Tag Archives: deconstruction

All our steps

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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.

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.