Tag Archives: stillness

Gratitude and presence

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Perhaps the most notable overall change [in the awakening mind], though, is a general sense of well-being. In the same way that the taking for granted syndrome inevitably leads to frustration and dissatisfaction, ongoing gratitude leads to contentment and fulfillment. You will no longer crave things you don’t have or need, since you’re now able to appreciate what you do have. You’ll be free of the constant niggling need to add more to your life or to change your life situation, like an addict who is finally free of the craving for drugs.

You will also feel an enhanced sense of presence. In chapter 1, I mentioned that many qualities of wakefulness are interdependent, and this is particularly true of presence and gratitude. Gratitude brings us into presence, and presence creates gratitude. Our blessings are always in the present, whereas the taking for granted syndrome takes us out of the present, into imaginary future scenarios.

You might wonder: Is it actually possible to live in an all-encompassing state of gratitude, continually aware of the myriad blessings in our lives? But we don’t have to extend our gratitude so widely all the time… Gratitude should be a constant, underlying trait that arises organically in relation to our experience. And when we do have free moments of contemplation, we will naturally find ourselves extending our gratitude more widely, to encompass all of life itself and the Earth.

We should also remember that, as suggested in chapter 1, it’s unrealistic – and even unnecessary – to live in a perpetual state of spiritual ecstasy. Of course, we often have to focus our attention on practical tasks, such as driving or cooking or earning a living. In those practical moments, our sense of gratitude may recede from our awareness. But it will always be in the background, naturally arising when we relax our attention. This applies to all the other qualities of wakefulness… in general.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.51-52

Steve Taylor’s point about presence and gratitude is an important one. In sitting still, there is nothing, apart from the continual drift of thoughts, to distract us from the fact of our sitting, the weight of our body, the scatter of sounds in the background, the blessed pattern of our breathing. What we are is here, now, in this place and instant – and that is not other than the open ground itself, present before and beneath the space and time in which we live and die.

As Eckhart Tolle frequently points out, presence is in some way analogous to waiting: to wait with full alertness is to be fully present, fully attentive to what is. “Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence.” (The Power of Now, p.96)

To be fully present is to be finally free from the constant burden of the little self – defensive, grasping, threatened – that keeps us from our own life, from the gratitude that is our true relationship with what actually is. To sit still in the silence of our heart is to be present at last, in the “ineffable… holy essence” that is our home.

The actually loved and known

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The contemplative life is not in fact about ideas at all, really. It is far more practical, even down-to-earth, than that. In a sense, the contemplative doesn’t care about constructing a metaphysical framework. What happens is merely experience. When a person enters the stillness of “awakened” consciousness, the rigid boundaries of the self drop away. The immediate, felt reality of that state is precisely one of mutual indwelling.

In that state, we don’t look at nature; we are in nature, and nature is in us. We don’t so much sympathise with another person’s suffering as we experience our existence as continuous with theirs. Charles Williams’ coinherence becomes simply a description of what it actually feels like when the ego’s filtering mechanism relaxes – when Huxley’s doors of perception drift open of themselves.

All that we are consists in our relationship with all that is; not in an abstract sense, but in vital, lived reality. When the boundaries of the self are fully defended, this is no more apparent than the atoms that constitute the hands typing these words; but the function of the contemplative mind is to dissolve those boundaries to little more than a fitful mist across what is. Each one of us is in fact infinitely permeable, and infinitely, intricately conditioned. We reflect each other, and are reflected, like dew drops in a web of uncountable dimensions, bright with the light of the isness from which they emerge. It follows that what each of us does or thinks or feels, in the minutest degree, affects all others, human or otherwise, sentient or not. And so we are ourselves affected, from the least to the farthest.

