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.

Following the stream

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It seems to me that what comes to be is, in its own essence, no more (and no less) than the necessity of things to be what they are: caused by events in what we call their past, and in turn causing events, and entities, in what we call their future. There is a continuous flow of coming to be – of being – that is inevitable, unceasing, beautiful. We are each of us ripples in that stream, brief appearances; and yet we are not other than the water, the flow itself, and that does not end.

I’m not sure what to call it. The ancient Chinese called it the Tao; Benedictus Spinoza called it God – although that was dangerously far from the God of Abraham with whom he’d been brought up.

The necessity of the flow, the inevitability of it, Spinoza saw to be nature itself, the universe, the continuum; and it was that which he called God (Deus sive Natura). To know that, realise it, live within it, breathe it as a cat breathes air or a fish water, he called the love of God.

What is necessary of itself does not cease: it is. Meister Eckhard wrote of it as Istigkeit; it is the open ground, in which as things come to be, and change, and die, and are not lost. The ripples rise, and lap, and fade; the stream flows on.

Otherness

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In my last post, I mentioned my sense that in situations of what I called transcendent powerlessness we can touch – or be touched by – something electric and quite beyond ourselves. In that post I wrote,

…something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else…

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

What is happening here? Throughout the years philosophers, from the ancient Taoists to Spinoza, have found themselves unable to avoid treating the necessity of what could otherwise seem raw causality with something close to personification.

There is something undifferentiated and yet complete.
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless.
It depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25 (tr. Chan)

God is the Determiner (but not a Planner): God/Nature is the immanent (indwelling) and necessary cause of all things. God doesn’t stand outside the world creating and planning by free will, like the personal, transcendent God of traditional religion. Instead, the order and regularity of the universe—the natural laws—are God’s nature.

Google Gemini, in conversation with the author on “Spinoza’s Determinism and God”

In contemplative practice one may occasionally find the sense that, in the sheer powerlessness of sitting still, something breaks through that Dzogchen practitioners would call Rigpa, “the ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself.” (Stephen Batchelor). Somehow this is always unsought – you cannot bring it about, and trying is entirely counterproductive.

Of course the parallel immediately appears here with the traditional Catholic concept of infused contemplation – “…a state that can be prepared for, but cannot in any way be produced by the will or desire of a person through methods or ascetical practices” (Burke & Bartunek).

As I wrote yesterday, there is nothing here but grace. One can go so far in faithful practice, in preparedness and in waiting, but no farther. Even Spinoza wrote of the “intellectual love of God”, his term for the highest spiritual attainment, as intuitive rather than rational. I think we experience the ground of being, especially when encountered unawares, as so profoundly “other” because its immanence and necessity are so far from our own state as one of the “ten thousand things” (Laozi); and yet we are not other. We did not plan our birth: our very existence rests in the ground itself – we are from being itself, and that by sheer grace.

Powerless

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Learning to navigate life’s changing nature from center is one of the gifts of endarkenment (to commit to turning toward rather than away from physical and symbolic darkness and to learn to perceive with the heart—beyond unconscious bias and hierarchical perception). Change invites us to affirm our participation with life beyond the isolating, but seemingly sheltered, visible security. With reverence toward the divine darkness, we can learn to meet our human experience of change with openness rather than fear. We can learn to surrender to rather than resist the groundlessness of change. We can learn to lean into the changing nature of existence, realizing the freedom that arises from not knowing and realizing we do not have to fear the unknown.

Deborah Eden Tull, in an extract from her book Luminous Darkness, published in Tricycle Magazine, August 2025

One of the most striking encounters with powerlessness that many of us have had to navigate was the recent pandemic, Nick Cave: “Suddenly, there was an extraordinary sense of relief, a sort of wave washing through me, a kind of euphoria, but also something more than that – a crazy energy. A sense of potential, maybe? Yes, but true potential. Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something.”

There are many ways to understand this odd experience. There have been other times in my life, too, when I have lost for a time – for all I knew, forever – the ability to choose my own course. (I think particularly when I suffered what the press describe as a “life-changing accident”, and had to face the prospect of losing my career, my home – a farmhouse that came with the job – and all sense of security in an instant.) And I experienced Nick Cave’s strange sense of immense, electric potential; there was a genuine exhilaration, a quality of being right at the nexus of change. Anything could happen, anything could be lost; and somehow there was nothing to fear, however frightened I was.

Perhaps this sort of thing lies at the root of the old quip about there being no atheists in foxholes. Of course those in imminent danger of death don’t suddenly acquire a full-featured evangelical faith, but something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else.

