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.

The treasures of the storehouse

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In the past I have all too often found myself caught up frantically in the search for solutions, answers to dilemmas, where to go and what to do. When I was younger I so frequently struck out into uncharted and risky places, unhelpful relationships, odd career moves, simply in order to do something, get somewhere – anywhere – rather than live with uncertainty and indecision.

When I became involved with the Christian contemplative tradition, I encountered for the first time the concept of leaving such things “in God’s hands”; the idea being that in the fullness of time the Holy Spirit would convey the answer to the dilemma, directly or (more likely!) indirectly to the waiting mind. Now there is a very real benefit to be gained by such an approach, regardless of the prescribed methodology. The issue is left in abeyance for the time being, and out of the glare of anxious attention a solution may arise; or else the heart may become reconciled to the lack of one.

Of course there are alternative ways to explain this process to ourselves. “According to the left-brain, right-brain dominance theory, the left side of the brain is considered to be adept at tasks that are considered logical, rational, and calculating. By contrast, the right side of the brain is best at artistic, creative, and spontaneous tasks.” (Eagle Gamma, ‘Left Brain vs. Right Brain: Hemisphere Function’ in Simply Psychology, October 2023) So the problem the left brain has been desperately scratching at is left unsolved, until the patient, creative right brain has done its subtle work.

Needless to say, there is a Buddhist approach as well. Kaira Jewel Lingo, in an extract published in Tricycle Magazine:

These deeper life questions can’t be resolved at the level of the mind but must be entrusted to a different, deeper part of our consciousness. Thay suggests we consider this big question as a seed, plant it in the soil of our mind and let it rest there. Our mindfulness practice in our daily lives is the sunshine and water that the seed needs to sprout so that one day it will rise up on its own, in its own time. And then we’ll know the answer to our question without a doubt.

But we must leave the seed down in the soil of our mind and not keep digging it up to see if it is growing roots. It won’t grow that way! It is the same with a deep and troubling question. We ask our deeper consciousness to take care of it and then let go of our thinking and worrying about it. Then in our daily lives we practice calming, resting, and coming home to ourselves in the present moment, and that will help the seed of our question to ripen naturally and authentically. This process cannot be rushed or forced. It may take weeks, months, or years. But we can trust that the seed is “down there,” being tended to by our deeper consciousness, and one day it will sprout into a clear answer.

In Buddhist psychology this part of our mind is called store consciousness. This is because it has the function of storing our memories and all the various mind states we can experience in latent, sleeping form. For example, maybe you’ve experienced trying to solve a problem or find an answer to something that perplexes you. You think hard and circle round and round in your mind, but you feel you don’t get anywhere. Then you let the question go, and suddenly when you least expect it, inspiration or helpful ideas come to you in a time of rest, and you just know what to do. That is store consciousness operating. It is working on the problem for you while your day-to-day consciousness rests. Store consciousness works in a very natural and easeful way and is much more efficient than our thinking mind. When wisdom arises from store consciousness, it feels right in the body and we no longer have doubts.

But waiting for the answer to arise can be challenging at times, because we may really want to know the answer. We may find ourselves feeling deeply insecure and fearful if we don’t know what to do, which path to choose. We worry we will make the wrong choice, and we catastrophize about what will happen if we take this or that direction. It’s hard to find our way if we continue to feed this worry and fear. We can recognize that we are not helping the situation and stop. Returning to this moment, anchoring ourselves in our body, we will find the solidity of the home inside of us, which is capable of helping us find our way, if only we let it, and if we can let go of trying to figure out the future in our heads.

Whichever way we choose to understand it, the process – which can only take place in the heart’s stillness, whether through the explicit practice of mindfulness or by some analogous means – is profound and trustworthy. In fact, it seems often to be transformative, not only of our own lives but, in a deep and unexpected way, of the lives of those around us.

