Author Archives: Mike Farley

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About Mike Farley

Ex-dairy herdsman, musician, writer and contemplative based in the south-west of the UK.

What’s love got to do with it?

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In All About Love, bell hooks writes (p.239):

Love heals. When we are wounded in the place where we would know love, it is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything. No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way. We go forward with the fresh insight that the past can no longer hurt us. Or if our past was one in which we were loved, we know that no matter the occasional presence of suffering in our lives we will return always to remembered calm and bliss. Mindful remembering lets us put the broken bits and pieces of our hearts together again. This is the way healing begins.

But to open our hearts to love… It seems so impossible when, as bell hooks writes, we are wounded in the very place where we would know love, the place where we had opened in trust, only to receive hurt. To remember would seem to be the worst counsel, when all we were wanted merely to run, to hide from the shame of having trusted.

And yet what seemed a refuge turned out to be nothing more than a place apart from ourselves, a place without. The protection we had sought was the door locked against becoming healed.

To remember mindfulness itself is to remember love: to remember the blue distance and the scent of the sea; the movement of wind in the cedars, amber beads against the grey bark.

Remembering what is, just as it is; instead of forgetting in the search for something else, always something else. Only now is it possible, only in this now. This one, now.

It may not make sense, but in now the past is healed. Remembering is different now. In the open stillness, what was was only what is seemed to be at the time; and what is is now.

Ordinary lives in quiet places

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Eve Baker, in Paths in Solitude:

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.

We need sometimes, I think, to remind ourselves of our uselessness. The end of the contemplative life – in the sense of purpose – is not a thing we achieve, not even a destination we arrive at.

Sandy Boucher (Tricycle Magazine, December 2017):

We share the physical elements and so much else with other beings; our lives are dependent on the conditions prevailing in our environment. This is being nobody special. How do we recognize and surrender to this without thought of image, achievement, comparison? Maurine Stuart advised, “All the simple, ordinary, everyday things we do—walking, cleaning, sitting—are ways to deeply penetrate this.”

So we become the true person without rank, the primordial person, who simply walks, eats, shits, works, sleeps, loves. We see that even the fully awakened condition that we call enlightenment or liberation, even this is not special but as inconsequential as a grain of sand. To be fully awake is the normal human condition. It expresses the deepest truth of our nature, our oneness with the energy of the universe. We meditate and study and practice to penetrate into, or relax into, this awareness.

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.

Sky gazing

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Occasionally, throughout my life, I have found myself gazing into the open sky, vast, unbounded; and I lying beneath, like an ant at the bottom of a measureless funnel of bright air.

The first time I can remember was at the age of five, lying on an old rug in the orchard at the back of our house, recovering from a long illness. (I have written more of this in the introduction to this blog.) The blue vault of the sky stretched over me, seemingly limitless, threaded by the distant sparkling motes, high overhead, of aircraft heading out over the English Channel towards Europe.

There were other, less striking occasions during my teens and twenties; it did not come again, recognisably, until some time in my thirties, lying – once again in an orchard! – with friends late at night at an isolated farmhouse near Poitiers in central France, far from any human lights, gazing up at the Milky Way stretching far into the interstellar distances, sparkling with uncountable stars. The sense of self and place, the voices of my companions, the night sounds of insects and owls, all fell away. I was alone in a timeless immeasurable distance; only I was not. All there was was light; light beyond light, without place or end or source.

It was many years again before I stumbled across the fact that in Dzogchen there is a long-established practice actually known as “Sky-gazing” (Tögal), which delineates, in typically precise Tibetan fashion, exactly what had been happening to me on these occasions. (See also Matthieu Ricard, p.93ff)

It isn’t necessary to lie out under the open sky – though it is beautiful and profoundly healing when it can be done – but merely to gaze up into the interior of one’s vision (usually, I find, with closed eyes), or even into a patch of sky glimpsed through a window, Thoughts, sensations, dream states (hypnogogia) will inevitably occur, but they can safely be allowed to pass. All that is necessary is to lie still.

A barking dog. Green leaves dancing in the sunlight. The listening silence. Open. Vast. Limitless. Just this!

