Monthly Archives: Jul 2026

Acceptance and integration

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I have written much here about acceptance – including particularly Tara Brach’s concept of radical acceptance – and it seems to me one of the keystones of any contemplative practice. To accept the circumstances of our life, the time and place of our birth, our age and our state of health, the changing seasons… this is a way of being that underlies whatever peace and stillness we uncover.

Integration, the goal of so much psychotherapeutic theory and practice – most obviously in the Jungian tradition – is the core process of individuation, where hidden, unconscious parts of the mind – the shadow, the anima or animus, repressed or concealed complexes – are brought into conscious awareness to create a unified, whole self: the endpoint of healing.

Acceptance is key to integration, also: it is not possible to bring into open awareness these intensely charged unconscious materials without acceptance. To accept oneself, all of oneself, as at its heart given (see Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit for instance) is the beginning of our inner work, and its fruit.

All that we are is given to us, in its iridescent, changing beauty. The necessity of what is remains, but it is in a sense a contingent necessity. Our response is ours to make: to remain still and watch is the beginning of radical acceptance – Heidegger’s Gelassenheit if you will – and a fundamental surrender to isness itself. In hesychasm the principle of synergia – the cooperative working together of free will and grace – is perhaps the deepest human level of integration.

To sit still, just that, is the beginning and the end of practice. There is nothing else to do, nothing else is needed. The ground opens in this moment: there is nothing else, nowhere else to go.

Grace?

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Grace? But wouldn’t it be simpler just to call these experiences [of unsought peace and illumination] moments of grace? For that is what they are, aren’t they—times when God suddenly touches our lives with his blessing and renews us from the center of his own bottomless abundance?

Well, yes, that is quite true. Grace and mystical hope are close synonyms, and the outward effects are virtually identical. A person under the sway of grace and a person connected to the flow of mystical hope will display the same qualities of joy, gratitude, and a lightness and fullness of being even in the face of apparent reversal and defeat. Outwardly, they are dead ringers for each other, and even inwardly I believe they resonate with the same experience.

But words also have connotations, and this is why I make the distinction between grace and hope. For over the theological centuries calling an experience “grace”… has come to connote something extraordinary and uncharacteristic: an infusion of divine sustenance into our lives as a special gift from God, given with God’s own timing and discretion. Such a notion is consistent with the traditional theological viewpoint, where it seems that the first priority has always been to affirm the sovereign freedom of God and God’s role as sole initiator. Using the term “grace” tends to lock us back into those traditional categories and allows us to go sailing right by the distinction I really want to highlight.

For in overemphasizing this divine freedom it is all too easy to understate and miss that hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose sight of the invitation—and in fact, our responsibility, as stewards of creation—to develop a conscious and permanent connection to this wellspring. We miss the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can pour; a lamp through which it can shine.

But what if we are intended to become this vessel, this body of hope? What if, in fact, this effervescent, “lightness-of-being” energy is the fuel that drives our human life toward its divine fulfillment? What if our insistence on treating it as a rare and exceptional phenomenon is a way of ducking the invitation that was permanently extended [John 4:1-42] at the Samarian well that blazing midday?

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, p.16

I have often stumbled over this word grace myself. There is so undeniable a sense of givenness about so much of the inner life that it is hard to evade the expression. We may practice faithfully for weeks, years, and yet illumination comes unsought, unexpected, often at what on the face of it might seem to be the most unpropitious of times. We may be overwhelmed with loss, with grief and regret, and suddenly the sky will open and we are flooded with peace and acceptance like a shaft of unimaginable sunlight.

What is happening here? Of course it is tempting on the one hand to turn to theories of the bicameral mind, or of the collective unconscious, or on the other to conventional theological formulations of “[s]aving grace [as] the free and unmerited operation of God’s person and presence… initiat[ing] the spiritual life of God’s people” (The Gospel Coalition). But neither extreme seems even to begin to reflect the wonderful lightness of being, the openness and clarity, the sheer sense of gift that comes so unexpectedly, so seemingly undeservedly. There is a profound mystery here, in the true sense of the term.