To know this, and yet to sit still, is in some way the greatest gift. “The ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself” (Stephen Batchelor) holds all that is, the “ten thousand things” of the ancient Taoists: our sitting in some way brings them into that whole and healing light, despite ourselves. We cannot know it, cannot hold an image of it as we could hold a book or a glass paperweight; and yet unknown, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

[*the title is taken from David Jones: “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“]

Perennial

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It’s significant that the major characteristics of wakefulness I’ve identified through my research are essentially the same… as the main themes of wakefulness as described in the world’s spiritual traditions. (…[T]hese included union, inner stillness or inner emptiness, self-sufficiency, compassion and altruism, relinquishing personal agency, heightened awareness, and well-being.) This synchronicity validates the insights of spiritual traditions and shows that wakefulness can exist outside spiritual traditions and is more fundamental than the traditions themselves. It suggests that wakefulness exists as a psychological or ontological state in itself. It may be interpreted in terms of spiritual traditions, but it doesn’t have to be.

Theologians and transpersonal psychologists have long debated the existence of a “perennial philosophy,” a common core to the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. According to the perennial view, the same basic truths lie behind all spiritual teachings but they’re expressed in slightly different ways. They’re simply different paths leading toward the peak of the same mountain, though there are some superficial differences between them, of course.

On the other hand, some people dispute the existence of a perennial philosophy, believing instead that spiritual and mystical traditions are independent. There isn’t a common mountain — all the paths are heading in different directions toward different peaks. Any similarities between different traditions are the result of contact or influence…

This seems highly implausible to me. For one thing, even if there was a chain of influence in the way this argument suggests, surely the original teachings would have been altered beyond recognition over centuries of dissipation (similar to a game of telephone), rather than remaining essentially the same. But the best way of verifying perennialism is to look outside spiritual traditions, as we’ve done in this book. Most of the participants of my research had no familiarity with spiritual traditions or practices at the time of their awakenings, but still described them in similar terms to the mystics of many different traditions. (Some of them became familiar with traditions later — in some cases, many years later; in other cases, only to a limited degree.) This strongly suggests that there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.233-234

[T]he physical world is not ultimately separate from its transcendental foundation, and so the perennial philosophy is a non-dualistic view of reality. There is no barrier between the so-called physical and metaphysical dimensions of reality (i.e., between the universe and its transcendent source); the two are a Oneness rather than a duality, and this is in contrast to systems of philosophy or religion that place a firewall between the transcendent realm and the physical world. For Perennialists, the universe arises from the Ground of Being, or, put the other way round, the Ground of Being takes form as the world around us. The One becomes the many, just as one ocean can rise up into multiple waves. Furthermore, and because we too are “waves” on the surface of a cosmic sea, our physical selves also arise from the Ground of Being. The Ground, therefore, is not only the Ground of Being but, consequently, the ground of our being as well.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.33-34

Ever since I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy in my early twenties, I have been drawn to the clean simplicity of the idea. In the passage I’ve quoted above, Steve Taylor provides one of the briefest and most credible responses to the most common criticism from both humanist and religious points of view: that the contemplative traditions, rooted in such radically different religious soils, cannot have anything in common. As Dana Sawyer points out, a few lines on from the passage above, “…human beings have the latent ability to grasp the content of the two previous postulates experientially. That is, we have a capacity, whether we cultivate it or not, to go beyond intellectual descriptions of the Ground of Being (transcendent) and the Oneness of Being (immanent) to the direct experience of these realities, as did the mystics of the past—and as do some mystics today.”

It doesn’t matter, either immediately or ultimately, whether the experience in question occurs within the taught practice of any one religion or philosophy; as Taylor explains above, “there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.” I can testify to this myself: my earliest unitive experiences of inner stillness, emptiness and heightened awareness came around the age of five, long before I knew anything of religious or contemplative teachings in any form.

The simple phenomenology of contemplation – inner experience itself (by which I don’t mean experiences, altered states or spectacular changes in perception, but plain awareness) – will teach the foundational fact of oneness with the ground. Merely to sit still is usually quite enough…

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 we really are

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We pay attention to our own true nature and by becoming fully conscious of the union of our nature with Christ, we become fully ourselves. 

