Monthly Archives: Dec 2024

No one to blame

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I’m always a bit skeptical when people talk about the increasing interest in Buddhism and the numbers of people appreciating the dharma and turning to meditation. It’s like the first week of a romance. When you first fall in love with someone—even if that person has purple hair and all kinds of what we call “extraordinary embellishments”—there’s just the feeling of love. You don’t see the blemishes; you see only the good things.

Yes, meditation and being calm and peaceful and loving, and generating compassion and doing good for others, and being more aware—these are all very good! But in the initial romantic stage, you may be looking through rose-tinted glasses. After that, you will see the hard work involved, hard work that will be done by nobody but you. This is why interest in Buddhism increases at first and then dips—and this dip is steep, because hard work will never make Buddhism very popular.

Moreover, Buddhism is the only philosophy that doesn’t have anyone to ascribe blame to but oneself for what’s wrong. Nor is there anyone but oneself responsible for producing what is good. To be put on the spot like this is not always seen as favorable by the human mind. Our cultures, social upbringing, and the design of our world condition us to hold some person or people or circumstance responsible for our situation. We have politicians to blame; we have God and the prophets, religious masters, and original sin to blame. We have many things to blame, including karma. It is very difficult to come to the point at which you see that blame is not actually logical—that everything depends on you, yourself.

Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, writing in Tricycle Magazine

Every so often I find myself longing to be able to hand over the responsibility for walking this path to someone else – divine or human – who could absolve me of the weight of all this moral, intentional, intellectual hard work. A religion would be such a comfort. And yet…

The longer I seem to be able to try to follow this way, the less it does seem to be someone’s responsibility, either mine or God’s. Yes, as Khandro Rinpoche says here, there is no one else; but responsibility, in the sense of being the one to make it work? It’s inevitable that the ego, the left-brained, thinking self, will want to take responsibility, absent someone else to lean on – but the “executive self” can’t do it, can’t even see that there is a path. Only by keeping still, by watching to see what happens – of itself – can the busy little mind be persuaded to give up. Giving the whole process names, and hence regulations, is the root of the religious impulse itself, it seems to me.

I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t going through some kind of unseen spiritual revolution at the moment. Yes, the great religions appear to be flourishing – except when they’re not –  and the purveyors of slick solutions appear to thrive, but under the radar a good deal of quiet, hidden, patient practice seems to be going on. It’s invidious to draw direct parallels, but I am often reminded of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; not in their asceticism, but in their rejection of compromise and expedience in favour of interior silence and continual practice. Who knows where this is going? But that doesn’t matter – where it is going is just the flow of the stream in its bed; this is not the time for dreams and plans, but for emptiness and quiet.

Outside the window as I write this it is dark, but pinpoints of light from the road, and across the yard by the old reservoir, prick the blackness. At this distance they can’t be seen to illuminate anything, but the little lights are there in their own brightness. It seems very still. There is nothing to do but watch.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness, with thanks to What’s Here Now

To sit still in winter

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Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter Solstice, a day variously to reflect on the past year, to celebrate the season’s turning from darkness towards the light of the coming summer, and to draw together in the warmth we humans have learned to make against the long cold. It is tempting to locate its origins in the Last Glacial Maximum, when our ancestors must have been so acutely aware of their fragility in the face of the huge weight of time and climate that bore down on them, and sought with such longing for an assurance of this turning season.

Today is also the day the United Nations has set aside as World Meditation Day, celebrated for the first time this year. (Jochen Weber, writing for the Secular Buddhist Network, has an excellent and well-linked reflection on their website.)

Meditation, as far as we can tell from historical research, has been practised in something like its present form for at least 5000 years; the Winter Solstice has been celebrated, in ways we can recognise, at Neolithic sites like Newgrange and Slieve Gullion for roughly the same length of time.

To sit still in winter, to wait for the season’s turning, to watch for the coming of the light, must be one of the deepest instincts of humanity, going far back into the beginnings of our species, perhaps even of our old, old relatives from before we modern humans appeared. Sitting in my warm, lamplit room this evening I felt for a moment part of all this, no different from the long succession of humankind whose DNA still sings in my own blood; and something in me was thankful, in a way I hadn’t imagined, for warmth and life, and for the sweet succession of generations of women and men who have watched, just as I do, for the light.

