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.

Dimensionless

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In stillness it can become apparent that the dimensionless ground, that is “before all things” (Colossians 1:17) underlies both phenomenal reality and the perception of that reality, since the mind’s original awareness – its intrinsic consciousness – is awareness of the ground itself. In this sense,

Consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.

Rebecca Goldstein, in a personal communication to Annaka Harris

As long seen in the Dzogchen concept of rigpa, the ground is both dimensionless and atemporal. It is empty, from our phenomenological point of view, even of “emptiness” itself. It is no thing, in the most utter sense of that phrase. And yet each of us can be said to have it, in the identical sense that all beings are said to have “Buddha-nature”; only our own confusion, our incessant and self-identified thoughts, get in the way as the clear light of the moon is obscured by clouds. (There is even a Dzogchen term for this too – ma-rigpa!)

Perhaps this sounds complicated. The attempt to say it gets that way; and yet it is the simplest thing. All that is needed is to remain still enough, open enough to plain awareness; the ground is open, cloudless, without end or beginning. It isn’t even there. It, simply, is.

The open door

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Thought is the result of the past acting in the present; the past is constantly sweeping over the present. The present, the new, is ever being absorbed by the past, by the known. To live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory; in this death there is timeless renewal.

The present extends into the past and into the future; without the understanding of the present the door to the past is closed. The perception of the new is so fleeting; no sooner is it felt than the swift current of the past sweeps over it and the new ceases to be. To die to the many yesterdays, to renew each day is only possible if we are capable of being passively aware. In this passive awareness there is no gathering to oneself; in it there is intense stillness in which the new is ever unfolding, in which silence is ever extending with measure.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Transcript of Talk 10, Ojai, 29 July 1945

To remain still, to turn from knowing to simple awareness – without choosing, without direction, in open unknowing – really, that is all that is needed. It is so simple, so unproblematic, that we find it the most difficult thing, simply because it seems too good to be true. And yet it is the truest encounter this life affords; it is the open door to “the original primordially empty Body of Reality, the ultimate truth of the expanse” (Longchenpa). In the end, there is nothing else.

Only practice

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At times recently I’ve been tempted to see my previous years of practice, stretches of time I spent as a Christian contemplative in the world – rather than as a monastic of any kind – as perhaps wasted years; years I could have spent in some more fruitful way, such as the kind of practice to which I’m now committed. But gradually, it has come clear to me that it has all worked together, astonishingly seamlessly. There is no right or wrong way: there is only practice. The “story of my life,” disjointed though it has often appeared to me, is actually all of a piece. There is nothing to regret. There is no need to start over with anything.

I have mentioned before here my profound gratitude for occasions in my life when I have been injured or unwell, and the insights they have afforded me. These too, though, aren’t isolated occurrences in a life of somehow lesser significance; they are merely currants in a bun whose sugar and spice, and very ordinary flour, have been just as essential to the overall flavour.

I don’t mean to attribute any of this to some species of external cause, in the sense of acting under the control of some supernatural puppet-master; everything I have mentioned has merely been composed of natural events in a largely unremarkable life. Any sense of their fitting together, of their working towards some overarching purpose, is retrospective: the pattern only emerges as it nears completion. Perhaps it could even be suggested that without its later elements the earlier would be meaningless, or at least have an entirely different meaning; but perhaps “meaning” is too loaded a term altogether. A pattern, after all, only describes what has happened, what events have become; even if like one of Daniel Dennett’s real  patterns it does have significance beyond simple human interpretation!

There is a kind of peace here that I hadn’t perhaps foreseen. In one sense, nothing has changed – practice goes on from day to day just as before; and yet something is different in a way I find difficult to explain even to myself without falling into linguistic pits. Maybe nothing more needs to be said: what is being described here is a still-evolving process, not a destination. If there is indeed a pattern, it is probably much more like a vortex street than a snowflake, to misappropriate a metaphor. The practice remains. Nothing else is needed; there is nothing else we need to remember.

Just this simple

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Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Really, it is just this simple. There is next to nothing to it, this practice of ours. And yet it is the work of a lifetime, and the more we go on, the lovelier we discover it to be. There is something so juicy, so moreish, about this whole enterprise. Part of it seems to be that we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch meshing like the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.

More than this, the webbed patterns of causality seem to come clear, bright wires against the dark softness of the breath itself; they are as they are, and yet all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right. What is is the most precious gift, Merton’s diamond, the open ground of isness in this ordinary room, this plain body resting in just now.