This is not like anything else. It is as it is. How is it? It’s not any particular way for it is always changing…

The real message is what remains after the ink has vanished. But if you are looking to see what that is, you will never find it, for you are looking for an object. Presence is not an object. It is the openness that beholds it all.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp, p.34

Mysterium Tremendum

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It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

In a sense, meditation does just this, in small, repeatable doses, if we have the resolve to sit through what seem at the time to be dark places.  We are out of our depth, conclusively – and it can be all too easy to draw back, reflexively, like drawing back one’s hand from an electric shock. If we can sit it out, literally, then we may receive one of the greatest  gifts of our practice.

Just last week, I quoted Eckhart Tolle. I make no apologies for repeating the passage here, since what he says fits so precisely:

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

As Rohr suggests in Immortal Diamond, this may be why initiation rites have traditionally mimicked dying, and why so much of the language of traditional monastic spirituality used the terminology of dying to self, and rising to God. But we are once again at the thin edges of language here, and what actually happens is not in the least metaphorical.

As Rohr suggests, actually to encounter the metaphysical ground is not an experience (if that is even the right word for it) that it is possible to take lightly. It is overwhelming, in every sense of the  word, not least in the way that volition, self-determination, self-anything, are swept away in what simply is. And yet, and yet – where else could one ever hope for?

A very plain stillness

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Joan Tollifson, in one of her Substack essays, writes:

This so-called awakening stuff is so slippery to talk about. Is there anything to do? There is nothing to do, and yet in a way, there is, but it’s more like an undoing, a relaxing, a seeing through, a letting go, or a dissolving, and there’s no one to do it, and what is relaxed into includes seeking, resisting, contracting, and feeling separate. It includes everything! How to make sense of this? The mind simply can’t…

And then, what exactly is “the ocean” in the ocean/wave metaphor? Some say it’s Consciousness or Mind, some say it’s thorough-going impermanence and interdependence, some say it’s radiant presence, some say it’s God or the Ground of Being, some say it’s groundlessness, some say it’s emptiness, some say it’s intelligence-energy, some say it’s spirit, some say it’s no-thing-ness. But this is a good question to keep alive, because it’s very tempting to make something out of no-thing, to put a self or a Self (an author, doer, chooser, decider, creator, controller, manager, observer) where none in fact exists—to reify the ungraspable and slip into dualistic thinking. Thought can even turn “ungraspable no-thing-ness” into Something that it can cling to and worship. Thought is a slippery creator of illusions.

“Thought is a slippery creator of illusions…” and words decorate the illusions with glittering enticements to believe. But as always, the antidote seems to be no more than sitting still in plain awareness, while the thoughts do whatever it is that thoughts do on their own. What seems to happen is that the words peter out when they are not followed, not elaborated upon, but merely allowed to be little upwellings from the silence into which they quietly return.

The ground of being – at least so long as you  leave off the capital letters – carries none of the anthropomorphic frills of doctrine. It simply is; without it, nothing would be.

I wrote here of the “ocean/wave metaphor”. In that post I concluded: “To be still, listening, beside the open ocean, is all it takes; then our fretful wavelets still for a moment, if only between one breath and another, and we can sense the non-differentiation of Istigkeit, the unending of no thing. We are not other than what is.”

The nature of silence

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In Larry Rosenberg’s new book, he writes:

There are many ways to quiet ourselves, all of which are valuable. There’s a silence that comes from reading a book filled with magnificent ideas. There’s a silence in seeing beauty in any form—in nature, taking a swim in the ocean or a walk in the woods, or just being in solitude. But I’m talking about a measureless kind of silence that grows out of the practice. You could say it’s the heart of the practice because the deepest essence of our innermost being is silence.

This silence is shy. You can’t find it through the intellect. You can’t reach it with your emotions. In fact, you can’t search for it—the search itself would cause stirrings, movements, vexation. You can’t order it, expecting to receive silence by command. That would be like commanding love—we all know you can’t force love into existence. Silence likes humility, gentleness, innocence. It likes to be valued for itself. Thought goes into abeyance gently, gracefully, peacefully, without a struggle, without any bloodshed…

This silence is not a rarified experience. Stillness or silence or emptiness is not reserved for mystics who live high up in the Himalayas, wear loincloths, eat one grain of rice a day, sit cross-legged for weeks while freezing cold, or stand on one leg for ten years. It’s part of the human constitution.