Threads

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This question is proving interesting, and difficult. I resolve to pursue it night and day. I have a go – asking myself from time to time, in the midst of ordinary life, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’

As I get used to the exercise, the response settles down to a pattern. I usually find several things; several candidates for things I might have been conscious of a moment ago. Sounds are the easiest bet. They hang on. They take time. When I light upon them, they always seem to have been going on for some time, and it feels as though I have been conscious of them. There is the sound of the cars outside in the distance. There’s the ticking of the clock. There’s the beating of my own heart. And then – oh goodness me – how could I have ignored that. There’s my breath. Surely I have been watching my breath, haven’t I?

Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness

I’m sure that, in a sense, this is a familiar enough experience for most of us: to suddenly become aware, in the midst of practice, especially, of an ongoing sound – a clock chiming, a cat purring (both examples from Blackmore’s book) – coupled with the realisation that it has been going on for some time already. But when? When did we become aware? At the first stroke of the clock? Or when we noticed it, say at four strokes? If it was the former, why hadn’t it been the focus of the conscious mind? If the latter, what was going on before we noticed?

There is no answer, says [Daniel] Dennett. There is simply no way in which one could ever tell. Looking inside the brain won’t tell you, for the signals were being processed in the relevant bits of brain whichever way you describe it, and asking the person won’t tell you because she doesn’t know either. So it’s a difference that makes no difference. And what should we do with a difference that makes no difference? Forget it; accept that there is no answer to the question ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’ Can that really be right? …

[W]hen I look, I can find at least one, and often many, threads of things that I might have been conscious of a moment ago but which seem to have had no connection with each other. Who then was conscious of them? Surely someone was because they have that quality of having been listened to, having been stared at, having been felt or smelt or tasted – by someone. Was it me? Unless there were several mes at once, then no. Or is it that I am split up in reverse; that going backwards I can find lots of routes to the past? This is how it seems. Threads is the right word. From any point – from any now – I can look back and find these myriad threads. They feel perfectly real. They feel as though I was listening to that blackbird’s song, that drone of traffic, that distant hammering somewhere up the hill, the purring cat beside me. But each one has this peculiar quality…

I can go round and round, starting with the middle of the view out there, working in carefully towards myself in the centre, and there I find only the same old view, to start all over again. How did that happen? I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. It’s a familiar enough trick, but easily forgotten. Look for the viewing self and find only the view. I am, it seems, the world I see.

Blackmore, ibid.

That, of course, is the crux of all this, the unimaginable but undeniable Istigkeit that we always try not to see: there is no self remembering, no inner seamstress patterning the threads. There is the living loveliness of just what is, nothing more. What is arises of itself, comes to be because that is what it is. Light strikes the water, sparkling instants. Mind perceives. Thoughts think themselves. Everything is as it is, acts according to itself. What else could it be? There is only what is, clear and pure as a raindrop on the window of – what? – mind? Only what is. That is all there is.

Invisible

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For a long time, since in fact before I formed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards being somehow invisible among my peers. And of course, over the years, my contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising. All this tends inevitably towards the eremitic.

As I have said here before, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; perhaps even for the commitment of active membership in some political or social movement. This may seem austere to a detached observer, but it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, as it were. It may even be a necessary discipline.

Oddly enough, I can’t seem to detach this eremitical instinct from an acute sense of the moral necessity of equality. It has never made sense to me that – often in religious just as much as in political contexts – some people were disadvantaged, often for reasons over which they had no control themselves, compared to their fellows. That the fact that someone was a woman, or Black, or poor, or gay, would have anything to do with the opportunities life presented has increasingly seemed to me morally obscene. In an interview with Andrew Copson, published in the recent What I Believe collection from Humanists UK, Kate Pickett says,

I’m always quite impressed by the way Quakers talk about it, they have a testimony towards equality. I think that’s the way I think about it as well. People get a bit bent out of shape when they talk about equality, saying things like: ‘We can never have equality, and can never truly be equal, it’s utopian.’ And to a certain extent, that’s true, but we can have more equality. And we can work towards reducing inequality gaps in various aspects. So we can think about working towards reducing gender pay gaps, for example, and that’s improving equality. And even if we don’t get to exactly the same level, then we’re still making progress.