In another way, of course, what I’m describing isn’t complicated or difficult at all. What you are really learning—and this begins with following the breath—is the art of doing less and less until finally you are doing nothing, just being as you are and letting your experience come to you. There are no distractions; you are mindful of your present experience just as it is. Nothing in particular is supposed to happen. You attend to what is there just because it is there. It is your life at that moment. We are used to doing things all the time, trying to change our environment, improve our situation, so it may seem difficult to do nothing. Actually, there is nothing easier. You just sit and let the world come to you.

Larry Rosenberg, appendix to Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive

Stone lanterns

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I have always been strangely moved by the tōrō stone lanterns found in gardens and along paths around Buddhist monasteries and large houses in parts of Japan, and hence in similar places around the world in tribute. The one here is in the Japanese garden at Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Even as a boy I loved to look at garden ornaments like sundials and benches that stood out in the rain and sun, in the snow and the wind, bearing the marks of the weather and its changes.

To sit like a stone lantern may be a fanciful way of putting it, but there is something in shikantaza that is just like that, sitting still as the moments pass and the breaths, and the sounds outside drift unremarked across the comings and goings of thoughts. Sitting steadily, nothing moves; and yet there is nothing that remains unchanged, nothing that does not bear the marks of time and its weather. To do nothing, as the stone lantern does nothing, is to remain true to impermanence. Nothing is sought or planned; there is no goal or intention, only to sit still, out in the sun and wind of what comes to be, just that – and in that, all that is.

The truth can only heal

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This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have…

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Tricycle Magazine, June 2015

Impermanence, the realisation in actual experience that nothing lasts, nothing is eternal, seems to many people a gloomy doctrine. Actually it is anything but. The burden of hope is lifted; the agony of yearning is eased in the coming of light. The truth can only heal; only the truth can truly heal.

As Traleg Kyabgon says, though, this has to be experienced, not merely learned. The intellect may find such a thought easy enough to grasp – or it may not! – but it is only in lived experience that the heart can know. This is grace; the grace of practice, the gift of sitting still; or else it may be the grace of pain itself, accepted either willingly or helplessly. Either way, I have not found it something I could set out to learn: it had to happen to me. (Various monastic traditions, Christian and Buddhist, have disciplines intended to make it easier – meditations in charnel-grounds, for instance – but again I suspect that they are more ways to open the heart to grace than to compel it to learn some technique or accomplishment.)

I have been uncommonly fortunate. Not only do I have my practice, grown and changed to fit over many years, but I have had more than one close encounter with the finitude of my own life. These last have been great gifts; but they are not something one could seek out intentionally – what the news reports call a “life-changing industrial accident” would be an odd sort of spiritual discipline!

I think what lies at the heart of what may be learned from all these practices and encounters is acceptance – even glad acceptance – of the fact that life and death belong together as do the two sides of one coin, as do day and night, summer and winter. Not only is one impossible without the other, but they are a succession, parts of a cycle. Our little lives are not just rounded with a sleep, but with a waking too; just as next summer will be another year, so there will be another life. Not I – I am as fleeting as the leaves – but another will wake to a new day, in another time that might have been different had I not passed this way before.

When there is nothing left

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One of the strangest realisations of contemplative practice is that the closest place to the truth is when everything is broken. Really. When the thing you thought you could never survive is upon you, when the last thing you could rely on has given way under your feet, then you can see what is actually there. Until the bridge breaks beneath you, you have no idea what is really going on at all. You have your plans, you have your resources, you have your own strength and your courage; until you don’t. Until the worst happens. And then you are free. Oliver Burkeman:

This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as “playing in the ruins.”

In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen—when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations—he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, “a precious state of being can dawn. . . . You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, OK, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?”

When there is nothing left, the way opens. Only when you can sit still in the ruins of all you had lived for, and see what is actually there, can you begin to wake up at last.

The promise of the end of suffering is the hook that we grab on to, and for a long time after we’ve begun to practice we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn’t end up looking like what we expect—or what we want.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

All this sounds like very bad news, but in truth it is the best news possible. When what is not is gone, when our hopes and our fears turn out to be the same thing in the end, then we can see that what is is, in Thomas Merton’s words, the “little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty” that is iness itself, the open ground. And that, perhaps, is why we practice.