We are back with the odd intersection of semantics with experience. A committed Christian at the time, I experienced an immediate sense of the nearness of God; a Buddhist like Deborah Eden Tull might find something different again. The spiritual landscape within which we live, the words that come with the tradition we occupy: these things condition our very experience, and yet the truth of what each of us encounters is the same. It has to be, if it is real.

Perhaps it’s in these extreme situations – pandemics, near-fatal accidents, instants of loss and devastation, that we can suddenly see clearly, if we are open enough, in a way that has at least something in common with the fruit of years of contemplative practice. It was during an intense spiritual and psychological crisis, coming at the climax of years of anxiety and suicidal depression, that Eckhart Tolle had the encounter with terror and surrender that changed in an instant the course of his life, and led him to spend the next few years externally lost and homeless, yet radiant within, trying to work out what had happened to him. (See the Introduction to The Power of Now)

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

Contemplative practice is a far safer path; and yet, strangely, the apparently uneventful years of faithful practice can crystallise in a moment, providing a cradle of unsought meaning to hold the instant of transcendent powerlessness. In that moment of acceptance, just as in a crisis met with surrender, there is nothing left but grace.

Changes

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Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change… It somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better… This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.

Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, p.165

‘Changes’ was a song performed by a long lost band of mine, The Society of the Walking Wounded, and written by our frontman, my best friend Malcolm Long. Malcolm died well over thirty years ago; I still miss him, meet him again in dreams, think of him almost daily.

“Change and decay in all around I see…” in the words of the old hymn. And yet change and ending and decay are necessary for transformation, indispensable for new life. We are frail and temporary creatures, all of us who love, and live. Grief is as inevitable as death itself, and inextricable from love.

The contemplative way is as much a way of understanding this as it is a way of liberation. It is often thought of as liberation from suffering; I would differ. Whatever may be said about the perils of attachment,  truly to love is to know that grieving is as much a part of it as joy; on the contemplative path one learns that not only is it so, but that it is right that it should be so. As Nick Cave points out, suffering is the primary engine of change; life itself is change; suffering is essential to life.

This is not unkind or harsh; the path teaches us that it is not to be fought, or raged against: death is as normal and ultimately beneficial as the fall of leaves in autumn – they are falling fast here now – and in its way as beautiful. The grace of change is being itself, and lies in the hollow of the open ground like a hazel dormouse in her nest of leaves.

Faith and contemplation

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

There’s a kind of hunger that draws one in, further and further. It’s not that present practice is wrong, or inadequate; but that there’s always more, literally infinitely more, and the heart cannot rest – it has to go on, further in and further up. This is, to put it in rather technical words, part of the phenomenology of contemplation – first person experience, in everyday words.

One of the great pitfalls of the spiritual life is to refuse to see, or understand, what is given to us in first person experience, because it does not fit what we have been taught, or have come to believe. Perhaps this is why contemplatives and the contemplative way seem so often deeply threatening to both religious authorities and secular presumptions, and why they so often provoke resistance and even oppression. (One has only to read the biography of St John of the Cross, of Gutoku Shinran, or even of Eihei Dōgen, to see what I mean.)

Faith, in one sense at least, is just this “unreserved opening of the mind” to contemplative experience, and the acceptance of its implications for one’s life, however difficult or unlikely they may seem.

The Sufi scholar Oludamini Ogunnaike, speaking in an interview:

There’s a famous Ḥadīth that says, “God is beautiful and that he loves beauty.” Here beauty is not just a distraction or temptation, but instead a reflection of the Divine, it is the Divine.

But this can mess you up.

The analogy that one of my teachers uses is birds flying into windows. The world is like that, a fun house of mirrors. You see the beautiful face of the Divine reflected everywhere, but if you just run toward it at full tilt, you’re going to keep smacking into it. You’re not going to get to kiss your beloved. So you have to learn to navigate the world of reflections of Divine Beauty. The sweetness we taste in sugar is a reflection or manifestation of Divine Sweetness, but if we just eat sugar all day, we’re going to get very sick. So it’s a process of recognizing and understanding the manifestations of the Real in every phenomenon and treating each with the proper adab or courtesy it demands. You can see God in a crouching tiger, but it’s still usually good adab or manners to give it a wide berth.

Contemplation seems to require patience, and stillness. I know from my own past life the danger of running to kiss reflections! But still the hunger, and the excitement, call us on. To sit still, in silence, in faith, when the tides of yearning are at flood, is perhaps the hardest and most necessary thing we shall have to do.

Keeping it simple

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Remember that thoughts are only the product of the momentary confluence of a great number of factors. In themselves they do not exist. Thus, the moment they arise, recognize that their nature is emptiness. They will immediately lose their power to produce other thoughts, and the chain of illusion will be broken. Recognize the emptiness of thoughts and let them relax into the natural clarity of the transparent and unaltered mind.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, quoted by Mathieu Ricard in The Art of Meditation

In my last post I wrote of the conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know to becoming vulnerable and available to illumination, to open objectless awareness.