Organisations – even sometimes the Quakers! – have inequality gaps. It’s inevitable: the mere organising of people into structural groupings has this effect. Maybe the radical inward equality imposed by the contemplative life cries out against even this; perhaps that is why the longing for stillness and solitude seems somehow to include a longing for equality?

Certainly this instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.

Seasons

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The contemplative life has seasons. Perhaps that should come as no surprise – this life is as impermanent and changeable as any other – but it’s important to bear in mind. I call these variations in experience and inclination “seasons” rather than stages or phases, because although they are not strictly cyclical like the seasons of the year, they certainly don’t appear to me to be rungs on some kind of ladder of ascent, as so many spiritual traditions seem to suggest. I don’t think the spiritual life works like that; at least, it doesn’t for me.

One thing I do think worth remembering is that the seasons of the contemplative life are not measures of success or failure, not markers of progress to be charted, expected or evaluated. They are much more like changing weather than they are like stages in the growth of a plant or an animal. (This of course is why I dislike the “ladder” paradigm – it so easily leads to self evaluation according to some external, artificial scale or standard.) We may find we need to go back over and over to some areas of understanding before we finally “get it”; this is not a fault, but merely a necessary step on the path. Your sticking places may very well not be mine, of course, and it would be misleading – distressing or even dangerous – for us to compare our progress as if they should be.

So what do I mean by seasons? They are sometimes, I think, merely technical – matters of concentration, alertness, inward honesty – that might be compared to the fine motor skills developed by practising a musical instrument. At other times they seem more like stages in the Jungian idea of transformation – and as such may need to be revisited at different times, and in different orders. At times we may find we are struggling with the losses involved in impermanence; at other times it may simply be that we are plagued by painful memories, and the fear or anger or remorse they bring with them. These are vitally important things, and I don’t think we can just tell them, “Come back next month – I’m supposed to be working on my sense-impressions this week.”

We need, as always, to be gentle with ourselves as we sit. I truly don’t think that for most of us a warrior mentality, flogging ourselves through some kind of spiritual boot-camp, is constructive. (For a few it may perhaps be, I confess – there are almost infinitely different kinds of people – but I suspect they are few and far between.) Truly listening to our hearts – if that’s the right term – in the course of faithful, persistent practice seems to be a sure enough guide. Keeping our regular times and duration of practice is key: coming back to sit without avoiding the difficulties, yet not overstretching ourselves by overly extended practice, is the safest way I have found to navigate these passages.

Another point is the necessity of study: we will get on far better if we will only learn from those who have been this way before. Kathleen McDonald:

[The contemplative path] requires a slow and gradual process of listening to and reading explanations of the mind and the nature of things; thinking about and carefully analyzing this information; and finally transforming the mind through meditation.

I have made a very short list of books I have found helpful in another post; I’ll just say here that this is again an intensely personal matter. You will have your own list of favourite books, and it may very well prove to be useful to have some of them handy on a desk or table – or on your e-reader app – where you sit, for ready reference at the end of practice, before you get caught up in quotidian things again.

I should just say, before I forget, that it took me a long time to twig this matter of spiritual seasons; and it was for me a major insight when I did. It is so easy, especially if one is practising without a human guide or teacher to consult, to think that there is something wrong with one’s practice because things don’t remain the same, or because they’re not progressing quite the way one has been led to expect. Patience, gentleness, listening – that’s all we need; and the resolution, if it all gets too scary, to ask for help.

Surrender, again

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I find surrender a difficult thing to write about, even really to think about if it comes to that. To attempt to understand this call to relinquish will and intention in, and through, practice is to attempt to grasp what is, by definition, ungraspable. All we can do, it seems, is – as always – to sit still.

Just sitting in open awareness begins with breathing, obviously. And breathing, in itself, involves surrender. Unless we are deliberately choosing to breathe in and out, as an act of will, then it just happens. Sitting still, we watch it happen. It always does, just as it does when we are asleep – unless perchance we have died. And that, in an odd sense, is just the risk of surrender. We have to surrender to the autonomic function of breathing, to its steady beat even when we are asleep. We have to trust the inflow and outflow, the coming and going of the breath, to keep us alive for as long as our life lasts.

