Tag Archives: Leonard Cohen

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.

Wide-eyed seeing

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Contemplation allows us to see the truth of things in their wholeness. It is a mental discipline and gift that detaches us, even neurologically, from our addiction to our habitual way of thinking and from our minds which like to think they are in control. We stop believing our little binary mind (which strips things down to two choices and then usually identifies with one of them) and begin to recognize the inadequacy of that limited way of knowing reality. In fact, a binary mind is a recipe for superficiality, if not silliness. Only the contemplative, or the deeply intuitive, can start venturing out into much broader and more open-ended horizons. This is probably why Einstein said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination  encircles the world.”

But how do we learn this contemplative mind, this deep, mysterious, and life-giving way of seeing, of being with, reality? Why does it not come naturally to us? Actually, it does come momentarily, in states of great love and great suffering, but such wide-eyed seeing normally does not last. We return quickly to dualistic analysis and use our judgments to retake control. A prayer practice—contemplation—is simply a way of maintaining the fruits of great love and great suffering over the long haul and in different situations. And that takes a lot of practice—in fact, our whole life becomes one continual practice. 

Richard Rohr,  Why Contemplation?

That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? Wide-eyed seeing – the necessity of awakening from the daze of subject/object, inward/outward. As I mentioned the other week, trauma – and the shock of love – can free us, instantly, from the fog of the default internal narrative, the user illusion of the “selfplex” (Blackmore) that occupies our days. But the moment fades; we can even begin to doubt it ever happened – or if it did, that it meant what it seemed to mean in the blazing moment that we were there, present for once, in the utter light of what actually is.

As Rohr says, our contemplative practice is only the way – the only way – that we can sustain ourselves in the presence: in the vastness of the open ground. It will not feel like that most of the time – in fact, it may hardly ever feel like that – but each day’s hour of sitting sustains us in the unknowing from which this wide-eyed seeing can proceed. This unknowing is the hollow place in us where, as in the moments of shock and trauma, what is can touch what we are. It is the crack where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen saw.