Monthly Archives: Apr 2025

Lenses, or doors

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Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes…

The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ – phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage – so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air.

There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoché – they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly.

Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Thinking and writing as I do about spiritual experience and practice carries with it at least one persistent difficulty: that of finding words for that which is by definition, almost, beyond words. When I confine myself to quasi-scientific language, shunning anything that sounds too “religious” or “woo-woo”, I all too easily find myself in a barren, materialistic wasteland, bereft of the living inwardness of actual experience. On the other hand, if I allow free rein to words like “God”, and “mystical”, it is almost impossible to avoid the “isms”, and the coloured lenses through which they force me to see, to describe even to myself, the inner landscape of the spiritual.

You see, sometimes religious terminology, whether Buddhist or, more seductively for me at any rate, Christian, seems to be the most appropriate – if not the only possible – language in which to discuss the spiritual. But then I find myself thinking in religious language, and before I know it I am experiencing my experiences as scenes in some sort of inner stained-glass window. I don’t merely describe them to myself in those terms: they actually arrive as those sorts of experiences, tinted and glittering with two millennia of resonant imagery.

Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, [Husserl teaches that] one is… able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.

Wikipedia

If all is going according to plan, of course, one’s practice should provide the necessarily astringent antidote to general or naive isms of all kinds.  But in trying to write, I have to think; and if I think in the terms that I’ve adopted in order to write… you see the problem?

The danger – and it is a danger, not just an inconvenience – is that a disconnect may occur between the living, wordless awareness at the ground of things, and the view through the lenses that religious language, and all that that entails, have dropped between the experience and the experiencing mind. If this is not seen in time, then the usual remedies of mindfulness and attention may no longer work, and one may find oneself in a spiritual crisis, “often called spiritual emergency, awakening or psycho-spiritual crisis… a turbulent period of psychological opening and transformation”, when the mind’s reliably everyday interface temporarily shatters under the pressure of massive cognitive disconnection. Too often, these events or states are mistakenly diagnosed as psychotic or depressive illness, with disastrous consequences.

The power of religious language over even the most rigorously honest thought and expression can be seen in the work of any number of last century’s poets, from David Jones to TS Eliot to Dylan Thomas. The escape route, it appears, was spotted almost two centuries earlier by William Blake, when, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern”. The narrow chinks of language, the language we use to describe even to ourselves what is beyond language, must swing away before the bright ground of all that is.

What all this means for the poor spiritual writer is another matter, perhaps. Effing the ineffable is a perilous endeavour, choose how. But we must do our best with the tools at our disposal, whether they are home-produced or borrowed from another culture. We just have to be especially careful, perhaps, not to cut ourselves with the sharp edges.

*If this post strikes too uncomfortable a chord, or if you simply would like to explore this question of spiritual crises further, I have added some hopefully useful links to the foot of my Advice page.

A leanness of speech

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Faith is not the same as belief. Faith is what Jay Matthews described as staying at the center with God. In my lexicon, God is simply another word for wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality, the heart of being. What Jay is saying points to an abidance in and as wholeness. Being unconditional love. Seeing as God sees.

In my experience, this means waking up here and now, returning again and again to the openness and the listening presence that is most intimate, the boundless awareness that is always accepting everything and clinging to nothing.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

It is hard sometimes, writing about the contemplative life; not because it is difficult to find words so much as it is to find what words to leave out. Belden Lane:

When you put a priority on silence and scarcity as taught by the land itself, the language you use will be very sparse. People out in the desert don’t tend to talk much. Having left behind the noise and clutter of city life, the [desert] monks placed a premium on brevity of speech. They knew that words too easily got in the way of what matters most…

The monks’ leanness of speech even affected the way they spoke of God. The vast expanse of the desert had done a job on the mindset of these early Christians. It broke up their dependence on glib answers and theological explanations. They found themselves running out of language very easily. They knew that in God’s own being was a vast expanse beyond their ability to comprehend, not unlike the desert itself. God is ultimately beyond anything that can be put into words…

I have found it increasingly difficult, despite my periodic protestations, to avoid this word “God”. As Joan Tollifson points out, it encompasses so much “wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality…” even “the heart of being” itself. In other words, this one little word will stand in for whole stacks of other, quite possibly defensive or polemical, or merely pompous, assertions and jargon on my part.

Too often we would-be contemplatives find ourselves drawn away into argumentation, activism, restlessness, no matter whether we are caught up in the activities of some religious institution, or in some humanist or secular-spiritual one. A long time ago, Isaac of Nineveh (613-700 CE) had this to say:

And this is the definition of stillness: silence to all things.

