Tag Archives: acceptance

The consolation of no exit

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We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

– Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview, with thanks to Joan Tollifson

To understand, with Cohen, that freedom lies in the embracing of necessity, is to realise that peace exists only in the radical acceptance of what actually is. We are all in the same mortal boat: no one here gets out alive; and compassion arises simply from this realisation.

For myself, I have come to see that understanding the inevitability of causality is the foundation not only of peace but of forgiveness. “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” (Spinoza, Ethics, 1a4) – and so this present moment that seems to be myself could not have been otherwise.

To sit still, and watch, is the beginning and end of practice. All we have come to be is here now, in this arrangement of limbs, this pattern of breathing, these half-heard sounds from beyond the closed window. The small birds flit between branches; the Weymouth bus is pulling away from the stop into the light evening traffic, and there is no wind. None of this could have been otherwise, and the blessed silence slips between every instant, complete and endless.

Further along the path of disenchantment

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Our age is more dominated by scientific theory than was Spinoza’s; but only a fond illusion persuades us that it is more guided by the truth. We have seen superstition triumph on a scale that would have startled Spinoza, and which has been possible only because superstition has cloaked itself in the mantle of science. If the heresies of our day are, like Nazism and communism, the declared enemies of religion, this merely confirms, for the student of Spinoza, their superstitious character, and confirms, too, Spinoza’s insight that scientific objectivity and divine worship are the forms of intellectual freedom. Spinoza, like Pascal, saw that the new science must inevitably ‘disenchant’ the world. By following truth as our standard, we chase from their ancient abodes the miraculous, the sacred and the saintly. The danger, however, is not that we follow this standard – for we have no other – but that we follow it only so far as to lose our faith, and not so far as to regain it. We rid the world of useful superstitions, without seeing it as a whole. Oppressed by its meaninglessness, we succumb then to new and less useful illusions – superstitions born of disenchantment, which are all the more dangerous for taking man, rather than God, as their object.

The remedy, Spinoza reminds us, is not to retreat into the pre-scientific world-view, but to go further along the path of disenchantment; losing both the old superstitions and the new, we discover at last a meaning in truth itself. By the very thinking that disenchants the world we come to a new enchantment, recognizing God in everything, and loving his works in the very act of knowing them.

Roger Scruton, The Great Philosophers: Spinoza, pp.45-46

The longer I sit with the consequences of deconstruction – in other words the radical openness that refuses all dogma, and so escapes the grasp of doctrine and its “rulers and authorities” (Ephesians 6:12) – the more clearly I see that deconstruction isn’t a destination but a process: not something to achieve but something to live. It doesn’t stop at the point when we feel we have shrugged off the shackles; we may find it is now a lifelong principle for living.

To understand, as Benedictus Spinoza did, that necessity is freedom itself, is to live within the grace of belonging: to stop running from necessity, and to know that final acceptance as inescapable joy.

Spinoza’s final joke on us is that this bleak, austere worldview ends up offering a kind of salvation. Not the salvation of prayers answered or sins forgiven, but the salvation of peace in a world that doesn’t owe you anything — and doesn’t need to.

Robert Flix, Spinoza in Plain English: Understanding Determinism, Freedom, and Joy, p.49

Otium

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In A Simplified Life, her beautiful account of being a contemporary hermit, Verena Schiller writes:

…I eschew any attempt at repetitive words of prayer while walking or working out of doors, though some find this helpful. Even after years of praxis, learning to do just one thing at a time does not come easily. ‘When you are walking just walk; when you are digging just dig; whatever you are intent on give it your whole attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with the whole of your being and as though it were the only thing to do and as though there was all the time in the world’, a counsel of perfection given me by Bishop John V. Taylor at the very beginning of my solitary exploration, echoing the wisdom of countless others all down the centuries. Rarely can this be even a remote possibility in most women’s lives. For me it is and, in a sense, carries a double responsibility: to practise this single-pointedness not only to deepen my own attentiveness but also on behalf of others caught up in unrelenting multitasking. Life and the work in hand is the prayer or, put the other way about, the prayer is the work. We live in a world characterized by extreme activism, restlessness and rush, yet a hallmark of this solitary life needs to be otium. [pp.112-113]

Gradually the contemplative life seems to take over the “rest” of one’s life; the simplest of tasks become luminous – almost at times numinous – with presence. Even simple conversations can become exercises in something akin to receiving spiritual direction… in the midst of discussing vegetables, perhaps!

