascal, saw that the new science must inevitably ‘disenchant’ the world. By following truth as our standard, we chase from their ancient abodes the miraculous, the sacred and the saintly. The danger, however, is not that we follow this standard – for we have no other – but that we follow it only so far as to lose our faith, and not so far as to regain it. We rid the world of useful superstitions, without seeing it as a whole. Oppressed by its meaninglessness, we succumb then to new and less useful illusions – superstitions born of disenchantment, which are all the more dangerous for taking man, rather than God, as their object.

The remedy, Spinoza reminds us, is not to retreat into the pre-scientific world-view, but to go further along the path of disenchantment; losing both the old superstitions and the new, we discover at last a meaning in truth itself. By the very thinking that disenchants the world we come to a new enchantment, recognizing God in everything, and loving his works in the very act of knowing them.

Roger Scruton, The Great Philosophers: Spinoza, pp.45-46

The longer I sit with the consequences of deconstruction – in other words the radical openness that refuses all dogma, and so escapes the grasp of doctrine and its “rulers and authorities” (Ephesians 6:12) – the more clearly I see that deconstruction isn’t a destination but a process: not something to achieve but something to live. It doesn’t stop at the point when we feel we have shrugged off the shackles; we may find it is now a lifelong principle for living.

To understand, as Benedictus Spinoza did, that necessity is freedom itself, is to live within the grace of belonging: to stop running from necessity, and to know that final acceptance as inescapable joy.

Spinoza’s final joke on us is that this bleak, austere worldview ends up offering a kind of salvation. Not the salvation of prayers answered or sins forgiven, but the salvation of peace in a world that doesn’t owe you anything — and doesn’t need to.

Robert Flix, Spinoza in Plain English: Understanding Determinism, Freedom, and Joy, p.49

Otium

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In A Simplified Life, her beautiful account of being a contemporary hermit, Verena Schiller writes:

…I eschew any attempt at repetitive words of prayer while walking or working out of doors, though some find this helpful. Even after years of praxis, learning to do just one thing at a time does not come easily. ‘When you are walking just walk; when you are digging just dig; whatever you are intent on give it your whole attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with the whole of your being and as though it were the only thing to do and as though there was all the time in the world’, a counsel of perfection given me by Bishop John V. Taylor at the very beginning of my solitary exploration, echoing the wisdom of countless others all down the centuries. Rarely can this be even a remote possibility in most women’s lives. For me it is and, in a sense, carries a double responsibility: to practise this single-pointedness not only to deepen my own attentiveness but also on behalf of others caught up in unrelenting multitasking. Life and the work in hand is the prayer or, put the other way about, the prayer is the work. We live in a world characterized by extreme activism, restlessness and rush, yet a hallmark of this solitary life needs to be otium. [pp.112-113]

Gradually the contemplative life seems to take over the “rest” of one’s life; the simplest of tasks become luminous – almost at times numinous – with presence. Even simple conversations can become exercises in something akin to receiving spiritual direction… in the midst of discussing vegetables, perhaps!

Of course, as Schiller points out herself, this is a counsel of perfection; with the best will in the world too many jobs are done thoughtlessly, too many conversations slip by in mere chatter. But even so – to look back in less time each time, and see the gaps in attention, becomes its own often humorous discipline. (The Pure Land Buddhists have a lovely word, bombu, for just this kind of spiritual hamfistedness!)

Otium. It’s not a common word in most people’s vocabulary; but it means, at least in a contemplative context, a kind of holy leisure. Schiller (op cit., p.36):

In early monasticism, leisure or otium was not only an essential mark of the life of a monk, it was integral to the life itself. Leisure, otium, is how the monastic life was described in the early Middle Ages (a life free from negotium, of busyness and business). Few of us would recognize this as a description of contemporary monasticism, and even St Bernard, that great reformer and founder of the Cistercian Order, who had hoped to reduce busyness and business to a minimum in the life of a monk, was soon to amend this adage wryly to that of a negotissimum otium, a very busy leisure indeed.

The retired life can be otium per excellentiam, if we will only let it be. Practice need not be confined to the daily spells alone in one’s room: it can be allowed to spill out, just like the hermit’s, into walking, cooking, housework, even being together. It becomes a portable grace, a lovely thing that brightens all that it touches, even pain and concern, even the most mundane or dreadful things. It has begun to become an open channel to the hidden boundless grace that holds all things in becoming.

Troubled times

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We live in troubled times, more troubled than many of us can remember. To be honest, though, a great deal of our lives are lived in times like these. My own generation lived through a Cold War that all too often threatened to heat up into nuclear conflict, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the Viet Nam War, the UK miners’ strike (and its brutal repression) of the 1980s, the Falklands War, 9/11 – the list goes on. Our parents lived through – and many of them, Susan’s and mine included, fought in – the Second World War. Of that appalling period of history, reminiscent in so many ways of our own, CS Lewis wrote at the time:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes…

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the [one] who takes [their] long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

The Weight of Glory, pp.48, 61

Awareness of impermanence, the recognition that our lives are led in a dissolving world of ceaseless change, is not a doctrine of despair but of realism; and in that realism, hope. Somehow our very grief becomes, in extremis, a channel of grace. Sharon Salzberg:

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss.

To accept the love that is the motor of grief is to accept the role of mourners, of givers-of-thanks for what is being lost, bearers of unbearable hope. Death always follows life; but new life follows death. (Even in Chernobyl, the natural world is thriving as never before.)

