Tag Archives: peace

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.

Sein zum Tode (being-towards-death)

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It is towards death that we are always living, from the instant we are born if not before. What we are is mortal; life itself exists only inasmuch as it will die. And this is not a tragedy.

We treat death like a defect, an unfortunate end to the story. It’s an event that happens at some point and ends the party. We don’t see it for what it is for Heidegger: the most fundamental structure of our being, defining every single moment…

If death is merely a future event, it has no power over our present actions. We can ignore it until it knocks at the door. This perspective makes us forget the preciousness of the moment and leads us to structure our lives as a succession of obligations and distractions…

Do not understand death as an end, but as the “possibility of the absolute impossibility of existence.” It is not a distant threat, but the ever-present possibility that all other possibilities end. This realization is not frightening, but liberating. It lends infinite depth to every second. Every breath, every conversation, every project begun derives its value precisely from the fact that it is not a given. Failure is then not the end of the world, but part of a finite, precious process. Just as Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl bracketed the world in order to penetrate to the essence of things, so the awareness of death brackets the trivialities of everyday life in order to penetrate to the essence of life.

Valentin Graf, ‘Heidegger Sein zum Tode einfach erklärt: Profis setzen den Tod als Strategie-Bef‘

To “live towards death” like this is not morbid: as Valentin Graf points out, it is peace and freedom. All that we are tends towards this end; it is the one thing common to all humanity – indeed to all that lives. All that is will end. Only isness itself – Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura – does not, since it is the open ground of being-itself, from which all that is derives. The river flows, and is in its flowing; the lovely eddies on the bright surface come and go; their transitoriness is their very nature.

The year I was due to go to school I contracted bacterial meningitis, and spent some time – over Christmas and New Year! – in a coma. When I had recovered enough to talk, my mother made no attempt to conceal from me how afraid she’d been of losing me. This struck me as odd, but somehow right. The time between falling ill, which I remembered quite well, and waking up one sunny morning in the little bedroom upstairs, surrounded by my favourite soft toys, was an utter blank. Where had I been? I had no sense of anything – not blackness, not dreams; nothing. An absence of me, entirely, and of all else besides.

The mental picture, the concept, of not being alive any longer I don’t suppose I like any better than anyone else; but the experience of being close to death seems to be quite different. There have been times since that long childhood illness when I have been plausibly close to death, and yet I have not found myself afraid: I have found myself surprised; and I have lived since then in that glad knowledge.

Death is an old friend. To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing: what is there to fear? Death follows us, yes, but he is our very own death; dear, familiar, kind, and faithful.

Harmony and freedom

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To live in harmony with what actually is seems to me perfect freedom. All the we are, all that we can do, can ultimately be traced to antecedent causes; human bondage seems to consist in the attempt to fight that, or to ascribe it to some other cause. But what comes to be doesn’t seem to be, looked at sub specie aeternitatis, so much an iron necessitarianism as a supple flow – and to live in accord with it an easy, open response to its really becoming.

Freedom seems just to be acting in the openness of things’ true relations; just as in music the freedom to improvise truly means to play in accord with what the music itself wants to do, and so in the liberty that the ancient rules of harmony and scales, rhythm and chords actually allow us.

To act in true freedom feels quite close to non-action, really, though it is not doing nothing. There is a seamless flow in what comes to be that, taken as it comes to be, is without effort or anxiety. The merest space of time is open space; and in that instant, everything is possible, yet only what actually is.

Endings and beginnings

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So many blogs and newsletters across the internet at this time of year are looking back over the last 12 months, and on into the next 12, reflecting on the changes their writers have seen, and the things they expect to come. I don’t think I’d have much to add to this conversation per se. What interests me is the nature of endings and beginnings themselves, and whether they are what they usually seem to be.

So often we look at events as having discrete boundaries: they begin here, where there was nothing before, and they end there, leaving things different from how they had been. After the end of an event, there is a time when nothing is happening; and then, Boom! There’s another event just beginning out of the empty place that was waiting for it to begin.

If we sit still, though, and listen, what we find is that there is a ceaseless rippling of the bright water of the stream of coming-to-be. Sounds, and presence, and thoughts, and weight, without their own duration or dimensions. Where is the beginning of a wave, and its end? They are only arbitrary points on an oscilloscope trace: the wave waves. It has no beginning in reality, nor does it end. It waves.

Spinoza called these waves modes, and the stream substance: his one substance, God or nature (Deus sive natura) appearing in the modes of cats, or mountains, or people – rather as the Tao appears as “the ten thousand things” in the Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42). To see this, whole and undivided – as it is – is the end of fear, and the beginning of peace. May this peace be with you all, this coming year.