In an interview, also in Tricycle magazine, the Buddhist LGBT+ pioneer Larry Yang says,

As activists, we can be invested in the goal or specific change. Take your time. Experiment with the teachings yourself and see if they assist you to navigate the complexities and stresses of your own life. Explore for yourself how the impact of the mindfulness and heart practices can influence your work. Please feel invited to exploring freedom through the process, rather than the outcome. Freedom is distinct and different from justice. Working toward justice and equity are indispensable activities to level the disparities that create oppression. However, freedom is not dependent on external circumstances—not even justice. Can we do the difficult and hard work of social justice without our hearts becoming difficult and hard as well? Can we deeply engage with working toward justice from a place of inner freedom within our minds and hearts and use wisdom and compassion as forces to change the world? That is the invitation that I am passionate about exploring for myself…

Creating the stillness in the vortex of our lives helps us to create some sense of calm and tranquility in a world that seems to be crazy with violence and fragmented in its differences and conflicts. As we transform our own experience and relationship to our realities, we cannot help but affect those around us in radiating circles into the larger culture. These moments of freedom and transformation begin to change and elevate the consciousness and awareness of the world.

Interrupting the skeuomorphs

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Anyone who was involved with personal computers around 25 years ago will be all too familiar with skeuomorphs, those little pictures of familiar material things that were so often used as interface elements – ring-binder pages for calendar applications, or the little gleaming jewel-like forward and back buttons in a web browser like Netscape Navigator 9 or Internet Explorer 7. They’re still in use today – the virtual keyboard of your smart phone is a skeuomorph – there isn’t a keyboard there at all: it just looks, and works, like one.

It seems to me that our day-to-day experiences are not unlike existential skeuomorphs – they allow us to remember, to interrogate and interact with events, but they are no more than pictures of what actually happened. Of course, we couldn’t operate, couldn’t even usefully perceive anything, without them. Part of the phenomenological action of psychedelics is surely just that: the disabling of this delicate interface through which we encounter the world. No wonder a person on a bad trip feels they are going mad; temporarily (we hope) they are. The world may be an inconceivable web of fields and probabilities, but we perceive real tables and chairs, cats and boxes; they may be illusions, but they are benign (Dennett) and necessary illusions, as real as we are ourselves.

Only in the stillness of meditation – or a sudden unbidden illumination – can we, if only for a moment, allow a fully open awareness to catch a glimpse of what actually is.

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

Andreas Müller, No-thing – ungraspable freedom

(I wrote at greater – if more subjective – length about this last year. It seemed to me today, though, that it was worth mentioning again in the context of these perceptions. I am not a neuroscientist, nor even a philosopher of mind; I am only someone who has occasionally encountered something that seems almost as if it might be the tangible fruit of such disciplines in direct experience.)

Sangha and solitude (slight return)

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Sangha and solitude

It occurs to me that this post, though it was written when the pandemic was still near its height, says some things I’d wish to say now. In any case, more recent readers may have missed it first time around!

Physicalism vs spirituality?

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In the broadest terms, the philosophical theory of physicalism maintains that the explanation for how minds came about is no different from the explanation for how rivers, trees, mountains and meadows came about. Mind was not something extra, added at the beginning or somewhere along the way; rather, from the stock of basic physical ingredients that make up a human—mostly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium and phosphorus—all that was required was the cooking.

Barbara Gail Montero, Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction

It is sometimes feared that abandoning dualism – “which maintains that the immaterial mind, or soul, is an additional ingredient, brought into the world by God at the moment of conception” (Montero, ibid.) – will leave us bereft of the spiritual dimension of life, which for many of us is the sweet core of our own being. But as Sam Harris says, in a passage I seem to be unable to avoid quoting on a regular basis,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

An analogy that sometimes occurs to me is one drawn from technology. Of course this blog could not exist without the internet, without the web host’s data centres and the fibre optics that connect them, without this tablet I’m writing on, and its connection to the internet, without the hardware whose screen you are reading now. But however carefully you study any of that hardware, you will not come across these ideas. They are data; and the content management system that brings them to you is software. These are not, in the crude sense, material things; but they are entirely dependent on all that copper and silicon and glass, not to mention the rare metals, so intricately and painstakingly manufactured to contain and to convey them.

