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Happiness… appears at first to be a temporary experience that occurs from time to time, but when investigated turns out to be ever-present and always available in the background of experience.
As such, happiness is not a temporary experience that alternates with unhappiness. It is not the opposite of unhappiness, any more than the blue sky is the opposite of the clouds. Just as the clouds are the veiling of the blue sky, so unhappiness is the veiling of happiness.
Happiness is our very nature and lies at the source of the mind, or the heart of ourself, in all conditions and under all circumstances. It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.
We cannot know happiness as an objective experience; we can only be it. We cannot be unhappy; we can only know unhappiness as an objective experience.
Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware, p.8
It might be objected that happiness is a somewhat flippant concept when compared with more serious and weighty (dare I say, manly?) ambitions such as progress, or the acquisition of knowledge. But think for a minute: What would one wish to progress towards? Why acquire knowledge? The famous phrase from the US Declaration of Independence suggests, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, But these are objective measures; they mean nothing without our essential being; in Spira’s words, happiness itself.
In Spinoza’s system, an active emotion is an emotion that arises from our own adequate understanding (our power), not from external events. The highest active emotion is Joy (laetitia), which he defines as the “transition to a state of greater perfection.”
- When you achieve the Third Kind of Knowledge (the intuition), you are having the most “adequate idea” possible—you are understanding a part of the world (or yourself) as it truly is in the mind of God/Nature.
- This act of perfect understanding is the highest expression of your mind’s power.
- The feeling that accompanies this ultimate act of understanding is the ultimate Joy.
- Because this Joy is directed at its cause—the eternal, necessary order of God/Nature which you now intuitively grasp—Spinoza calls it the “Intellectual Love of God.”
(Google Gemini, response to user query, 4 November 2025)
I myself would probably choose the word “joy” over “happiness”; but surely Spinoza and Spira are saying the same thing, essentially.
In my own experience – and an experience is, as Spira points out, necessarily second-hand, a mere carrier for the instant – the dropping away of the clouds, whether of unhappiness or of craving or simple self-regarding, reveals a bright stillness that is nothing other than the open ground itself, endlessly beyond life or death or identity. It is no thing, being itself, and holds all the “ten thousand things” (Laozi) in its isness. To know that – which is to say, be that – is the parting of the clouds Spira describes; Spinoza’s “blessedness” (Beatitudo). It is not so much an epistemological shift as an ontological one: not what (or how) one knows, but what one knows one is.
I find myself at the moment unable to get away from a recognition that the impulse to the contemplative life is at bottom an impulse to an ordinary life.
We are so often taught that we should aspire to extraordinary things: to public recognition, to great acts of service, or great works of imagination or reason or commerce; and yet our humanity belongs in the little things, in the everyday acts of simple kindness, in the touch of the moving air, bird-shadows on cropped grass, in the quiet between places.
This ordinary hiddenness is the natural place of one who finds themselves on the contemplative way. Our everyday lives are our practice quite as much as any formal times of meditation or prayer (however we understand that almost inescapable word).
A hidden life is not a life that has failed to reach its potential, but a life that has found its home in the ordinary occasions of life among others, in the quietness of simple things, in the lives of the sparrows in the shrubbery, the wren in the ivy bank. These are the territory of plain contentment, and the source of contemplation itself.
Sociologist Nancy Nason-Clark has researched the parallels between abusive religious environments and abuse in intimate partnerships. She has determined that individuals—women in particular—who have been in high-control religious environments are more likely to be in abusive partnerships. These individuals have internalized that their voice doesn’t matter, that someone else is allowed to control them, that they are supposed to forgive, and that it would be a sin to leave. The systems are the same whether they are in a marriage, in a church, on a team, or in a workplace. And when our sense of self is eroded or devalued, or when someone who has control over us tells us they represent the will of the creator of the universe, it makes sense that we wouldn’t recognize the dynamic happening in another context.