To accept what is, it is necessary to know what is, now. This means attention, questioning, investigation. It means practice.

When we feel separate, small and encapsulated, the ungraspable nature of the living reality makes us feel insecure and out of control. And because reality sometimes contains enormous pain and suffering, we are easily prone to adopting ideas and beliefs that seem to provide security, control, explanations and so on. But belief is always shadowed by doubt. And the truth is, we are clueless. We cannot see the whole.

But we don’t need to! When trying to get a grip falls away, it is actually a huge relief!

Joan Tollifson, The Essentials (Substack)

Human culture is not “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.” (Lewis, ibid.) If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.

Tariki

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It seems to me that we are not so much human beings as human becomings. And it doesn’t apply merely to humans: there are feline becomings and bovine becomings, cephalopod becomings and fungal becomings. It’s becomings all the way down.

To speak of a “being” implies an object, a static substance that acts and is acted upon; a thing embedded like a rock in a stream called time. But this isn’t what we are. Even our cells are replaced on a regular basis, some every few days; we change and evolve, each of us, throughout our lives, and we are different people in different eras of our life, very often with different interests and abilities. This applies perhaps more strongly to some people than to others, but by and large it is true: a person in later life is quite different than the “same person” in their teens, or as the parent of a young family.

Our thoughts too shift and flicker moment by moment, despite any effort we may make to concentrate on even one stream of them. Even the most elementary contemplative practice will show us this in the first few minutes!

But it isn’t just the ephemeral creatures of earth that are becoming, moment by moment and aeon by aeon. Our planet itself is changing and remoulding itself – if you doubt that you’ve never lived through an earthquake – and even our own lovely Milky Way is a finely balanced eddy of gas and dust and stars sailing 630 km/sec along the Hubble Flow.

Nothing is static. There are no objects, except by convention. All is change and becoming. As Spinoza saw, there is no substance but God (or Nature): everything – ourselves included – is merely a mode of that infinite becoming. The ten thousand things are no more than sparkles on the broad river of the Tao.

Literally, no thing is the ground of becoming.

So if this is how it is, what of our vaunted human will? The slipstream of a passing gnat disperses it. But becoming is movement, an ontological wind over the ocean of what is. There is no need to lean, brows knitted, on the imagined oars of the will. Sit still; the sail is raised of itself, and fills.

Contemplation and language

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As I have mentioned before on this blog, writing in secular terms about the contemplative life, even thinking about it (as opposed simply to living it), is all but impossible without engaging with the religious language in which it has been clothed for most of its recorded existence. It is hard to write about the interior life without a framework of what is, effectively, myth, no matter which religion’s terminology is used the describe, even to think, about it. After all, it is so much easier to use a ready-mixed religious language, in which various shades of meaning may be taken more or less for granted without having to struggle actually to describe them. But as AC Grayling wrote:

There are people of sincere piety for whom the religious life is a source of deep and powerful meaning. For them and for others, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that can bind one human heart to another, feels as natural and necessary as breathing. Some of the art and music that has been inspired by faith counts among the loveliest and most moving expressions of human creativity. It is indeed impossible to understand either history or art without an understanding of what people believed, feared and hoped through their religious conceptions of the world and human destiny. Religion is a pervasive fact of history, and has to be addressed as such…

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

[W]hat alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, pp.1,7

Contemplation is not about escaping the world; it’s more about seeing the threads that connect it to all that is. It’s not a matter of reconciling the world to some imagined deity; it’s a matter of discovering that the world is not other than its metaphysical ground. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” “Where I place my attention shapes what I become. To attend to the suffering of others, the beauty of the world, or the silence within is to participate in the creation of meaning—not because a god demands it, but because the world needs it.” (Mistral Le Chat, in response to user query)

To express the not-other-ness of each other, of “all that is made” (Julian of Norwich), is more often the work of poetry – see Mary Oliver, or JH Prynne – than of philosophy; and when philosophy does take up the challenge, the result is famously difficult – Martin Heidegger, AN Whitehead, even Benedictus Spinoza, for instance. A few, RS Thomas occurs to me, manage to write poetry that is as difficult to read as the metaphysicians. So who am I to complain that I don’t find this blog easy to write?

The only approach that seems to offer a glimmer of hope here is, perhaps oddly, unknowing.

Much has been made of the difference, indeed the opposition, of religion and science. But the more we hear of modern scientific research, especially in physics, the closer they seem to be. Contrary to popular belief, science is not about establishing indisputable facts, it is about positing and attempting to prove (or disprove) hypotheses, with the understanding that any discovery may be superseded in the future. Science is about a spirit of enquiry. The unknown is accepted, even welcomed as a challenge for future research. As biologist Stuart Firestein said, “What we don’t know is our job. It’s much more interesting to think about what we don’t know than what we do know.” That too is the mystic position.

But, whereas scientists may see this place as a challenge to learn more and to eradicate more areas of uncertainty, for mystics or spiritual seekers, the challenge may be about embracing that uncertainty, about accepting that for some questions there will be no answers – and that it doesn’t matter. Not only that it doesn’t matter but that the unforeseen may contain riches that go beyond what in our habitual ways of thinking and in our workaday lives we are capable of imagining. In giving the unforeseen more of a chance, we are opening up opportunities for our creative selves, for spontaneity, for the part of us that goes beyond the routine certainties of everyday life.

If we recognise that it is the unforeseen that might have the most importance in our lives, we may allow ourselves to welcome uncertainty…

Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing, p.15

Process and coinherence

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Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, if you will allow the term.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… 

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.