The emptiness I’m talking about is not dead; it’s not a vacuity. When the mind gets silent, you’re tapping into the energy of the universe. Though we’re part of the universe, we typically just receive it in little drips—drip, drip, drip, like a faucet that’s not fully turned on. When we let go of who we think we are—all the notions, concepts, images, and delusions—we channel the energy that animates the whole universe. Silence is an energy that’s packed with life. It’s highly charged.

Larry Rosenberg, in an extract from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness, published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2025

I’ve often written of silence on this blog, but Larry Rosenberg’s words here seemed to say something I’ve been trying to say for a long time, and probably failing to capture. Silence, the silence of spiritual practice that is so intimately connected with stillness, is not the absence of noise.  It thrives on the presence of background sounds, whether gentle and quiet like the wind in the tall trees behind the garden, or rather less so, like the occasional sirens from the main road – which are actually not all that occasional, since we live near a major hospital. It will grow quite happily, as I wrote the other day, in an airport departure lounge.

No, shy though the silence of the heart seems to be, it is actually a thing of greater power than we’d imagine. In this long extract published in Tricycle Magazine, Rosenberg goes on:

Silence is what spiritual life is about, at least this version of it. Behind all the commotion of our lives there is an unfathomable silence accompanied by unlimited space—an endless dimension. We’re psychonauts, whether we know it or not. Ours is an inner orbit. The Tibetans put it plainly: the cognizing power of emptiness. In silence, there’s an awakening of a kind of intelligence. Great healing, the most important healing, occurs in silence. In silence you find you’re more compassionate, wiser. All the metta, or loving-kindness, you could ever want is in silence.

The longer I go on with the contemplative life, the more obvious it seems to me that what actually happens in the silence is that our apparent separation from the ground, from the source of being itself, falls away. Separation is an illusion anyway, less substantial than moon-shadows on a cloudy night. We are not ever separated from the ground – else how could we exist? – but our enserfment to the useful illusion of our everyday life in consensus reality makes it seem as though we are. Just to sit still in open awareness allows the mind’s illusions to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond, until the clear presence can be seen for itself, the ground of all that is.

Vast, empty

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So it’s more about the recognition that the “me” who seems to be “doing” all of this [living and practice] is a mirage. It’s ALL a movement of this undivided whole. The vastness has space for everything, and it clings to nothing. It is open, playful and free. Free to wear robes and free not to wear them. Even free to feel contracted, encapsulated and separate. Whatever comes will eventually go. And if the mind starts looking for what doesn’t come and go, anything it finds will be another object, another imagination. That is what Toni [Packer, leading a retreat] was pointing out. And the objects can get very subtle in nature.

One of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, said, “Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.”

Joan Tollifson

Choiceless awareness is like this. It is not a specialised technique for meditation, nor a philosophical position, though it can be taken for either of those. I’m not sure – and this is the difficulty so many people have (myself included) when they first encounter the term in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s writings. What, exactly, are we being asked to do?

It has taken a long time, but gradually I have come to realise that just sitting, only that, aware not only of breathing, and the body resting in space, feeling what it feels, hearing what it hears, but also being aware of thoughts as they arise, and of the emotions and bodily states that can accompany them (fear, desire, wonder, grief…) as they well up and fade away, is nothing other than the vastness of which Joan Tollifson writes so movingly. Allowing it all, the empty awareness is itself the open ground, being-itself, Istigkeit.

But it isn’t something we do. That’s what is so difficult to explain. In stillness, it happens. As Tollifson writes (op. cit.), “And, of course, ‘we’ aren’t doing any of this. It is all happening by itself. Ever-fresh. Ungraspable.” It does happen all by itself. It always has. Just watch.

One small room

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You need one small room for yourself. This is very true: when you can really find yourself in a small room, then there is you yourself, and the whole universe is there, and the whole universe makes sense to you. Without your one small room, the whole universe doesn’t make any sense. So what you need now is a small room, and what you will need after your death is a small stone. That is the actual reality, which is always true for everyone.