Hillary McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing p.80
Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In other words, it will take something different from the tools we were handed by toxic and abusive systems to build communities where spiritual trauma doesn’t happen. We do something different each time we refuse to believe we are bad. With the courage of an open heart, we can stay connected to the pain within ourselves, we can see the pain we have caused in others, and we can hang on to the ray of hope that comes from telling the truth about what should not have been and who we really are.
Ibid. pp.141-142
It seems to me that perhaps the dangers Dr McBride outlines aren’t restricted to what she refers to as “high-control religious environments”; perhaps it is simply in the nature of organised religion – even in such apparently benign forms as a Quaker meeting or an Anglican parish – to set up these control systems, often quite unconsciously. It is not necessary to set out to devalue a worshipper’s own intelligence and their own voice: with the best will in the world, that is just what happens in religious systems, merely by virtue of what they are.
To attempt to put things right within the structures of organised religion – whether by reform or by some kind of “safeguarding” or other oversight – appears to me massively to miss the point. If I am right in suggesting that crafting a hierarchical organisation to oversee spiritual intuition is disastrously misguided – if humanly understandable, given our inborn instinct for community – then attempting to fix a religious institution from within is precisely a case of attempting to use the master’s tools to dismantle the house he has built.
Since the recent pandemic there has been a continued move away from the institutions of religion, despite the panicky efforts of religious nationalists to drag us back to some imagined “better past” – be it some kind of Islamic caliphate or the false memory of an ideal “Christian nation”.
I have written before (here, and here) of the benefits of a quiet life. Perhaps we are indeed coming into a time when the more or less solitary contemplative way has more to offer, not just to its practitioners themselves, but to the community generally, oddly enough. The intuition that has often led communities of prayer to strengthen their commitment rather than to disperse in times of war may not be so escapist after all, nor indeed so dependent on community as it might at first appear. The contemplative spirituality of a life apart is embedded very deeply in humanity; as so often in the past – look at the lives of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, or the earliest Quakers – it may prove indispensable in our own time.
If we’re referencing “being awake” or “liberation” to a particular experience or state of mind—maybe a very expanded, open, peaceful feeling—that will inevitably prove disappointing because that state will disappear. The open aware presence it reveals is simply what remains when the me-system is quiet or when it is totally accepted as simply the weather of this moment. That open boundless aware presence is actually ever-present, even when apparently obscured by obsessive, me-centered thoughts. It is the common factor in every different experience. And those thoughts are nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as thoughts. Experience is ever-changing like the weather. It’s never personal. It’s a happening of the whole universe. But if we take the stormy, cloudy, foggy weather personally, then it seems like we have lost that expanded openness that we tasted before. If we imagine that there is a persisting, independent self (“me”) who is either awake or not awake, that is only an imagination. No such persisting, independent self can be found. There is no experiencer outside of experiencing. Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them. And eventually, we see that every experience, whether contracted or expanded, clear or muddy, is always just this.
Joan Tollifson, Silence
I think that perhaps Tollifson has expressed here more clearly than anything I can remember reading why I tend increasingly to be suspicious of teachings that rely too much on technique – whether the use of any form of psychedelic substance, or any sort of psychological manipulation aimed at inducing particular experiences or “altered states”.
As Joan points out here, the “open aware presence” of the contemplative mind is “nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as…” whatever happens to be in our field of awareness right now. It might be the gentle passage of breath against the edge of our nostrils, or the bright stillness of the quiet mind; but it might just as easily be the grumble of a bus pulling away from the stop in the street outside, or a sudden metallic clang from the water company yard behind the old reservoir. Or it might be an old fear, or an old fantasy, or something we forgot to buy at the shops, rising unbidden to the surface of memory. Whatever the field of awareness contains now is just what it is. There is nothing else for it to be; and looking for another, better, experience is plain old fashioned confusion.
When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is…
Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.
Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space and Being
There is an odd thing about time: that practice which appears pointless, tedious, or irredeemably flawed nevertheless works just as well, in terms of growth or awakening, as the most apparently instructive or illuminating kind.
Time is the key, it seems. What happens during actual sitting matters far less than we might think; it is only over the months and years that the value of our practice appears, and even then with little reference to our memories of good – or bad – sessions.
Once again, it seems, all we need to do is to sit still, as patiently as we can manage. Something is going on beyond our conscious notice that we simply don’t understand; something that changes everything when we are not looking.
Our quiet breathing, the flickering, adhesive passage of thoughts, the sounds filtering up from the street, birdsong, weather – these are what matter in the end, it seems. How we feel about them at the moment seems to have little to do with anything. As the years pass things will change, as they do anyway; only we shall be changed in different ways – at times radically different – than we would have been without our practice. Could we have chosen differently? I’m not sure the question even makes sense. We are the change, ourselves; and what we were is no longer here.
Sit still. Watch. Nothing else is needed, except that we show up on time.
Eve Baker writes, in Paths in Solitude (pp.10-11):
The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.
I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench. For the longest time I believed that these things would only be attainable, as an adult, if I were to live in solitude, and I had not the resolve or the leisure or the foresight to plan out such a life for myself.
But now, as a retired person and a contemplative, I am doubly useless. This is a blessing found at long last, after a life spent trying to thread my way through the necessity of work, the yearning to create, and the far deeper call, often hidden even from myself, to the contemplative way. Oh, for most of those years I managed to maintain – as much despite myself as wholeheartedly – a contemplative practice. But these days I find myself in sympathy with Uchiyama Roshi:
We shouldn’t imagine that life after retirement has to be miserable or impoverished. To be old is also one of our roles. When we’re young, our role is to work; upon retirement, we take up another role. Since we have less income, we should simplify our lives as much as possible. That is the way to fulfill the role of an old person. We should not judge it miserable, but just devote ourselves to that particular role. We function through our roles and exert ourselves in our occupations as a role. Finally, dying is one of our roles.
From Tending the Practice Ground, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Tricycle Magazine, November 2025
Eve Baker writes later on in the book I quoted above (p.105):
Solitude is of course an interior disposition, which external solitude confirms and strengthens. One can be quite solitary in the midst of a crowd, and one’s opportunities for solitude during the day are not necessarily those when one is entirely alone, but times when one’s attention is directed inward and away from the distractions which surround us. The mind can go flying about, following one stimulus after another, captive to a dozen things which grab our attention. The secret is to look beyond these things by focussing upon the one point, which is God… Like falling in love, it is a process where we are taken beyond ourselves into an unknown world.
As contemplatives, we are not here to lead anything. Most of us are not even here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to live our ordinary lives in quiet places. Our solitude is so often a merely interior solitude, so that we cannot even claim the romantic status of some kind of hermit.
Here we are, unremarkable, at the edge of the mystery. The endless ground lies open before us, and we walk down to the nearest shop with our little bag, and our comfortable old shoes. This is all we are; our little sisters and brothers the sparrows chirp to us from the hedge, and the rain is coming on, again.
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
John Keats, The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763
Slowly it is being borne in upon me that open awareness is not so much a state of mind among other states of mind, but mind itself. Forgive me if I quote here again a summary of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, but it may help to refresh our minds:
In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:
- Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
- Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
- Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.
Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.
(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)
What I referred to the other day as “our normal everyday consciousness” is Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge: limited, conditional and conditioned, irredeemably self-centred. The second kind of knowledge is the one we employ in thinking things through, whether how to hang wallpaper straight or the ontological argument – Keats’ “irritable reaching after fact and reason”. But the third kind is a leap into something entirely different.
The third kind of knowledge is direct seeing; and in my experience, just sitting, simply aware of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight and presence, you begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.