Of course, as Schiller points out herself, this is a counsel of perfection; with the best will in the world too many jobs are done thoughtlessly, too many conversations slip by in mere chatter. But even so – to look back in less time each time, and see the gaps in attention, becomes its own often humorous discipline. (The Pure Land Buddhists have a lovely word, bombu, for just this kind of spiritual hamfistedness!)

Otium. It’s not a common word in most people’s vocabulary; but it means, at least in a contemplative context, a kind of holy leisure. Schiller (op cit., p.36):

In early monasticism, leisure or otium was not only an essential mark of the life of a monk, it was integral to the life itself. Leisure, otium, is how the monastic life was described in the early Middle Ages (a life free from negotium, of busyness and business). Few of us would recognize this as a description of contemporary monasticism, and even St Bernard, that great reformer and founder of the Cistercian Order, who had hoped to reduce busyness and business to a minimum in the life of a monk, was soon to amend this adage wryly to that of a negotissimum otium, a very busy leisure indeed.

The retired life can be otium per excellentiam, if we will only let it be. Practice need not be confined to the daily spells alone in one’s room: it can be allowed to spill out, just like the hermit’s, into walking, cooking, housework, even being together. It becomes a portable grace, a lovely thing that brightens all that it touches, even pain and concern, even the most mundane or dreadful things. It has begun to become an open channel to the hidden boundless grace that holds all things in becoming.

Trust what opens

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First and foremost, I would say follow your own light—trust your own sense of what opens things up and what just amplifies the confusion. Everyone is unique, each moment is unique, and no one else knows what you need. In my experience, life always gives us exactly what we need—including the difficulties and apparent setbacks. Everything that shows up is part of your unique path. You can’t get it wrong.

What I would suggest, whenever it invites you, is to simply give open, innocent attention to the bare actuality of present experiencing – hearing sounds, feeling sensations, seeing shapes and colors – just this bare actuality that is here before, during and after the thought commentary about it.

Joan Tollifson

The further I go on this path, the clearer it seems to me that there is no one way. As Tollifson says here, “Everyone is unique, each moment is unique, and no one else knows what you need.”

So often I have fallen into the trap of thinking that I needed to sign up, take vows, commit to one way or path or tradition – or another! – when I have had my own way waiting beneath my ribs all along. Besides, over the years we each change:

For a long time, we may be caught up in trying to figure out which one is right, which one is the best, which one is the highest truth, the most effective, the most advanced, and so on. But eventually we realize these are false questions. These seemingly different maps all have something valuable to offer, and none of them can fully capture every dimension and possibility of this living reality.

No map is itself the territory that it helps us to navigate. And so, we learn to take from each what resonates now, and not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. We even learn that the moon and the pointing finger are not two, that mapping is an activity of the territory, that nothing is outside of this seamless no-thing-ness. We find many apparent paradoxes, and we discover that reality is not one, not two. We lean this way and then that way. Thankfully, different imaginary rugs we try to stand on get pulled out from under us. Again and again we wake up. Just this!

What is it? We can’t say. And yet, apparently we have to say something, just as we apparently have to act in one way or another. And so, these words and all the many spiritual practices and pointers on offer have all poured out choicelessly from we know not where into the great listening presence that we all are.

Joan Tollifson, from another essay

I know that writing like this, Joan’s or mine, will horrify some good and honest people who do believe that there is one right way, and that holding faithfully to the way we are “called to walk” is the only way. To them I’d have to say that if that is good for you, fine, and so much the simpler in a sense; but please don’t seek to apply your own structures and boundaries to us Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin who can no longer live metaphorically indoors.

Ultimately, the whole contemplative life is so exceedingly simple that we often cannot credit it with being that easy. We feel it must be more complicated, more effortful than that: if only there were more blood, sweat and tears we might believe it, but simply to wander, “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown”, is just too much like the end of term for us to trust.

If we do stay still, still enough to listen to the woodlice walking beneath the bark, to see the little velvety red mites scampering on the stonework in the sun, to hear the meltwater trickling beneath still frozen snow, then we will often find that the ground opens of itself, devoid of words or traditions, no thing at all but bright and placeless. And then there will no longer be any need to worry about paths, really.

Geworfenheit

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We didn’t choose to be born, and there is nothing about our coming to be here that was voluntary. We did not choose our biological sex, nor our blood group, nor the colour of our skin, or hair, or eyes; we didn’t choose our nationality, nor the century into which we were born, nor the social class we were born into. Crucially, we didn’t choose our parents: we didn’t choose our genetic makeup, nor the parenting skills our parents did or did not possess; come to that, we didn’t choose whether we were the child of a stable couple, or a single parent, nor whether we had a step-parent or even two. We were just thrown into life, to make what we could of where we landed.