Minds are not the brain’s neurons and their blood supply, nor the neurotransmitters that ripple across their synapses; and while you could get a pretty good idea from the brain’s activity that there was something going on, you will never find a mind in there, in the sense of a physical structure, no matter how long you scan and probe and watch. Mind, and the mind’s subjectivity, is not, in the crude sense, a material thing; but it is entirely dependent on all those intricate and beautifully balanced cells and fluids and exchanging gases, not to mention the heart and lungs and blood and liver and all the rest of the kit that allows the physical brain to keep running.

None of this should give us cause to grieve. Just as understanding, however sketchily, the intricacies of the internet cannot take anything away from the ideas and dreams it conveys, nor can the work of the neuroscientist or the philosopher of mind detract from the beauty of contemplative spirituality, or the love between those who practice and teach it. The stillness is what it always has been; the open awareness that is grounded there is just as luminous. All we need is to be still enough to let it be.

Contemplative Reading

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I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.

If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.

I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.

I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway  – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.

A (very) short booklist:

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

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

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

NB!

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It may seem obvious, but I find it’s sometimes too easy to forget that contemplative practice isn’t just what happens twice a day on the cushion (chair, bed, carpet…) but is threaded through the rest of life, including sleep. I have found that, as well as the inevitable – and usually benign – ways that perception and emotion evolve, insights sometimes appear at unexpected times – the edges of sleep, particularly – that are often hard, if not impossible, to recall. Unless one makes a note…

Over the years I have found that a notebook is almost as essential a tool as a place to sit. I do mean a notebook, not a journal; journalling is an honourable spiritual discipline in its own right, but it isn’t what I’m referring to here. What I’m getting at is something that is always close at hand, where I can jot down reflections and realisations – not during formal practice of course! – as they arise, before they’re lost in the vagaries of thought and memory.

What sort of a notebook you use may depend on what sort of person you are, and what you’re used to, what you’re most comfortable with. One thing I would say, though, is that it will probably work better the simpler it is. This is probably not the place for artisan paper and a vintage fountain pen, nor for a fully-fledged word processing application. What’s needed is something more like a reporter’s notebook and a cheap biro, or a really simple notes app like Google Keep or Samsung Notes.

Personally I have come to prefer using my phone for things like this – I’m at ease with technology, you can use it in the dark, it doesn’t leak on the bedclothes… I’ve become very comfortable with glide typing, and I can type silently this way very nearly as fast and as accurately as I can with a physical keyboard. (Contrary to the linked article, Gboard and Samsung Keyboard work pretty much as well as SwiftKey for glide typing, once enabled – take your pick!)

Some people, though, seem to find that technology disables – or distracts – rather than enables such an intimate thing as making notes as part of a contemplative life. For them whatever notebook they like (I do have a preference for some kind of lay-flat sort that you don’t have to hold open) and whatever pen is comfortable will work best.

The important thing is not how you make notes, but that you do it. It doesn’t matter whether you feel you are gathering ideas for some more formal writing – like a blog post, or a book – or merely to refer back to later: the important thing is that the actual process helps locate the insight in language, where it can seep out and bless the whole field of cognition. That’s why, perhaps, it has to be an easy process, that’s not going to draw attention to itself – something you’re really comfortable with, like a pair of old walking shoes…

Doors

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There is something about doors. They are curiously inevitable. Largely unchanged long into history, they can let their users in or out, keep them safe or keep them prisoner; let them rest or let them run.

Our senses are only the doors of our perception; what we see or hear is as much story as data. Turn off the processing, the algorithms of interpretation that make us who we are, and the crazy lights of elsewhere will threaten to wipe all we ever knew like words written in the steam across a bathroom window. That’s the hope and the fear of psychedelics; but we cannot know what is real by simply breaking down the doors of what it is to be human.