John Main, Word into Silence, p.18

The idea of time has many expressions, from chronological to biological, emotional to cosmic. We sometimes feel we have lived a lifetime in a moment. We can feel time as a crucifixion or as a resurrection. The vast figures measuring cosmic time in an expanding universe can seem overwhelming but the few years of a human life can seem more significant and precious. Time and mortality live out the drama of birth and death and the painful mystery of separation. In the light of faith we come by stages to see the all-pervading mystery of union…

This consummation of union, whether it is called nirvana, liberation from rebirth, enlightenment, moksha or heaven is part of the common ground of all religious wisdom when we understand religion in its mystical dimension. It refers to the experience of oneness, the transcendence of the ego’s centre of consciousness, the transformation of the dualistic mind, the movement from the mind’s self-mirroring complexities into the simplicity and pure vision of the heart, the non-duality of the spirit. With a silent passion deeper than their words and differences, all religions point to this. If they do indeed teach this way and not just pay lip service to it, religion offers our often sad and battered humanity a reasonable and empowering hope.

We both lose and find ourselves in the otherness of ultimate reality. This is easy to say but it is a hard paradox to wrestle with. It demands a deepening faith commitment. When the master class of life has taught us enough, commitment meets detachment and solitude, the recognition and acceptance of our uniqueness becomes more attractive and even easier. We gradually withdraw from unnecessary activity and distraction. We become freer from compulsions and addictions.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, p.76-77

What we really are is this. We are not what we think we are, frail isolated intelligences trapped in a zero-sum game of mere survival, creatures of allegiances and enmities, just barely hanging on. We belong. We are part of it all, wavelets on a limitless ocean of grace.

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

Faith is no more, perhaps, than this radical open-heartedness, this helpless surrender to what is, in David Jones’ words, “actually loved and known”. All our practice, all our patience and all our prayers come down to this simple oneness. What we used to be is dispersed, patched and rotted through with light. None of the old certainties can hold. They don’t need to: this trackless brightness beyond the memory of shorelines is the waking heart itself, nothing more.

Mysteries and metaphors

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It seems that everything we can say about the contemplative life is metaphor. Indeed, it might not be stretching it to suggest that what we can say about pretty much anything is actually metaphor. However attached we are to the idea of plain speaking, even the most direct words applied to the most straightforward objects or circumstances are picture language, mere scratchings after what is in itself ineffable.

Elaine Aron:

Why the word path? Life path, spiritual path—we use path so much in this way that it has almost ceased to be a metaphor. Life, like a path, has ups and downs, detours, roadblocks, and so forth. The metaphor works for me…

But paths are more than maps of passive journeys. They involve choices, or at least noticeable changes in direction…

The beginning of a life often looks more like a moving sidewalk. You were born. No choice there. And you started to move along, to grow from a child’s body into an adult’s. Biology sees to that. Your society, through your family, saw that you received an education (you are reading this), so that you would be useful in some way, able to support yourself and contribute to the larger good. Depending how far along you are, biology and culture has supported your interest in finding a mate and having children, working at a job, and then retiring and maybe helping raise grandchildren. That’s the moving sidewalk, and of course we all add our unique touches to the trip, but maybe you made some larger choices… Maybe you decided not to have children or never to retire. Maybe you took up sailing and sailed around the world, or you raised parakeets and even made a living at it.

Time is what a path and a moving sidewalk have in common. Time has been taking you forward toward the end point.

(Spirituality through a Highly Sensitive Lens, pp.51-52)

To speak of a spiritual path has become as much a cliché as a metaphor, smelling of patchouli oil and self improvement. And yet it is hard to find another expression for whatever it is. But perhaps there is more to the threadbare phrase that even Aron suggests here. Her “moving pavement” reminds me of Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit – “thrownness” – the unique set of limitations of birth and time and society which each of us has inherited. Our choices are real, perhaps, but they are far more constrained than most of us would admit. Our spiritual path is what it is because of who we are; all the yearning we can yearn will not allow us to walk another’s.

It may be that our truest compass is merely to acknowledge this fact. “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” (Isaiah 30:21 NIV) And the voice is that of our own authentic self, “who we are” at our barest essence: who we are in silence, in the stillness of our practice. The way is not another’s map, and the directions are not another’s doctrines. All we can do is to step out onto the mountain in the night wind, and listen.

