Monthly Archives: Nov 2025

Ground and network (republished)

Merlin Sheldrake, in his book Entangled Life, discusses the way all life, on this planet at least, seems to be underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks (which is facilitated by the wider international academic and commercial scientific community), “It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you.” (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)

Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a “thing” over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don’t continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, competition between organisms (Sheldrake, op cit., pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.

For a long time now, Paul Tillich’s understanding of God as “Ground of Being”, beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (Theology of Culture, p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in Systematic Theology refers to God as Ground of Being as “Being-itself” – a concept which has always seemed to me very close to Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, “isness”.

This sense of the ground’s relation to “things” in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of.

Simon Cross writes, in one of his Weekday Meditations,

It’s extraordinary how quickly time moves, and with it, understanding of our world. Only in recent years have we come to recognise that apparently ‘non sentient’ forms of life are not only sentient, but apparently social too. Trees have been shown to communicate with one another, to share resources with one another, and to be interdependent in ways that were hitherto unimaginable. Or perhaps – imaginable, but impossible to demonstrate.

With this growing recognition that the world around us is alive in ways that we hadn’t realised, has come a renewed interest in the panpsychism, an idea that has its roots in centuries old philosophy which suggested that consciousness exists beyond ‘just’ the animal kingdom. Panpsychists think that consciousness of some sort may exist at a molecular level, which, when you come to think of it is pretty mind blowing. Although given the subject matter, that seems like exactly the wrong term, or perhaps exactly the right one.

Now, I don’t know anything much about panpsychism as a philosophy of mind, but it has been suggested that the concept of Buddha-nature may in some Buddhist traditions be interpreted as implying a form of panpsychism. Dōgen Zenji, the importer into Japan of the Sōtō Zen school, wrote:

Therefore, the very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are the Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature.

This impermanence, the dependence of things for their origin, one upon another, is surely the very place where we fall to the ground of all that is, or seems to be.

“Everything passes; everything changes; just do what you think you should do.” (Bob Dylan, ‘To Ramona’) Perhaps somehow we can be still enough to know.

[I came across this post, first published back in 2021, and thought it might be worth republishing it here.]

Godless?

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At this point in my life, I think there isn’t a god or Higher Being out there 100% of the time. My renouncement of God is too fresh, and a major reason I felt relief at my unbelief was the end of the cognitive dissonance I experienced for so long. I don’t think of the universe as a god-substitute, somehow working with will and intention to bring people and opportunities our way. I truly believe that no one is in charge anywhere out there in the background of our lives.

Yet I considered the label “Christian atheist”… not because I do and don’t believe in God, but because I feel like I am an atheistic cultural Christian, akin to a secular Jewish person. Because I continue to be culturally involved in Christianity while I attend church with my family and socialize with predominantly religious friends. I still enjoy discussing (picking apart) the Bible, and I enjoy debating spiritual theories. I like this approach because as I laid out earlier, Christianity created me. The foundation of my life was centered around Christ. It greatly contributed (for better or for worse) to so much of my essence—my values, my morality, my language, my behavior, my tastes, my sexuality, my life choices.

Sarah Henn Hayward, Giving Up God, p.155

Although for most of the middle years of my life I would have called myself a contemplative Christian of one kind or another, I never really shared Sarah Henn Hayward’s sense of being a cultural Christian. I grew up as the child of a single parent, outside of any formal religion. My mother, a painter and sculptor, was an early example of someone who might today refer to themselves as spiritual, but not religious; and while most of my twenties were spent trying to find some kind of spiritual compass, the last place I thought of looking was within the Christian faith. Most of the time my adult friends were not Christian – some were militantly atheist – and I was rarely entirely at home in a church milieu.

Nevertheless, since my own “giving up God” experience over the last five years, I have experienced something of the tension Hayward describes. Like her, I found Christian language had become “infused into the air I breathed” (ibid. p.156), and it has been difficult at times to live without it. Appropriating another religious language from a culture far removed from my own would not have helped – long ago I discovered that, intricate and finely honed as it was, Buddhist language and iconography didn’t really do it for me. Inevitably I do find I borrow technical terminology here and there, but that live electricity of a sacred poetry deeply embedded in my own culture is lacking.

The language of scientific materialism, while I tend to agree with many, if not most, of its conclusions, doesn’t do very well when it comes to the phenomenology of spirituality. It is probably best left to those who use it in their daily work; in any case, stretched too far, it begins to sound like pseudoscience, after the manner of Deepak Chopra or JZ Knight.

To muddle on, as I have done over the last few years, occasionally using the word “God” in Paul Tillich’s sense of the ground of being, or Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, occasionally repurposing bits of Scripture, occasionally filching Buddhist or Taoist phrases to use out of context, seems to be the best I can do; although even academic philosophers often seem to find themselves reinventing language to suit their own formal requirements – Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work comes to mind, not to mention Spinoza’s Euclidian complexities in his Ethics. In any case, I have no formal philosophical training whatsoever; and moreover, I usually find myself distrusting academic philosophy when applied to spiritual intuitions.

