Monthly Archives: Jun 2026

Part of the mystery

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The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Eve Baker, Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

As Steve Taylor writes: “However, awakened people travel lightly and transition easily. They perceive their existence as part of a vast network of being that will continue to flourish without them. They feel that they share their identity with the whole of the network, that something inside them is part of everything else.” The contemplative life is not a one-way relationship, as so often imagined by religious dogma. Sitting still, we find ourselves part of the unknowable ground as waves are part of the ocean: not other, and yet not exactly one with.

To live as part of the mystery, fully aware of our partial and temporary nature, might seem from an observer’s point of view a kind of death. In fact it is in truth a kind of death. The notion of ourselves as finite, detachable entities cannot live long in the desert. That is why we go there, into the desert of the heart. As Eve Baker puts it (ibid.), “The desert to which the solitary is called is not a place, but something that must be there below the surface of ordinary human existence. It is nowhere, a place of thirst…”

So much of this life is apophatic: we find ourselves in a trackless land, unknowing; what we are is no thing: in that we are part of the ground itself, nothing more. What else could we long for?

Small things

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I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important.

In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’.

Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic particles which are sites of movement and energy. Solid things are largely made up of energy. Solidity itself is something of an illusion.

So yes, the reality we experience around us is, largely, an illusion. That ‘tree’ you can see over there is actually mainly energy, it is also a large group of small things, working together to be a tree. In that sense a ‘tree’ is a ‘society’, or even a ‘society of societies’ – we just think of it as an individual thing because that’s how it looks to us. In reality it’s nothing of the sort. And of course, the same is true of you, and the same is true of me. We are very complex, very sophisticated, societies. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it. Apart from anything else, you currently contain something like a kilogram of bacteria in your internal organs. Good luck living without them.

So here we are encouraged not to despise ‘the day of small things’ – even the smallest act of care has a real impact. Offering someone a glass of water is not ‘just’ symbolic of an alignment with their cause, it’s also a real piece of participation in the constantly evolving web of relations.

It’s part of that idea: “for the want of the nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the battle was lost…” The smallest things, the most insignificant things, have real importance.

So here the writer imagines a network of households choosing to offer welcome to emissaries of Jesus, small things, vulnerable things. Moment by moment choices that shape the future. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a deeply encouraging idea, or a terrifying one.

Simon J Cross

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with small things – the spray of stamens on a Rose-of-Sharon, a harvestman resting spread-eagled on a brick wall beneath a windowsill, the tiny black bristles at the corner of a sparrow’s bill – these have seemed to me more precious, more freighted with meaning, than the ambitions of men.

The reality of things is relationship. Nothing can be without other things; that there are things at all depends on their relations one with another; depends, ultimately, on the ground of being itself.

TAO engenders One,
One engenders Two,
Two engenders Three,
Three engenders the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry shade
And embrace sunlight.
Shade and sunlight, yin and yang,
Breath blending into harmony.

Laozi, Tao te Ching, tr. Addiss and Lombardo, ch.42

Thought cannot embrace the quantum fields in which things consist: theoretical physics can learn about them to some degree, but to know reality at its fundamental level is impossible for the rational mind. Unknowing, remaining still, we can perhaps touch the skirts of this unseen world. All that is, we are; in the quiet, that we can know as we know a lover’s breathing. In the quiet, we can come home to that.

Presence again

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Human beings are probably the most inappropriately named species on our planet. Most of us spend very little time being. It would be more accurate to call us human doings, human thinkings, or perhaps human wantings – with being somewhere near the bottom of the list.

Most of us find it very difficult to be – to be inactive, or to do nothing – and so spend most of our time doing, filling every moment with activities and distractions. When we have nothing to focus our attention on, we usually feel uneasy and immediately reach for some means of occupying our minds…

Presence, or being, is an essential quality of wakefulness. Awakened people are centered in the present. Since they don’t experience inner discord, they don’t feel the impulse to escape the present and so spend much less time in a state of absence. Rather than finding presence a burden, they relish it. To awakened people, simply to be – to take in the reality of their surroundings and their experiences in the Now – is one of life’s greatest delights.

This is why awakened people savor solitude and inactivity, which allow them to be present and to experience the simple joy of being.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.59-61

Continual attention to presence, whether through formal practice or through moment by moment mindfulness, not only frees us from inner distraction and disharmony, it allows us to become aware of our own attitudes and assumptions, our unthought reactions and ways of seeing. This isn’t always pleasant: we find we can’t avoid seeing how we all too easily fall into characteristic patterns of relating to the world around us, and to its creatures, human and otherwise.

To observe our own predeliction for commodifying our fellow creatures, for reacting to imaginary slights and misunderstood communications, for looking away from each other’s distress, is deeply damaging to our comfortable self-conceit.

But presence is essential freedom; freedom not only from abstraction and distraction, but freedom from self-deception, and from self-absorption altogether. Practiced thoroughly. persistently, it becomes a delight and a refuge – somehow a homecoming after a long and broken time away. All that we thought were falls away. All that is left is what is.

Gratitude and presence

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Perhaps the most notable overall change [in the awakening mind], though, is a general sense of well-being. In the same way that the taking for granted syndrome inevitably leads to frustration and dissatisfaction, ongoing gratitude leads to contentment and fulfillment. You will no longer crave things you don’t have or need, since you’re now able to appreciate what you do have. You’ll be free of the constant niggling need to add more to your life or to change your life situation, like an addict who is finally free of the craving for drugs.