You may have noticed that [these] experiences have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come back from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore—only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

Ibid. p.47

One thing that all Bourgeault’s examples have in common with my own is this inherent quality of wordlessness. Of course in order to know something conceptually we must use words, if only to ourselves, and so these experiences of grace are clouded over with unknowing. And yet it is only in surrendering to not knowing that we can receive them – which may be why they are so often received in extremis. “Ego-centered consciousness” is mediated by thought, and thought by words; defeat words, and thought drops away from itself. What is left is silence.

I think this wordless silence is itself the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice – and, phenomenologically, such things as near death experiences – are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, especially in the depths of its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is given to us as our only home at the end of all we know.

Being present to death

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Now is the only moment we will ever know. Our memories of the past are experiences in the present. So are our thoughts about the future. So when we talk about not being present, we mean our attention is not on the present moment. It is focused on thoughts about the past or future.

We can be present in three ways. First, we can live for today, not worrying about yesterday or about what tomorrow may bring…

A second way, common to many meditation practices, is being aware of our current experience. Whereas most of our thoughts are about the past or the future, our sensory experience is always “now.” This is why basic meditation techniques often focus the attention on the body — the heartbeat, the breath, or some other sensation. The feelings in the body are always in the present.

And there is a third way of being present that can develop from this: being present to how it is to be present — not so much noticing your experience of the moment but noticing how it feels to be in the moment…

Savoring how it actually feels to be present motivates us to return here more often. As we do, the familiar, delightful feeling of being here now becomes a beacon drawing us home.

Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing

Death, it seems to me, is not a mishap or some kind of failure; it is as much a part of what we are as birth or love. It is not a horror to be evaded at the cost of our health, our happiness, our kindness; it is, as Hamlet half-suspected, really a consummation devoutly (but not impatiently) to be wished – a consolation for all ills, a reward for patience and a gentle homecoming at the close of day. It is a gift to be received alertly and with grace.

One of the blessings of growing old may be that it is harder by the day to forget that death is common to us all, without exception. Being present to one’s own death – whether in prospect or in actuality – may be perhaps the greatest liberation available to us.

In being present, though, one must as Russell says be present to presence itself – only so, I’ve found, is it even possible to know death for what it is, our oldest friend.

What is this light?

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In the west today, we are very interested in what consciousness (our field of awareness) can reveal when focused on the external world. For instance, if we focus our awareness on plants we can build a system of botany, and if we focus it on rocks we can build a system of geology. But mystics of all traditions have been interested in what we might call the nature of consciousness itself. What is this light inside our heads that the philosopher Colin McGinn has called the “mysterious flame?” In the same way that we acknowledge an external world to be explored, mystics have recognized an internal wilderness, also to be explored—and with rich reward…

To use an analogy, in the west we’ve traditionally or habitually assumed that consciousness operates like a standard light switch on the wall; it can be turned either on or off, and so we are awake during the day and “off” during the night. However, in the mystical traditions, it’s believed that consciousness can vary greatly, functioning more like a dimmer switch; that is, the “light” of our consciousness can be turned “on” but it can also be turned “up,” increasing its luminosity.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.28-29

Despite a blossoming in recent years of academic research and discussion (Daniel Dennett, Anil Seth, Susan Blackmore, Phillip Goff, David Chalmers and many others) consciousness remains a difficult field to study:

What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, p.1

The weird idea of using consciousness to investigate itself is precisely what I have been up to for most of my life, despite being distracted by the need to earn a living, and confused by the persistent claims of religion to have a corner on the field. As Blackmore herself knows (see her delightful Zen and the Art of Consciousness) what might broadly be called mystical experience is precisely this: the direct encounter of mind itself with mind itself.