Perhaps I am doing the best I can. Certainly over the last year or so I have become more comfortable with what I can’t do in terms of language. I know that my writing can verge on the incoherent, but at least I feel as though I’m beginning to be able to say what I mean, to put words to what David Jones so memorably called “the actually loved and known”.

The freedom of the elbow

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Again and again, I find liberation in the very places I thought it was not—in brokenness and imperfection, disappointment and disillusionment, limitation and death, failure and darkness, unresolvability and uncertainty, groundlessness and everything falling apart. This is “the freedom of the elbow not bending backwards,” as they say in Zen. Of course, the elbow can’t bend backwards without breaking. So this is not the freedom to do what I want, but the freedom to be as I am, and the freedom for everything to be as it is, which is no way and every way, and never the same way twice. This is the freedom of nothing to grasp…

For me, the never-ending, always Now, pathless path of awakening boils down to simply being awake, being present, being truly alive—seeing the beauty in everything, living in gratitude and devotion, enjoying the dance of life, being just this moment, not knowing what anything is, clinging to nothing, recognizing—not in the head, but in the heart—that everything belongs, that nothing persists, that every moment is fresh and new.

Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, pp.262,263

While human actions are completely determined, Spinoza introduces a notion of human freedom that is compatible with determinism:

True Freedom is Understanding: Freedom isn’t the ability to choose against causes (free will), but the ability to understand the necessary causes that determine us.

Activity vs. Passivity: A person is passive when they are determined by external causes and inadequate ideas (passions).

A person becomes active and more free when they act from adequate ideas (reason) and understand that they are part of the necessary order of God/Nature. This intellectual understanding leads to the highest state: the intellectual love of God (Amor Dei Intellectualis).

(Google Gemini, response to user query, October 2025)

The flow of becoming, the stream, the Tao, is what it is. What comes to be in our frail and transient lives is only the result of causes far beyond our understanding, and leads on to effects we cannot know. What we can do is pay attention to the grace of the tiny, beautiful things among which we live: the endless sparkling of the wavelets of the stream.

Freedom is to know, all-of-a-piece, that what we are is nothing other than the stream itself, and that the stream runs in the course of what merely is: the ground itself. But how?

As Joan Tollisfson says, the path of awakening comes down to being awake: just that. The only way I know to be awake is practice; simply watching what happens, watching what becomes as it is becoming, is the only way. It is so simple, so perfectly simple; and yet it is the hardest work I’ve known. To be aware, without choosing an object, is the purest kind of attention; and yet it is like holding a bare wire.

Only sit still, in quiet. Don’t seek anything – watch. Live quietly, in obscurity, as Epicurus advised, and just watch. There is nothing else to do.

Succession and substance

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The stream is nothing less than the sparkling surface of becoming. For us, I suppose, it is time, since we are transient waves on the motion of what is coming to be; and we can only see what has been – which we call life, or the past.

To come to an end of knowing, to a place where reason and observation fail us, is the beginning of what Spinoza called the Third Kind of Knowledge: direct perception of what is, as a necessary, unique expression of the immediate activity of the stream (God, the Tao). In that we are the locus of seeing, the inevitable awareness in which things come to be what they are.

For me it is in simply sitting still that we come to see the glittering light from the wavelets on the swift skin of the stream itself. We are each no more than that, but beautiful; and able to love, each in our lift and fall on the running stream. Nothing is lost. The stream goes on, and each wavelet cannot be other than the stream itself.

Is it possible?

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Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?

Noelle Oxenhandler, What Is the Shape of My Life?, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2025

To sit with this question, simply as it is, may be not unfamiliar when applied to the breath, to the sitting body, to the sounds outside, or to the sunlight on a blank wall or closed eyelids. But it is less familiar when turned, as Oxenhandler does here, to oneself. It is a strange and disorienting practice, with a dzogchen quality, like a wordless pointing-out instruction, about it somewhere. Something appears like a bright skein on the velvety dark of the stream, a shape of purling water, nothing else.

Recently I have found myself drawn into just such a practice. It is not something I choose. It rises up through the usual pattern of unbidden thoughts, and asks for space at least to be, like a map drawn on glass. There is nothing dramatic about it, no sense of “my life flashed before my eyes” – and yet it is there, a kind of Tube map of a lifetime, glittering behind closed eyelids. The least attention, and a pattern enlarges, a stream of cause and effect reveals itself, and is – what? – forgiven? Something like that. An act, yet again, of grace, anyway. There is no judgement here, no impulse to improve anything. It just is as Noelle Oxenhandler suggests (ibid.):

[T]hrough the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own… life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

On the map beneath the glass there is nothing even to heal. The lines and stops stand out against the dark, and my breath comes and goes. There is no story here, just a pattern in the quiet. Nothing to conclude. The bright pattern stands against silence, as it is.

[First published 20/11/2025]

Vastness

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…[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.”

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…

We look back into the emptiness that is the creative source of all stories and emotions, into the formless fertile space that gives rise to all of existence. There, we “see the universe as it is.”…

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.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance, pp.315-317

Vastness is an experience, if that is the right word, that most of us only encounter looking up at the night sky on a clear night, or perhaps gazing out across the ocean when the sea is glassy calm, and seems to extend beyond the rim of the world. But there is an interior vastness that opens directly on the ground of being itself, no-thing, the endless expanse before differentiation, before “thingness” ever was.

