A commenter on yesterday’s post reminded me that perhaps I hadn’t made it sufficiently clear that I am not advancing humanism – or anything else come to that – as an alternative belief system to take the place of organised religion. For some this may be case – although I don’t think that’s what AC Grayling was recommending in the passage I quoted yesterday – but it emphatically isn’t my own approach at all.

The Einsamkeit of yesterday’s title is a German term usually translated as either loneliness or solitude; its alternative translations, seclusion or solitariness, are the ones that interest me, (Like so many German philosophical terms, it has its own resonance which doesn’t seem to have a one for one equivalent in English.) I was using it to indicate following the course that appears, spiritually – I’m reminded of the Taoist phrase “to accord with the way” – not adopting a ready-made spirituality from either organised religion or academic philosophy. (People like Eckhart Tolle, or Jiddu Krishnamurti, are exemplars of this kind of contemplative path.)

It is of course hard to find words for all this, which is one reason that the Christian tradition of apophatic theology developed among the Early Church Fathers – although something similar already existed among the Neo-Platonists – and from the opposite direction, perhaps, Buddhist (especially Zen) philosophy and teachings often emphasise Śūnyatā, emptiness of inherent existence. The ground of being, the Tao, Istigkeit, is no thing. It cannot be described; it isn’t really possible truthfully to construct a sentence with it as its object. Awareness seems to be irresistibly identified with it: we are aware with its awareness. At the end, it is all we are; but it is all we have ever been. Our practice is really nothing more than a means of stripping away whatever stops us seeing that. To construct, or to adopt, belief systems is massively to miss the point – and that is what I was, perhaps clumsily, trying to get at yesterday.