You will also feel an enhanced sense of presence. In chapter 1, I mentioned that many qualities of wakefulness are interdependent, and this is particularly true of presence and gratitude. Gratitude brings us into presence, and presence creates gratitude. Our blessings are always in the present, whereas the taking for granted syndrome takes us out of the present, into imaginary future scenarios.

You might wonder: Is it actually possible to live in an all-encompassing state of gratitude, continually aware of the myriad blessings in our lives? But we don’t have to extend our gratitude so widely all the time… Gratitude should be a constant, underlying trait that arises organically in relation to our experience. And when we do have free moments of contemplation, we will naturally find ourselves extending our gratitude more widely, to encompass all of life itself and the Earth.

We should also remember that, as suggested in chapter 1, it’s unrealistic – and even unnecessary – to live in a perpetual state of spiritual ecstasy. Of course, we often have to focus our attention on practical tasks, such as driving or cooking or earning a living. In those practical moments, our sense of gratitude may recede from our awareness. But it will always be in the background, naturally arising when we relax our attention. This applies to all the other qualities of wakefulness… in general.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.51-52

Steve Taylor’s point about presence and gratitude is an important one. In sitting still, there is nothing, apart from the continual drift of thoughts, to distract us from the fact of our sitting, the weight of our body, the scatter of sounds in the background, the blessed pattern of our breathing. What we are is here, now, in this place and instant – and that is not other than the open ground itself, present before and beneath the space and time in which we live and die.

As Eckhart Tolle frequently points out, presence is in some way analogous to waiting: to wait with full alertness is to be fully present, fully attentive to what is. “Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence.” (The Power of Now, p.96)

To be fully present is to be finally free from the constant burden of the little self – defensive, grasping, threatened – that keeps us from our own life, from the gratitude that is our true relationship with what actually is. To sit still in the silence of our heart is to be present at last, in the “ineffable… holy essence” that is our home.

The actually loved and known

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The contemplative life is not in fact about ideas at all, really. It is far more practical, even down-to-earth, than that. In a sense, the contemplative doesn’t care about constructing a metaphysical framework. What happens is merely experience. When a person enters the stillness of “awakened” consciousness, the rigid boundaries of the self drop away. The immediate, felt reality of that state is precisely one of mutual indwelling.

In that state, we don’t look at nature; we are in nature, and nature is in us. We don’t so much sympathise with another person’s suffering as we experience our existence as continuous with theirs. Charles Williams’ coinherence becomes simply a description of what it actually feels like when the ego’s filtering mechanism relaxes – when Huxley’s doors of perception drift open of themselves.

All that we are consists in our relationship with all that is; not in an abstract sense, but in vital, lived reality. When the boundaries of the self are fully defended, this is no more apparent than the atoms that constitute the hands typing these words; but the function of the contemplative mind is to dissolve those boundaries to little more than a fitful mist across what is. Each one of us is in fact infinitely permeable, and infinitely, intricately conditioned. We reflect each other, and are reflected, like dew drops in a web of uncountable dimensions, bright with the light of the isness from which they emerge. It follows that what each of us does or thinks or feels, in the minutest degree, affects all others, human or otherwise, sentient or not. And so we are ourselves affected, from the least to the farthest.

To know this, and yet to sit still, is in some way the greatest gift. “The ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself” (Stephen Batchelor) holds all that is, the “ten thousand things” of the ancient Taoists: our sitting in some way brings them into that whole and healing light, despite ourselves. We cannot know it, cannot hold an image of it as we could hold a book or a glass paperweight; and yet unknown, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

[*the title is taken from David Jones: “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“]

Rebuilding the UI

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It seems to me that our practice is in a sense no more than a phenomenological user interface (UI) for the metaphysics of the contemplative life. What we are, beneath the structures of our frail and temporary selves, is no more than the open ground itself. We are appearances, wavelets that come and go, and flicker for a moment in the brief light of our human consciousness; but wavelets are water. They are the stream itself, waving for an instant here, and then there.

Our fellow creatures, human and otherwise, are likewise ripples on the same measureless stream. Whatever we each of us does disturbs the surface minutely, or substantially. Perhaps to do so intentionally and with love has more effect than we dream, even. At least it cannot fail to change things, somehow, in the direction of good. Charles Williams called it coinherence.

But it is hard to sit and take account of these things. Thought is merely about, not of. Human beings, all through recorded history – and undoubtedly before as well – have tried to engage directly with the vast space before things, and they have taken stories, images, songs from the culture in which they were born, teaching them to their children and their children’s children, until churches and ashrams and synagogues grew from the ache within the heart of each of them.

What are we to do, here on the edge of something we cannot understand? We need a user interface, a phenomenological UI of some sort. It is no good our carefully deconstructing the religion of our forefathers unless we have a way to understand – no, to stand under – the endless becoming that is the ground of all that is. One cannot interact with raw code; there must be some interface there – which was the genius of the uncountable generations before us, with their psalms and their parables, their songs and their stories.

We must, I think, learn to listen to our hearts. To sit still and listen is in many ways the hardest thing, and yet it must be the truest way. When a spirituality undergoes deconstruction, we often think we have to throw away our entire old user interface because we no longer believe in the literalist, dogmatic theology it was originally built for. Perhaps we don’t actually need to change the interface; perhaps we merely need to understand what its elements – buttons, widgets, liturgies, prayers – are actually for. In the silence, if we are patient, their names may appear. Only be still…