Troubled times

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We live in troubled times, more troubled than many of us can remember. To be honest, though, a great deal of our lives are lived in times like these. My own generation lived through a Cold War that all too often threatened to heat up into nuclear conflict, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the Viet Nam War, the UK miners’ strike (and its brutal repression) of the 1980s, the Falklands War, 9/11 – the list goes on. Our parents lived through – and many of them, Susan’s and mine included, fought in – the Second World War. Of that appalling period of history, reminiscent in so many ways of our own, CS Lewis wrote at the time:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes…

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the [one] who takes [their] long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

The Weight of Glory, pp.48, 61

Awareness of impermanence, the recognition that our lives are led in a dissolving world of ceaseless change, is not a doctrine of despair but of realism; and in that realism, hope. Somehow our very grief becomes, in extremis, a channel of grace. Sharon Salzberg:

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss.

To accept the love that is the motor of grief is to accept the role of mourners, of givers-of-thanks for what is being lost, bearers of unbearable hope. Death always follows life; but new life follows death. (Even in Chernobyl, the natural world is thriving as never before.)

To accept what is, it is necessary to know what is, now. This means attention, questioning, investigation. It means practice.

When we feel separate, small and encapsulated, the ungraspable nature of the living reality makes us feel insecure and out of control. And because reality sometimes contains enormous pain and suffering, we are easily prone to adopting ideas and beliefs that seem to provide security, control, explanations and so on. But belief is always shadowed by doubt. And the truth is, we are clueless. We cannot see the whole.

But we don’t need to! When trying to get a grip falls away, it is actually a huge relief!

Joan Tollifson, The Essentials (Substack)

Human culture is not “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.” (Lewis, ibid.) If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.

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.

This rib cage of failure

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It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and conclusions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves – spiritual humanist, say, or secular Buddhist – can we discover what the flow of change – the Way, the leading of the Spirit, call it whatever feels right – is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that attempted to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces and the rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in our own awareness that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

Hesychia

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The greek word hesychia (ἡσυχία) is commonly translated as quiet or stillness. In Orthodox teaching it is often associated with the idea of nepsis (νῆψις), watchfulness. Grace settles over stillness, as the heart withdraws from its clinging and rejecting and its continual self-comparison. If we can keep still enough, and merely watch, the sediment of self-concern will precipitate out.

Martin Laird writes (An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, p.74):

We can just begin to see how contemplative practice gently loosens the knot of ego and calms the spasms of reactive mind. When we return our attention to our practice as soon as we are aware that our attention has been stolen, ego is less and less the focus of our attention. The television screen in our heads will continue its constant stream of noise and images. The more we watch and listen to it the duller we feel, a dullness we take to be normal. We grow bored with constantly flipping through channels in search of something that might, one of these rounds, land on something that gives us a sense of being alive instead of being deadened by the din of our minds. The practical answer is simple: let the television play. Simply don’t watch it. Gradually (neither in a day nor in a short while) the light of awareness begins to shine through this mental clutter and we begin to realize that the derived identity provided by ego no longer has the ring of truth. “We need to guard,” [Christian] Bobin says, “not only against the world, but against our preoccupation with ourselves, another door by which the world might creep back into us like a prowler into a sleeping house.”

Practice is like this. Regardless of why we thought we began in the first place, only in quiet persistence, rather than in mental heroics and spiritual metrology, can the heart be still enough for grace to break through like sunlight through the overcast.

Behind the hours of practice there is a quiet, luminous stillness; it is always there, has always been there, only we had forgotten it among the “noise and images”. Practice, it seems to me, is perhaps no more than a means – whichever means we have found fits us best – of keeping quiet; for it is only in quiet that we are able to open to the grace of that luminous stillness. This conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – as opposed to “contemplative practice”) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with simple dwelling in stillness, in the presence of what is, now, is the only way I know to becoming vulnerable enough to be available to illumination – to the light of the open ground itself.