In just this way the coming to be and the ceasing of things continues: night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. They are just phases of the one way, two sides of the one, and to accord with the way is just to remain quiet and watch. Everything that comes to be rests in the ground of its becoming, but only when we let it be can we see this, can we ourselves rest in peace, in the ground of our own being at last.

Unseen

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Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, from ‘Signs of the Unseen’, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2024:

Ever since humans have had reason, both artists and mystics have been asking some variant of the following questions: What if what I see is not all there is? What if just beyond the limit of my senses there’s a whole other world, and what if that world has something important to teach us? In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James called this something “the Reality of the Unseen.” The Greek philosopher Anaximander called it apeiron, “the indistinct,” and identified it as the unifying, generative principle of all that we experience. In Zen we’d call it mind. My first Zen teacher, borrowing from Teilhard de Chardin, called it the ground of being.

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it is in me,” Whitman says, tiptoeing his way toward wisdom. And whatever it is, he adds, it’s untamed, untranslatable, without name—and then he names it: happiness. But this is no ordinary happiness. It’s not merely good fortune, nor is it subject to chance. It includes form, union, plan, eternal life. Taoism refers to it as the natural order of things, the eternal Tao.

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.


(Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation)

…This is why, amid so much that needs our attention, that needs our care, our work, our involvement, some of us stop and not do for a while. This is why we sit hour after hour focusing our attention on just one thing—the breath, a question, an image, a sound—diligently unnaming all the multiple things. So we can love them. So we can protect them the way we protect ourselves. We fiercely guard stillness and silence so we can guard that which in our to-doing gets lost or overlooked. We let go of thoughts so we can remember what we so easily forget. Yet paradoxically, it’s through forgetting that we remind ourselves of the unseen. It’s through the conscious, deliberate forgetting of names and forms and opinions and preferences that we recall what’s always been there, hidden just below the surface of our busy, clattering minds. (The Pali word sati, mindfulness, means to recall or bring to mind.) We could call this type of practice remembrance by forgetting or, in the language of the Tao Te Ching, attaining through nondoing. Its prerequisite: a cordoning off of our attention, a cloistering of our senses.

Sometimes I find myself hungry for this “cloistering” – so hungry it’s almost a physical sensation. One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Moses, is reported to have said, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Everything? That’s the thing, that’s the hunger, only if it is that then it is no thing, and that is more than the human heart can hold.

There is an odd passage in the Old Testament Book of Job that almost nails this strange and awful hunger:

“And after my skin has been destroyed,
    yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
    with my own eyes—I, and not another.
    How my heart yearns within me!”

(Job 19:26-27 NIV)

I remember that once, in my early twenties, during a life not characterised by what a religious person might think of as “holiness”, I was suddenly struck one afternoon by the sense that if I were just to sit quietly enough for a while, in sufficient solitude, the doors of perception might swing open, and I would be confronted with the “Reality of the Unseen”; that which is no thing, the ground of being itself. Oddly enough, for someone who had been happy to experiment with psychedelics, I was terrified. This, I intuited, might turn out to be real; once seen, maybe, it might be impossible to unsee. Maybe, even more likely perhaps, it would unmake “me” altogether.

This is all at least slightly unnerving, of course, even at this remove of years. It’s odd to think of it, but there may be a real insight here. Maybe “forcing” the doors of perception (as one tries to do with any serious use of psychedelics, after all) is a bad idea, and maybe concentrated contemplative practice of any kind, without years of gradual work, really does carry mortal danger for the unprepared. Goddard again (I’d recommend reading her whole excellent essay):

[M]y longing got me thinking that maybe we use our knowledge and certainty as buffers. Maybe they’re our protection against taking in too much reality too quickly. So maybe it’s good that practice takes so long, that we generally see so piecemeal. We’re certain until we’re not, and then we go looking for a bit of ground to stand on. Slowly, tentatively, we take a step and then another, and we see a little more of what we couldn’t see before. Then we get cocky and become certain again—until we’re not, and then we take another step. And little by little, we walk ourselves into waking.