Category Archives: Philosophy and phenomenology

Just noticing (edited and republished)

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I had intended to write a post here this evening when it occurred to me that I had already written, very nearly two years ago, almost the exact article I’d been planning. So here it is (somewhat edited):

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

There is always a risk, of course, in talking like this. People who like things cut and dried are often suspicious of what appears to them to be an impractical vagueness; those from a background of religious orthodoxy will wonder if there’s a heresy lurking in there somewhere. Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

Robert C Solomon writes:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand. This is not to say that intelligent people are more spiritual, but neither is it to buy into a long tradition of equating spirituality with innocence misconstrued as ignorance or even as stupidity.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either. Toni Bernhard suggests that,

[i]n this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow – and here I hesitate, as Krishnamurti suggested – that someone is prepared to do this.

We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.

Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen sometimes from a mountain hut.

What is trust?

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I’m aware that yesterday’s post perhaps raised more questions that it answered. That’s not a bad thing in itself, perhaps, but it’s not always kind to one’s readers. Richard Rohr reminds us:

Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good. Predictably, we soon separated intellectual belief (which tends to differentiate and limit) from love and hope (which unite and thus eternalize). As Paul says in his great hymn to love, “There are only three things that last, faith, hope and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). All else passes. Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being. Such goodness cannot die. (Which is what we mean when we say “heaven.”) … Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation.

The Universal Christ, p.22

Now I know that using the word “Christ” in this context may bring some readers up short, but bear with me here: there is more to New Testament Christology than often meets the eye. The apostle Paul says of Christ (Colossians 1:16-17 NIV):  “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (This of course is the source of the concept of coinherence so beloved of Charles Williams.)

Using the word Christ in this context is far closer to Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, the Original Ground of Dzogchen, or the Ground of Being in Paul Tillich’s writings, than it is to the “Jesus’ surname” usage common to some thoughtless conventional Christian preaching.

One difficulty we often run into on the far side of deconstruction, it seems to me, is finding words adequate to just this deeply experiential aspect of the contemplative life. It is all very well scraping terminology from neuroscience (or astrophysics, or academic philosophy) and often this can serve us well if we are trying to conceptualise spiritual realities. But our practice, and our awakened lives, ask more of us than conceptualising spiritual experience. Perhaps it is worth taking the risk, with Rohr and Williams and Tillich, of using the language of direct contemplative experience within our own culture. The contemplative life is a life of the heart, after all, and much of our practice depends upon casting a cold eye on the chatter of discursive thought! We cannot trust a bare idea as we can the direct faith that all things rest in Christ, in presence, in the open ground of isness itself – waves of the one ocean, if you will – and that to that presence they will return.

Unicity

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We are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing, inseparable movements of a seamless indivisible whole, and every wave includes the whole ocean. This one bottomless moment is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of here-now. The appearances vanish automatically as soon as they appear—they self-liberate as some traditions say—and there is peace in the simple immediacy of being alive, just as we are.

Thought poses as “me” and claims to be the thinker-chooser-doer, but no such entity can actually be found. Our thoughts, behaviors and apparent choices arise as movements of the whole. When we take it all personally and believe that we are small and separate and in control of our lives, feelings of deficiency, anxiety, guilt, blame, confusion and dissatisfaction inevitably follow.

Liberation from this kind of suffering can never happen in the future. It can only happen now, in the simple recognition that absolutely nothing needs to happen or not happen. Both the apparent suffering and the one who longs to be free are ephemeral appearances with no actual substance. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean…

Realizing the choiceless and impersonal nature of everything that happens frees us from guilt, blame, false pride, and many other painful and destructive feelings that arise when we believe that we are separate and in control of our lives, and that everyone else is in control of their lives, and that we all could and should be doing a much better job. Recognizing the impersonal nature of everything gives us compassion for ourselves and everyone else when we fall short of our ideals.