All we are is the infinitely delicate pattern our minds trace on the fields and particles of our fleeting scrap of what is there. Beneath it all the ground holds, beyond beginning or end. The doors we are given are ways in to what is real, our own dear and transitory lives; they let us in, not shut us out. Stillness, patience, the gentle breath: these are the ways to the fields of wonder, the steadiness of being.

Gratitude and water

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Gratitude is a more subtle emotion than it seems, I think. Oh, it is easy enough to be grateful to someone for a gift or a kindness; that’s not what I mean. There is another kind of gratitude – we might call it metaphysical gratitude, maybe – that is a deep sense of thanks merely for what is. To begin with it might have an object – gratitude for a clear test result, perhaps, or for the safe return of a missing cat – but underlying these there is an objectless gratitude that is close to a simple joy in isness itself. It has to do with accepting what comes to be without wishing it were otherwise, without trying to impose a mechanical order on the organic. Accepting what is given as it is may be the highest form of gratitude.

In theistic religions, of course, the pure impulse towards this kind of gratitude is always subverted; one must be grateful to God for this or that. The heart’s sweet clarity is clouded by forms of words: “Thank you, Lord!” we cry, and the initial flood of joy is diverted into acceptable canals of meaning.

Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way… It is because it does not contend that it is never at fault.

Tao Te Ching VIII

Free gratitude is like this – flowing like water, it follows the patterning of what comes to be, the organic order that you can see in the path of an ivy strand climbing a brick wall, or the eddies in a river downstream of a fallen tree. To love what is simply because it is – not for how it might benefit us – is the cleanest and truest kind of gratitude, that comes, as Lao Tzu would say, very close to the way itself.

Scatter plot

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Practice today was scattered; distracted doesn’t even cover it. One train of thought succeeded another with barely a break for open awareness between them. Trivial, juicy, engrossing – it hardly seemed to matter, just so long as it would take my attention away from the tiny precious instant that is all that is now. The delicious isness of the crisp air, the sounds from outside the window, were scarcely noticed between the pattering dissolution of one obsession and the cramping onset of another.

And yet the rest of the day was gentle, open, clear and attentive. What I did I did. I listened, truly listened, when people spoke. The most ordinary things came as gifts from the blue – and the autumn sky on this oddly warm day was as blue as blue – and even the busy streets were different, suddenly luminous with presence. Nothing seemed to take away this sense of grace and pattern. There was no such thing as irritation or impatience; everything had its own weight, its own benediction to deliver.

So what was going on? I have no idea. This “pathless path”, as Martin Laird describes it somewhere, has many odd sunken lanes to explore and wayside shrines to stumble across – one reason I have so little time in my own life for any idea of a “ladder of ascent” (John Climacus) however helpful others may find such things. Just sitting still is really all that is needed, pointlessly scattered though it may seem at the time. That doesn’t matter, it appears; what it seems to the conscious mind is beside the point. What is given is enough. There is nothing but what is given, anyway.

In the end…

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This morning the light in my room was particularly crystalline. The autumn sunlight crossed the floor, bringing with it the silvery blue of the open sky above the trees. Somewhere in that blue brightness an airliner passed high overhead, the muted rumble of its engines just on the edge of hearing.

There was a time, when I was briefly close to death, that a kind of blessed completeness replaced all normal perceptions, and I knew that my life, full as it was of things undone, loose ends, plans unfulfilled, goodbyes unsaid, could be laid down just as it was, and it would be all right. Not merely okay, but right – as it should be. The way would hold all that had been, and this life that had been mine would be completed, perfectly. There was nothing whatever wrong; it was all safer than I could have ever imagined.

This morning, very gently but suddenly, in the midst of practice, I knew this to be true not just in the immediate presence of death. This sense returned in open awareness, complete and sure, that everything – everything – is safe in the end, in the way, in the ground itself. There is truly nothing whatever to worry about. Not even death. Especially not death.