It occurs to me that some (most?) of my readers may be wondering how it is that, at my age and with a lifetime’s contemplative practice, one way or another, under my belt, I am still at times subject to these odd changes of direction and language. I sometimes wonder myself.

Proverbs 20:24 (NRSV) reads: “All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?” Benedictus Spinoza wrote (Ethics, Prop. XXIX): “Wherefore all things are conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but also to exist and operate in a particular manner, and there is nothing that is contingent.”

Free will perhaps is more a sensation than a condition of being – a thing more desired than factual. We do not choose our place and time of birth, nor the conditions into which we are born, nor the genetic disposition with which we are born. These things happen to us, as does life itself, at least from the point of view of the individual self.

It seems to me that the “pathless path” (Martin Laird) I find myself on just has these kinks in it. At times it leads on fearlessly across the saltmarshes of the spirit, straight as an arrow across the open ground; at others it is hopelessly twisted and tangled among the thickets of religion and doubt. There is little I can do about this. This contemplative life demands surrender, and acts of willpower are insupportable in the way of silence. (Perhaps this is where GI Gurdjeff went so wrong?)

If one sits still enough, though, the skies do clear, and the way opens. Not for the first time, AC Grayling’s beautiful passage comes to mind:

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

Humanism, accordingly, is the answer to the question often asked amidst the acerbic debates between proponents and opponents of religion: what alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

Humanism is the emphatic answer to the request for an alternative… [T]he most wonderful resources for good and flourishing lives lie in the intelligence, the experience, the wisdom and insight of our fellows in the human story; and it is from these resources that the humanist outlook derives.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, p.7

It seems that my own instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit, for walking my own path of practice, is in fact a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. Despite Grayling’s remarks above, I find it hard to commit myself unreservedly even to humanism. After all,

The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao
The names that are given do not contain their true meaning
Within the nameless is the true meaning.

Tao Te Ching, tr. Dennis Waller

It may be that the contemplative life, in the end, really is no more than a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.