We could say that the whole movie of waking life, including the central character we identify as “me,” is very much like a nighttime dream, and in a dream, the dream character is not writing or directing the show. The dream character doesn’t even really exist. The entire dream world is a movement of the dreaming consciousness, and none of the apparent objects or events exist outside of the dream. Or, alternatively, we could say that everything that happens is the result of infinite, interdependent causes and conditions. But any way we describe, map or formulate the living actuality is only a map or a description…

Unicity is eternal, which means timeless, ever-present, NOW. It is infinite, which means all-inclusive, boundless, limitless, HERE. This NOW-HERE is all there is. Have you noticed? There is no way to step outside of this. It cannot be objectified, although any words we use to point to it do seem to do just that, so we have to use words lightly. We habitually want something to grasp, something to hold onto, but in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom…

Joan Tollifson, Liberation Here-Now

What we are, as waves on the ocean – or in Spinoza’s terms, modes of the one substance, God – is no more than the flickering of wavelets, a brief appearances that is gone, all but traceless across open water. And yet the wavelets are water; they are not other than the ocean itself; they don’t come from water, they are water.

Finally, the heart opens in the quiet. There is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. To sit still is all we have ever needed: to sit still in the one place, which is now.

But as Tollifson goes on:

I’m never suggesting that we can or should ignore or dismiss the everyday relative dimension of reality. It’s real enough. But when we know it for what it is, it can be experienced in a different way, with much less suffering and more ease. And in the bigger picture, every mistake and every apparent imperfection is perfectly placed. There’s no way to get it wrong. There’s no “me” separate from the whole.

And this is never what we think it is, because thought conceptually divides, abstracts and freezes what is actually indivisible, immediate, and never the same way for even an instant. And yet, even thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing are also nothing other than unicity showing up as apparent thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing. The map is not the territory it represents, and yet, mapping is something the territory is doing. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean.

What a huge relief!

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.

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

Tariki

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It seems to me that we are not so much human beings as human becomings. And it doesn’t apply merely to humans: there are feline becomings and bovine becomings, cephalopod becomings and fungal becomings. It’s becomings all the way down.

To speak of a “being” implies an object, a static substance that acts and is acted upon; a thing embedded like a rock in a stream called time. But this isn’t what we are. Even our cells are replaced on a regular basis, some every few days; we change and evolve, each of us, throughout our lives, and we are different people in different eras of our life, very often with different interests and abilities. This applies perhaps more strongly to some people than to others, but by and large it is true: a person in later life is quite different than the “same person” in their teens, or as the parent of a young family.

Our thoughts too shift and flicker moment by moment, despite any effort we may make to concentrate on even one stream of them. Even the most elementary contemplative practice will show us this in the first few minutes!

But it isn’t just the ephemeral creatures of earth that are becoming, moment by moment and aeon by aeon. Our planet itself is changing and remoulding itself – if you doubt that you’ve never lived through an earthquake – and even our own lovely Milky Way is a finely balanced eddy of gas and dust and stars sailing 630 km/sec along the Hubble Flow.

Nothing is static. There are no objects, except by convention. All is change and becoming. As Spinoza saw, there is no substance but God (or Nature): everything – ourselves included – is merely a mode of that infinite becoming. The ten thousand things are no more than sparkles on the broad river of the Tao.

Literally, no thing is the ground of becoming.

So if this is how it is, what of our vaunted human will? The slipstream of a passing gnat disperses it. But becoming is movement, an ontological wind over the ocean of what is. There is no need to lean, brows knitted, on the imagined oars of the will. Sit still; the sail is raised of itself, and fills.