It won’t have escaped my readers that this is also a decent definition of phenomenology; Martin Heidegger, following his mentor Edmund Husserl, makes this quite clear, as does, especially, Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

Consciousness is not behind the body—it is in the body. This is Merleau-Ponty’s radical idea: To perceive is already to act. To act is already to understand. This destroys the mind/body divide far more thoroughly than Descartes ever anticipated.

Robert Flix, Merleau-Ponty in Plain English: Understanding Perception, Embodiment, and Experience, p.75

The point here is one that contemplatives of all traditions would recognise: mind and body, body and being, are a unified field. What occurs in one occurs in the others – not that they are “others” – and primary awareness holds the field just as it is, without the fragmentation to which our everyday mind has become so accustomed.

Contemplative practice – of whatever kind, it seems to me – acknowledges this unity as axiomatic, somehow. We sit, we breathe, we are aware of sounds and of our own weight, and our direct awareness of this awareness allows us to step from observer to observed and back in one epoché in which the distinction collapses into illumination. As Eve Baker puts it so clearly in her own slightly different context:

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.

Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

The paradox of active surrender

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“It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live,” Henry Miller wrote in comparing the art of living to dance, driven by rhythm into which the dancer must relax. “It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.” Surrender, it turns out, is an essential part of testing the limits, which is in turn an essential part of transcending them — in other words, the raw material of creative breakthroughs. But the beautiful term that Jeanette Winterson used to describe the experience of letting art transform us — “the paradox of active surrender” — applies just as aptly to the art of living itself: Paradoxical as it may sound, to stop resisting that which we cannot control is the only choice we have, but it is also one we must actively make in order to transcend our limits.

Maria Popova

“The paradox of active surrender” might almost be another name for the contemplative life itself. The conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know of becoming vulnerable and available to awakening, to open objectless awareness.

And yet surrender cannot help but be active in this context: one must intend to sit down, to be still – to surrender – even while one is relinquishing intent itself. The only response to such a paradox is simply unknowing: the embrace, the lingering, longing embrace, of what cannot be known, and yet is.

We do not see our hearts

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There are situations when one owes solitude to other people, if only not to bother them. But more than this, the multitude needs solitaries as it needs postmen, doctors and fishermen. They go out and they send, or bring, something back—even if they send no word and vanish finally from sight. The solitary is as necessary to our common sanity as wilderness, as the forest where no one goes, as the waterfall in a canyon, which no one has ever seen or heard. We do not see our hearts. I do not expect to be all that solitary for, as a paradoxical person, I am also gregarious and favour the rhythm of withdrawal and return. But in the mountain, I watch the Tao, the way of nonhuman nature (if there is really any such thing) and feel myself into it to discover that I was never outside because nature ‘peoples’ just as much as it ‘forests’.

Alan Watts, from Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

It’s true – we do not see our hearts in the shadow of what we take to be ourselves. The end of our unknowing is the open ground itself; and that we cannot know, since it is no thing.

It seems an almost unbearable paradox that society should need solitaires just as it needs other tradespeople, and yet Watts is right. Somehow I have known this in the depths of my heart for most of my life, though most of the time I haven’t dared believe it, or it I have, I’ve allowed it to be concealed behind doctrine and religious explication. The call to this life of Einsamkeit is as real as any other, only we don’t like to talk about it. (We don’t like to talk about death either, the two things being more closely related than we think.)

Perhaps it’s just as well that the vocation of Einsiedler is not better known, since societies have a way of misunderstanding those whose paths lie outside the highways of commerce and politics. After all, it is not by being known that we can serve our fellow people, but by being unknown: hidden mycorrhiza in the soil of community. Julian of Norwich lived out her life as an anchoress, her life of prayer and solitude embedded in the city of her birth.

Books like Watts’ and blog posts like this one notwithstanding, all we need to do is to keep still and listen. What we may hear will be all our gift.