Silence itself leads us in the end to what merely is. Only in inward silence can we see out across the shore of our own unquiet sea. If we will only sit still and be quiet, the peaks and troughs of our fears and our longings will settle out; and then, perhaps, the way will open across the water. But we must wait, we must be still and want nothing. Only when we are at an end of ourselves can we receive the grace that comes in silence, in the stillness that lies behind our breath, behind the little sounds from beyond the window, behind our having been born. For it is grace. All we can achieve is the letting go, nothing more. The best we can do is to get out of our own way, for the fundamental ground is always there, patient, immeasurable, without beginning. We have only to trust, to let go without assurance, drop ourselves, into the empty stillness that is always waiting for us, always there.

[First published 18/11/2025]

The fundamental unknowability of God

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In the Wikipedia entry on Panentheism, we read:

Baruch Spinoza… claimed that “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. “Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.” Though Spinoza has been called the “prophet” and “prince” of pantheism, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza states that: “as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken”. For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world.

According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) Spinoza did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God’s transcendence was attested by God’s infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God’s immanence. Furthermore, Martial Guéroult suggested the term panentheism, rather than pantheism to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, “in” God.

It seems to me that in this sense Spinoza’s God is almost the Western philosophical equivalent of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of the Tao. The Tao is not itself “the ten thousand things” (i.e. material existence) but “The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” (Laozi) To sit quietly and recall that the coming to be of things in time is no more than the result of things that have been, and that things themselves rest in the open ground as wavelets rest in the flowing stream, is to see that the stream itself – the Tao, God, Being – is prior to all that is. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17 NIV).

As Spinoza himself pointed out, there are three kinds of knowledge:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.

2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.

3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.

(Microsoft Copilot, in response to user query, 31 October 2025)

The second kind of knowledge, rational thought, cannot make the connection with the Ground. But to sit still with the knowledge, to sit stil in the impossibility of speech, like a Zen monk with a koan, is to allow “the fundamental unknowability of God” (Wikipedia) to open into the Ground all by itself. When we come to an end of what we can say – what we can think – the only path open is the way of emptiness, into the infinite pleroma of what actually is.

[First published 16/11/2025]

By the window

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By the window where I sit I am always aware of the sounds from outside – more so when it’s mild enough to leave the window ajar on its hook – and they have come to be an important part of my practice, somehow. Gradually I have come to tell myself less stories about them, but they are always there, as inevitable as my breathing, but more various.

In summer there is birdsong – the blackbirds especially, and the inevitable magpies (if you can call that song). In winter there isn’t much except the chacking of jackdaws from their roost in the old water tower, and the occasional robin’s episodic twitter. But there’s always the traffic from the road at the end of the garden: the background shush (and splash if it’s raining) of tires, recognisable engines – motorcycles (I have to try and avoid identifying these), buses, lorries – the occasional wail of a siren. Sometimes you can hear voices from the bus stop on this side of the road.

I always sit with my eyes closed, but I am aware of the light. I don’t know if that’s because, unconsciously, I remember what it was like when I sat down and set my timer, or whether I’m picking up the light through my lowered eyelids. I do have a sense, though, of the presence of the day around me, whether it’s first thing in the morning or before supper in the evening. There’s a clarity about that which reminds me of the season as well – bright sunlight at both ends of the day in summer, dimpsy in winter.

It’s more than ten years now that I’ve been sitting in this particular window. Generations of birds have come and gone, the trees at the back of the garden are taller now – and one fell in a high wind earlier this year – and the shrubs have grown and changed. Leaves drift these November days across the lawn, building up around the bushes until they’re cleared again. This place has become dear and familiar; there is a sense, almost, of the Benedictine quality of “stability of life”, and these ordinary things have acquired for me something approaching sacredness – the more so because they are ordinary. There is nothing else I need.

[First published 14/11/2025]

An admission

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It seems to me that perhaps I may have been precipitate in switching back entirely to Blogger as a platform. It is hard, sometimes, to admit that one may have made a mistake; but possibly I have done just that.

Instead of my readership from the WordPress blog following me over to Blogger, I now seem to have two separate sets of readers – with a few honourable exceptions. Certainly my list of subscribers on WordPress remains constant; they do not appear to have resubscribed on Blogger en masse!

For the time being, then. it appears that I may have to run both plaforms in parallel until something settles out and I can continue on one or the other. That having been said, I shall post repost here the handful of posts from the last week on Blogger; for a while at least I shall publish any new posts on both platforms.

Needless to say, I shall be interested to hear from any of my followers – once the initial sense of nuisance has passed, perhaps – which of the two platforms you find most useful as a reader.

Back to Blogger!

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I’ve been becoming increasingly despondent about WordPress’ attempts to turn themselves from a blogging platform into a social medium, so I am reverting to good old Blogger. For future posts, please go to An Open Ground, using this link. You can request an email subscription by using the Contact Form in the right sidebar, below the RSS feed buttons. See you there!