This is not a matter of academic philosophy – in any case I have no formal training in that field at all – but of plain observation. Open awareness is an overarching presence, awareness itself, objectless and unconditioned. Within awareness itself things appear – the “ten thousand things” of the Taoists, the Śūnyatā of the Mahayana Buddhists, Spinoza’s modes – but open awareness, that holds and gives rise to them all, is no thing. It merely is.
Awake awareness has been described as the “groundless ground,” or the foundation out of which all phenomena rise and dissolve back into again and again. It’s a big idea, but it can be explored in manageable pieces. Developed in Tibet more than one thousand years ago and used by advanced meditators, the practice of resting in awake awareness has recently become more widely accessible through the teachings of [psychologist and Dzogchen meditation teacher Daniel] Brown and others. It differs from the well-known practice of mindfulness by involving a key shift in the state of awareness. The practitioner learns to release from thought and the sense of being an individual who is meditating, and learns to become part of a more subtle level of awareness that is not separate from self and that is everywhere.
Imagine the ocean. Instead of identifying with the waves on the surface, which are like our thoughts that come and go, you can cultivate a calmer mind by sinking below the waves. You can open the experience of the mind to become the ocean itself. This subtle level of awareness, known as awake awareness, is limitless and boundless. It is lucid, calm, still, and has the quality of love.
When people learn to drop into the field of awake awareness consistently, or even just periodically, their relationship to this field allows them to develop basic trust in themselves and in life, even when they did not have a childhood that helped to establish trust…
Radhule Weininger, Deep Trust: Finding Our Footing in a Turbulent World, Tricycle Magazine, August 2022
Simple awareness is not in any way the same as our normal everyday consciousness, nor even a subset of it. Awareness, as Weininger points out, is an overarching presence, “limitless and boundless, and has the quality of love.” Being not separated – nondual, as it’s often described – it is “not separate from self, and… is everywhere.”
To “drop into the field of awake awareness” allows us to glimpse the underlying oneness of all things and events – modes as Spinoza calls them – and to cease trying to choose between them, to choose otherwise. In other words, to avoid the patterns of attachment and rejection before they begin.
In Buddhist and other contemplative traditions, one sometimes encounters the sense of three levels of mind: ordinary conditioned consciousness, mindfulness (attention to the present) and rigpa, awake (or open) awareness as Radhule Weininger describes above. It is not the same as, but somehow resonant with, Baruch Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge:
Spinoza’s Three Kinds of Knowledge
In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:
- Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
- Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
- Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.
Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.
(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)
To sit in open, choiceless awareness, in the plain light of what is, is in itself an act of radical trust. To let go of our cherished discrimination, our sense of ourselves as separate isolated selves sending messages to each other across a gap of disconnection instead of loving, is to realise all of a piece that there is nowhere else to be than the “groundess ground” from which all things arise. And that is uttermost trust in the “interconnected unfolding” (Weininger, ibid.) that is life, and death, itself.
Sitting quietly, it becomes apparent that awareness is not the same thing at all as thought. It’s not the same as physical sensations, either. Thoughts and sensations are objects within awareness; things seen, perhaps, against stillness. Awareness is no thing; it can’t be the object of any subject whatever, it seems.
Try it. Try merely being aware of awareness. (It’s much the same as Sam Harris’ introduction to the practice of Dzogchen – “looking for the one who is looking”.) You will find that there is no self to look, nor a self to be looked for, There is only awareness – and that is, after all, no thing.
To sit like this, merely aware – of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight sitting – you might begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.
This seems to be a big metaphysical bite; but it is not to be chewed, not to be thought through. Leave the thoughts where they fall. Sit in plain awareness, and all the mind’s anxious grasping will eventually fall away like leaves in autumn. The bright field of awareness is all that is; in fact, it really is all that is. Time and place, things and thoughts, are all simply ripples on that bright surface, nothing else.
Sit still. Be quiet. There is nothing you need. Let the bright field be your only home; it is, anyway.
An Open Ground 