A new site page

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I have just added a new permanent site page, Advice etc.

I hope the links here will give easy access to what little practical advice I have dared to give on this blog, not being in any sense a teacher!

Do click over and have a look – and let me know in the comments if there is any way in which you think it should be improved.

About time

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Real meditation isn’t something you do; it’s something you cease to do… it is the freedom to notice what is already here… What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important – or even sacred? … Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always – but always, and only, now.

Sam Harris, from a recorded talk on Waking Up

“Self” is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is a word for the thousand guises themselves. To understand the “self” is to understand the usage of the word within the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled in philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns. Wittgenstein repeatedly said that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language. In taking this approach to what had traditionally been seen as intractable metaphysical conundrums, Wittgenstein, I believe, comes the closest of any Western philosopher to Zen.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

The thing about the self is that it is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, another substantive noun – like time – that can lead us to mistake the word for the substance. Time does not contain, or somehow lead to, the succession of experience: it is that successive experiencing. The self does not experience a succession of events: it is the experience. To sit still is to see this unfold, in real time.

The unfolding is the sacred moment itself. As Harris points out in his talk, it would be easy to be misled by what appears to be religious language here; but the sacredness of the moment resides not in some imported framework of belief that conditions, or interprets, or redeems the time. It is sacred because it is real. It is all that can be real – all else is a memory of time past, or an anticipation of time future; and these are only dreams. The world of speculation is empty, as empty as the idea of a self. The one end is only present; it is all that is real.

Happy New Year!

No one to blame

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I’m always a bit skeptical when people talk about the increasing interest in Buddhism and the numbers of people appreciating the dharma and turning to meditation. It’s like the first week of a romance. When you first fall in love with someone—even if that person has purple hair and all kinds of what we call “extraordinary embellishments”—there’s just the feeling of love. You don’t see the blemishes; you see only the good things.

Yes, meditation and being calm and peaceful and loving, and generating compassion and doing good for others, and being more aware—these are all very good! But in the initial romantic stage, you may be looking through rose-tinted glasses. After that, you will see the hard work involved, hard work that will be done by nobody but you. This is why interest in Buddhism increases at first and then dips—and this dip is steep, because hard work will never make Buddhism very popular.

Moreover, Buddhism is the only philosophy that doesn’t have anyone to ascribe blame to but oneself for what’s wrong. Nor is there anyone but oneself responsible for producing what is good. To be put on the spot like this is not always seen as favorable by the human mind. Our cultures, social upbringing, and the design of our world condition us to hold some person or people or circumstance responsible for our situation. We have politicians to blame; we have God and the prophets, religious masters, and original sin to blame. We have many things to blame, including karma. It is very difficult to come to the point at which you see that blame is not actually logical—that everything depends on you, yourself.

Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, writing in Tricycle Magazine

Every so often I find myself longing to be able to hand over the responsibility for walking this path to someone else – divine or human – who could absolve me of the weight of all this moral, intentional, intellectual hard work. A religion would be such a comfort. And yet…

The longer I seem to be able to try to follow this way, the less it does seem to be someone’s responsibility, either mine or God’s. Yes, as Khandro Rinpoche says here, there is no one else; but responsibility, in the sense of being the one to make it work? It’s inevitable that the ego, the left-brained, thinking self, will want to take responsibility, absent someone else to lean on – but the “executive self” can’t do it, can’t even see that there is a path. Only by keeping still, by watching to see what happens – of itself – can the busy little mind be persuaded to give up. Giving the whole process names, and hence regulations, is the root of the religious impulse itself, it seems to me.

I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t going through some kind of unseen spiritual revolution at the moment. Yes, the great religions appear to be flourishing – except when they’re not –  and the purveyors of slick solutions appear to thrive, but under the radar a good deal of quiet, hidden, patient practice seems to be going on. It’s invidious to draw direct parallels, but I am often reminded of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; not in their asceticism, but in their rejection of compromise and expedience in favour of interior silence and continual practice. Who knows where this is going? But that doesn’t matter – where it is going is just the flow of the stream in its bed; this is not the time for dreams and plans, but for emptiness and quiet.

Outside the window as I write this it is dark, but pinpoints of light from the road, and across the yard by the old reservoir, prick the blackness. At this distance they can’t be seen to illuminate anything, but the little lights are there in their own brightness. It seems very still. There is nothing to do but watch.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness, with thanks to What’s Here Now