Martin Heidegger called this “Geworfenheit“, thrownness. Life was already underway when we were born: we found ourselves in an ongoing story, and we had to find our own part to play as we went along. This isn’t so much determinism as the felt inevitability of being. Our Geworfenheit is not so much our fate as the condition of our living at all; you cannot choose where your path begins – you can only respond to it.

We do not stand outside reality, we arise within it; and our freedom is not exemption from the necessity of our being in the world, but intimacy with it. Perhaps something like this is what Jesus meant when he said, as it is reported, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8 ESV) If we will only stop trying to solve life, stop trying to control beings – ourselves or others – the world will disclose itself to us, as it is.

Gelassenheit: releasement, openness, stillness; if we will only be still, the way opens, of itself. This is all our practice, really – just opening our hands to what actually is.

Merely to bear witness

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When we discuss, as I did the other day, the question of free will and determinism, it is all too easy to get caught up in intellectual debate, but this was not my intention. I wrote then, “Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time.” To see this directly for oneself, rather than think about it, is the beginning of our actual awakening.

But the state of accepting realisation that Spinoza refers to in his Ethics as “blessedness” is not arrived at by debate or dialectic, despite Spinoza’s own sometimes misleading phrase “the intellectual love of God”. It is simply the immediate embrace of this “radical acceptance”, in Tara Brach’s phrase, of what actually is.

In her book, Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes:

The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…

[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” [Dzogchen].

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. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

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.

To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet if we remain still enough to see that all that appears – sense objects,  thoughts, feelings, memories – are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed – from which all change proceeds.

Biological fate

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In Ch.1 of her 2019 book The Science of Fate, (annoyingly, the Kindle edition is not paginated) Hannah Critchlow writes:

The science that suggests we are all, to a large extent, at the mercy of our neurobiology, driven in the direction of certain decisions and behaviours, susceptible to certain conditions, is very compelling. On one level every one of us, however uniquely complex and valuable, is also simply a human animal whose principal… is to interact with others to exchange information that will contribute to the collective consciousness and, if we’re lucky, pass on our genetic material. Deep drives are at work to further those basic goals and they are largely beyond our control.

Even what we think of as the more individuated aspects of our behaviours, the ones that we feel instinctively must be the product of nurture more than nature and more under our own conscious control, are formed at a deep level by innate factors we were born with and that were reinforced in our earliest years. Our personality, our beliefs about ourselves and the way the world works, how we respond in a crisis, our attitude to love, risk, parenting and the afterlife: any of the highly abstract opinions and character traits you care to mention are deeply shaped by how our brain processes the information it receives from the world. When we start to probe the idea of being a free agent in control of our life in the light of what neuroscience is now showing us, it can feel as if the space available for free will is shrinking fast and we’re stuck in a loop that refers us back endlessly to a prior stage of preordained experience.

Ideas such as this have the power to evoke sometimes quite spectacular emotional reactions in those who hear them for the first time, or are reminded of past unhappy encounters with the likes of Spinoza, who have called into question our often unthinking assumptions about free will. There is a deeply visceral dislike, in many people, of the idea that our personal sovereignty might be in any way impugned. We long to be able to say, with all the conviction of William Ernest Henley, “I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul.”!

Critchlow herself, a page or two later, points out:

During my lifetime there will be significant discoveries, applications and ramifications. It’s possible that, as we discover more about the neurobiology of belief formation and prejudice, we might be able to boost our openness to new ideas, say, with massive consequences for reducing conflict at every level.

Not that it will be straightforward. Our predecessors were shaken to the core by the ideas of Newton, Darwin and Einstein. They had to re-evaluate humanity’s place in the universe. Perhaps neuroscience is now demanding of us that we embark on a similar journey of thought disruption. We as a society will certainly have to consider the implications and ethics of its insights.

But the matter of free will seems to me really to be a not matter so much of ethics, or even metaphysics, as it is a simple misunderstanding of the workings of our minds. Sam Harris (Free Will, 2012, p.49):

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can’t make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions. However, I think that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an illusion—our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality. Rather, we are mistaken about our experience. Not only are we not as free as we think we are—we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Contemplative practice is, as Harris himself explains at length in Waking Up, by far the most practical way (at least for those of us who are not professional neuroscientists!) to understand the inescapability of this illusion. Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time. Benedictus Spinoza saw this:

Because God [Deus sive Natura] is infinite substance, everything follows from God’s essence with the same necessity that the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. In Spinoza’s words, “things could not have been produced by God in any other way, nor in any other order.”