Contemplation and language

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As I have mentioned before on this blog, writing in secular terms about the contemplative life, even thinking about it (as opposed simply to living it), is all but impossible without engaging with the religious language in which it has been clothed for most of its recorded existence. It is hard to write about the interior life without a framework of what is, effectively, myth, no matter which religion’s terminology is used the describe, even to think, about it. After all, it is so much easier to use a ready-mixed religious language, in which various shades of meaning may be taken more or less for granted without having to struggle actually to describe them. But as AC Grayling wrote:

There are people of sincere piety for whom the religious life is a source of deep and powerful meaning. For them and for others, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that can bind one human heart to another, feels as natural and necessary as breathing. Some of the art and music that has been inspired by faith counts among the loveliest and most moving expressions of human creativity. It is indeed impossible to understand either history or art without an understanding of what people believed, feared and hoped through their religious conceptions of the world and human destiny. Religion is a pervasive fact of history, and has to be addressed as such…

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…

[W]hat 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.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, pp.1,7

Contemplation is not about escaping the world; it’s more about seeing the threads that connect it to all that is. It’s not a matter of reconciling the world to some imagined deity; it’s a matter of discovering that the world is not other than its metaphysical ground. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” “Where I place my attention shapes what I become. To attend to the suffering of others, the beauty of the world, or the silence within is to participate in the creation of meaning—not because a god demands it, but because the world needs it.” (Mistral Le Chat, in response to user query)

To express the not-other-ness of each other, of “all that is made” (Julian of Norwich), is more often the work of poetry – see Mary Oliver, or JH Prynne – than of philosophy; and when philosophy does take up the challenge, the result is famously difficult – Martin Heidegger, AN Whitehead, even Benedictus Spinoza, for instance. A few, RS Thomas occurs to me, manage to write poetry that is as difficult to read as the metaphysicians. So who am I to complain that I don’t find this blog easy to write?

The only approach that seems to offer a glimmer of hope here is, perhaps oddly, unknowing.

Much has been made of the difference, indeed the opposition, of religion and science. But the more we hear of modern scientific research, especially in physics, the closer they seem to be. Contrary to popular belief, science is not about establishing indisputable facts, it is about positing and attempting to prove (or disprove) hypotheses, with the understanding that any discovery may be superseded in the future. Science is about a spirit of enquiry. The unknown is accepted, even welcomed as a challenge for future research. As biologist Stuart Firestein said, “What we don’t know is our job. It’s much more interesting to think about what we don’t know than what we do know.” That too is the mystic position.

But, whereas scientists may see this place as a challenge to learn more and to eradicate more areas of uncertainty, for mystics or spiritual seekers, the challenge may be about embracing that uncertainty, about accepting that for some questions there will be no answers – and that it doesn’t matter. Not only that it doesn’t matter but that the unforeseen may contain riches that go beyond what in our habitual ways of thinking and in our workaday lives we are capable of imagining. In giving the unforeseen more of a chance, we are opening up opportunities for our creative selves, for spontaneity, for the part of us that goes beyond the routine certainties of everyday life.

If we recognise that it is the unforeseen that might have the most importance in our lives, we may allow ourselves to welcome uncertainty…

Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing, p.15

Process and coinherence

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Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, if you will allow the term.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… 

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

The ethics of listening

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Things come to be, and what they are is nothing but the way that they move; there is nothing that is that is not subject to change and dissolution. To “rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas) is to fail to see that the only way to live is to stay out of the way of what is coming to be, and let it become what it is to be.

If we listen to the stream, rather than trying to dam its flow, we find that we ourselves are no more than fleeting eddies on the bright water, and what is true is what the moment calls out. Then ethics is for us no longer a matter of what is written, but what is heard.

Light is only visible in the shadows; life needs death as up needs down. To see this for itself – see it, rather than working it out – dissolves our bitter grasp on outcomes, and leaves us free to find out the grain in things. To surrender to change – yes, and to decay – is to become free to live inside the pattern of what is necessary, rather than scratching at the surface of facticity.

Strangely, this is in no sense defeatism. Our freedom to act in accordance with what is might just as well involve us as the means of change ourselves: the tyrant’s brittle effort to resist the necessity of change is worn away to sand in the stream, carried down by the flow of what is true, by the slow processes of care and kindness.

To sit still, listening, still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be becomes clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest, is to find our own current in the stream of what is coming to be. If we do, then the smallest moment opens on to the limitless field that is the ground itself. There is nothing to wait for: what is is this.