If in stillness you are found full of turbulence, and you disturb your body by the work of your hands and your soul with cares, then judge for yourself what sort of stillness you are practising, being concerned over many things in order to please God!

For it is ridiculous for us to speak of achieving stillness
if we do not abandon all things and separate ourselves from every care.

Homily 21

The danger, it seems to me, is not that the contemplative might do too little, earning themselves the too often perjorative label “quietist”, but that they might be insufficiently radical in their quietness, and so lose the very thing that had drawn them to silence in the first place.

Having walked through the fire

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The period of early Christianity is one of the key building blocks in my lineage of faith. It’s an overlooked area for much of the Roman Church and its child, Protestantism. With the self-sufficiency and arrogance that has often characterized the West, we have proceeded as if the first centuries of Christianity were unimportant, or not part of the essential Christ mystery. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—are some of the most neglected parts of the Western Church. 

After the legitimation and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the 4th century, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the desert fathers and mothers (or abbas and ammas). The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church councils. Since the desert monks often lacked formal education, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. 

Richard Rohr, A Radical Foundation

During the period of pandemic lockdowns, I wrote, in one of the early posts on this blog, of

…my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world…

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century [CE], the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

It isn’t merely the sociology of religion at stake here, though. There is a fundamental shift in spiritual perspective, I suggest, when we step outside the conventions and hierarchies of organised religion – to say nothing of the inner bindings of doctrine and dogma – into an uncharted space of presence and necessary, rather than mandated, practice. There is no longer any traction for the human instinct for security and status; those things no longer afford an escape or a distraction from the inner work.

Out there in the wild, there was no one to impress, no need to cultivate a reputation. A lot of things didn’t matter anymore out there. The desert fathers and mothers wanted to keep the edges hot and to imitate the life of Jesus…. In short, theirs was a countercultural spirituality carrying a prophetic edge. Some of them had been draft dodgers and tax resistors. In fact, some of the women had fled from being sold into a marriage that would’ve been little better than slavery. 

A spiritual resistance movement takes shape among these desert monks, questioning the commodification and militarization of life in the wider culture. They had no use for the ego advancement and social climbing to which even Christians had begun to aspire. You see this in their practice of what they called apatheia, a fierce indifference to unimportant things….  

What do you learn to ignore and what do you learn to love? What needs to die in your life and what do you need to affirm unreservedly? These two questions are the heart of desert spirituality. The desert becomes a tomb, said the monks, a place for the demise of the ego. But there’s also an immense joy and release in that, in learning to die before you die. You’re finally set free to live with abandon. No one is freer than those who have looked death in the eye, have walked through the fire, and are able now fearlessly to love.

Belden Lane, quoted in Rohr, ibid.

So once again we have that sense I wrote of recently, that the nearness of death is in itself a gateway to the vast openness from which all things become, the ground of all that is. There is no getting around it: only as we face the ending of all we thought we were are we free at last to see that what we actually are is none other than what actually is.

Something in the air tonight

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Recently, I have begun to appreciate air again, like a fluid, filling the lake beds of empty rooms, valleys, unused spaces… Sitting still, you can feel the air surrounding you, feel its weight, the lovely column of clear presence all the way from the thermosphere down, to wrap softly around limbs, press the skin of the face softly against the bone beneath, carry the song of that sleepy robin across the hollow depth of the garden to the open window of this room.

When I began meditating in earnest, I entered through the path of Zen. In this tradition, enlightenment is often described as our natural mind, and it’s said that the very act of meditation is already enlightenment. Yet, in Zen the practice is still essential. As Suzuki Roshi said, “enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes us accident prone.” We can’t demand enlightenment, but we can show up and do the practices…

Zen master Dogen said, “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” This means the barriers of separation between self and other dissolve into a deep sense of interconnection with all of life. When I experience this awakening, I find an indescribable sense of peace and ease, yet also profound compassion for all who are suffering in the world and motivation to be of service.

Lisa Ernst, Lion’s Roar Magazine

Simply to turn up and sit seems to be all that is required. Nothing else is: not concepts, nor understanding, nor doctrine. Just sit still; it is already done.

Silence is the air knowing itself; the bright transparent place it has, that holds us all. Silence is alive with sound, with the singing waves of air; it heals the heart, stills the frantic thinking thing that will not rest. If it comes by accident, then its deliberate loveliness has always been there, only waiting to be found again. Holy, holy, the plain fact of it: that it is. That it is all that is, holds all that is; still, and bright, and true.