True freedom, for Spinoza, is not the ability to choose otherwise, but the ability to act from the necessity of one’s own nature, in harmony with God/Nature. Thus, freedom is understanding necessity.

Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, 2 November 2025

This may sound harsh, but it is not. The “freedom [of] understanding necessity” is a state of such crystalline stillness and clarity that Spinoza himself referred to it as “blessedness”. In Zen terms, Satori might be the right word; for the Taoist, it is the joy of accordance with the Tao:

To live a Taoist life is to become fully aware of our body, mind, and world—and of awareness itself. Our presence shines more and more brightly. To live in alignment with the Tao is to relish the inner peace, joy, and contentment that arise…

(Elizabeth Reninger)

Wolf Moon

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This afternoon the Wolf Moon rose over the tall trees behind the garden, butter-yellow and gleaming in the late daylight, seeming far brighter than the setting sun. Somehow it tugged at our hearts to see it there in the clear air, appearing to hang above the feathery treetops like a memory from another time.

There seems to be something atavistic in our being human that responds to “signs in the sky” – the moon especially – from some pre-scientific place we’ve long since forgotten to be consciously aware of. Wolves have been absent from England since around 1390, and yet the very phrase “Wolf Moon” resonates with some ancient yearning in us. The cold air itself seems to long for something lost.

To sit still by the window in the moonlight is one of the loveliest things at this time of year. In the 8th century CE the Chinese poet Li Bai wrote:

At the foot of my bed, moonlight
Yes, I suppose there is frost on the ground.
Lifting my head I gaze at the bright moon
Bowing my head, thinking of home.

We were already home, watching the moon rise; and yet something of Li Bai’s nostalgia touches me in moonlight. What is it I am longing for? Ah, but it is a sweet longing, though. I don’t expect something to fulfil it. I am at peace in the moonlight. I don’t want anything, and yet. And yet in the New Year’s rising away from the solstice there is a yearning, even when there is no moon. Perhaps as I said there is something in our merely being human that carries with it wordless memories from times we cannot remember, far back before people built cities or wrote history.

Somehow our practice, and whatever philosophy we derive from it, has to leave room for these times of strange resonance. Dear old Li Bai, the poet and traveller of the Tang dynasty, evidently knew all about this.

Unremarkable

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Eve Baker writes, in Paths in Solitude (pp.10-11):

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.

I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench. For the longest time I believed that these things would only be attainable, as an adult, if I were to live in solitude, and I had not the resolve or the leisure or the foresight to plan out such a life for myself.

But now, as a retired person and a contemplative, I am doubly useless. This is a blessing found at long last, after a life spent trying to thread my way through the necessity of work, the yearning to create, and the far deeper call, often hidden even from myself, to the contemplative way. Oh, for most of those years I managed to maintain – as much despite myself as wholeheartedly – a contemplative practice. But these days I find myself in sympathy with Uchiyama Roshi:

We shouldn’t imagine that life after retirement has to be miserable or impoverished. To be old is also one of our roles. When we’re young, our role is to work; upon retirement, we take up another role. Since we have less income, we should simplify our lives as much as possible. That is the way to fulfill the role of an old person. We should not judge it miserable, but just devote ourselves to that particular role. We function through our roles and exert ourselves in our occupations as a role. Finally, dying is one of our roles.

From Tending the Practice Ground, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Tricycle Magazine, November 2025

Eve Baker writes later on in the book I quoted above (p.105):

Solitude is of course an interior disposition, which external solitude confirms and strengthens. One can be quite solitary in the midst of a crowd, and one’s opportunities for solitude during the day are not necessarily those when one is entirely alone, but times when one’s attention is directed inward and away from the distractions which surround us. The mind can go flying about, following one stimulus after another, captive to a dozen things which grab our attention. The secret is to look beyond these things by focussing upon the one point, which is God… Like falling in love, it is a process where we are taken beyond ourselves into an unknown world.

As contemplatives, we are not here to lead anything. Most of us are not even here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to live our ordinary lives in quiet places. Our solitude is so often a merely interior solitude, so that we cannot even claim the romantic status of some kind of hermit.

Here we are, unremarkable, at the edge of the mystery. The endless ground lies open before us, and we walk down to the nearest shop with our little bag, and our comfortable old shoes. This is all we are; our little sisters and brothers the sparrows chirp to us from the hedge, and the rain is coming on, again.

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]