Shunryu Suzuki, Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life p.32

I have grown increasingly to love my own small room. It has become soaked, somehow, at least in my own feelings, with the hours I have  spent there, and the changes I have seen in myself and in the seasons – in the years now, in fact – the trees growing and changing, generations of blackbirds coming and going across the lawn.

Strangely, though, I’ve also come to notice that the room travels with me. If I am aware enough of where I am, of the light moving across the floor, my own breathing in its little tides and intervals, then my own little room can be in a hotel, even a train seat or in an airport among all the other displaced travellers who wait with me, Stillness isn’t a thing you need to find so much as that you just need to step into, opening the  door and closing it behind you gently.

Perhaps the strangest thing I have found is that this small room of stillness is there, almost clearer and almost more precious somehow, in those times when the usual patterns of volition, of self-determination, seem to be lost, and whatever baneful thing is in the air has, finally, hit the fan.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

Suzuki’s paradoxical remark about the universe begins to make sense. It is within now, as Tolle himself says, that what is is all there is. For once, we have dropped into the stillness that has lain beneath all that has come to be, and is beneath all that is becoming now. All the myriad contrivances of thought have dropped away; what is left is no thing – it is the ground itself, bright and unending.

A sensitivity to things not yet known

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We do not know, when we sit down to practice, what we shall find in the silence. It seems obvious to say it, but it is too easy to forget that practice is never routine: each time we are setting out on a voyage into trackless places. No one has been here before, least of all ourselves.

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

We do well to hesitate. There is no place here for preconceptions. 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 most radical – in the literal sense of the word – thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to; no maps, despite the reams of paper that have been expended on the subject, for this utterly solitary journey. Each of us has to go there alone; each of us has to find out for ourselves what is there.

To cast away knowing, to give up the idea that words can hold the open fields of what merely is, is sometimes called the apophatic way; but really it is no more than giving up the attempt to describe the indescribable.

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) is not a kind of daydream, or an altered state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention, or imagining some kind of goal or outcome towards which our practice is supposed to lead. “For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth. For who seeks that which he believes that he has found? Who explores a territory which he claims already to know?” (Quaker faith & practice 26.39, from which passage the title of this post is also taken)

Toni Bernhard:

[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.

How to Wake Up, p.104

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that perhaps it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow, that there is someone who is prepared to do this, quietly getting on with it, day after day. Perhaps someone needs to.

Umwelten again, but cleansed

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The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species’ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it. For example, around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the water and adapting to life on land. In open air, these pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer distances than they could in water. The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and strategic thinking  Instead of simply reacting to whatever was directly in front of them, they could be proactive. By seeing farther, they could think ahead. As their Umwelten expanded, so did their minds.

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Senses always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli [heat, touch and scent]. “However, the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, pp.7-8

When Aldous Huxley wrote his astonishing 1954 study of the effects of psychedelics on the human mind, The Doors of Perception, he pointed out that the human brain and nervous system, in their normal configuration, function so as “to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the ‘Mind at Large’.” Under the influence of mescaline, however, the “miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” becomes apparent, unfiltered, just as it is.

Now of course this is not an escape from the sensory component of the human Umwelt – we are still constrained by the information our senses can respond to (mescaline cannot enable us to see in ultraviolet, or accurately to sense the earth’s magnetic field) – but it is at least a partial escape from the functional processing of that information stream that presents us with the familiar, usable world of the everyday. As Huxley himself pointed out, it is possible to perceive directly Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the untrammelled isness of things, the being-itself that our minds dissect in order to construct our daily lives; in itself, it is, as William Blake remarked, infinite: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Absent hare-brained theories of medieval magic mushroom culture, Eckhart was not under the influence of psychedelics. The contemplative technology of unenclosing humankind has millennia of research and development behind it, and as texts like The Cloud of Unknowing reveal, it was highly developed in at least some strands of medieval European monasticism.  To see things as they are to our unedited senses – through our own cleansed Umwelt – is as basic a human ability as breathing; only most of us have forgotten how. As Eckhart Tolle points out in our own time,

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

The Power of Now, p.63