The obstacle, of course, is the incessant passage of thoughts through the mind – a stream which of course we cannot halt, since they are in this context no more than noise thrown off by the machinery of the conscious mind. But mere recognition will loosen their grip on our attention; and as Dilgo Khyentse points out, they will fall away of themselves from the awakening mind.

Simplicity, poverty of intent, remains at the heart of practice for me. The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm (contemplative practice based on the Jesus Prayer) and the Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening. But really, faithfully and regularly sitting still – whether formally, as in shikantaza, or just resting for a moment on the way – is all that is needed in the end.

Silence and language

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Even in silence, the linguistic apparatus of our brain continues in the background wash of thought. Even when we avoid the incessant temptation to follow, to identify with thoughts as they arise, we know they are there, spinning their webs of language in the corners of our awareness like spiders in the corners of the window frame.

We can attend to our breathing, to our proprioception, to the sensations of our body resting where it rests; but the thoughts with their language continue as before. What if we were to use the linguistic yearnings of our mind in our contemplative practice itself?

Stephanie Paulsell: “Contemplation… [i]t’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God… There are these things… reading, meditation, prayer… you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift…”

And then there are the prayers of repetition, acting almost as a semantic container for presence, a way of using the mind’s own hunger for language as a route to silence.

True contemplative silence is no more than resting in the objectless awareness that lies at the end of words. And Stephanie Paulsell is right – it is a gift – one that no intention, no act of will can secure. But we can remain still; it seems that, for me at least, stillness is the central thing “you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available”.

All of practice comes down to stillness in the end; and it is only in stillness that words can finally settle out like sediment in the troubled pond of thought, to leave the steady light of what is in the unobscured clarity of awareness.

Freedom!

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Abbot Christopher Jamison writes:

The first Christian monks and nuns were inspired by the example of St Antony. They lived in the deserts of the Middle East in the fourth and fifthccenturies and became known as the desert fathers and mothers, living in loose associations and gradually founding more structured monasteries. The wisest of them acquired the title abba for men and amma for women, meaning father and mother respectively, which later become abbot and abbess… They did not use the language of freedom, a language that has come to dominate modern discourse. Their central concern was purity of heart, which we might describe as freedom of spirit…

The desert fathers compared purity of heart to the target that a javelin thrower aimed at in the ancient games; a small target may be difficult to hit but it can be done and the effort required draws out the best from the thrower. So purity of heart describes the condition of human beings at their best, when the human capacity for love finds complete expression devoid of any selfish thought. To arrive at this state of being is demanding because human beings are continually tempted to behave selfishly, but the example of many saints shows that it can be done.

Finding Happiness: A monk’s guide to life, Christopher Jamison

So freedom of spirit is found in freedom from identifying with the thoughts of the self – in laying down the self as the centre of experience. Heidegger’s sense of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) from our manipulative human wilfulness then leads to contemplative openness to the mystery of Being (Sein).

But so much of the time we do identify with our self-centred patterns of thought – with the “self” on which our thought is centred – and become entangled once again. We miss the target…

Now, in the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” that last word gives pause to many who see it, in the context of too many clumsy sermons, in a narrowly moralistic light. But the Greek – the Jesus Prayer developed among those early desert monastics of whom Abbot Christopher writes, and was first written down and disseminated in Greek – word is αμαρτωλόν (harmartolón), and αμαρτωλόν carries the sense of “to forfeit by missing the mark”. For the Desert Mothers and Fathers, sin was just that, missing the target of purity of heart, of freedom of spirit; it is not in any direct sense somehow “transgressing a list of naughty-things-to-be-avoided”.

We slip so easily into self-identifying thoughts; freedom of spirit consists in freedom from this self-identification. Note, though, that it is not freedom from thoughts themselves. We can do little about those – they seem to be often no more than artifacts that the brain throws off in its everyday functioning – but we can learn not to identify with them, And that is what practice is for.

About being awake

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Oddly enough, I do mean just being awake, now; not planning to wake up, not undertaking to awaken after sufficient steps (hours, certifications) have been acquired.

Joan Tollifson, writing in Exploring What Is:

The kind of spirituality that interests me is not about a belief system or a philosophy. It’s about being awake Here / Now—seeing through the imaginary problem that we think is binding us and realizing the boundless freedom that is our ever-present True Nature. This realization is not something that happens once-and-for-all. It’s not an event in the past or the future. Awakening is always NOW.

When I talk about meditation, I’m not talking about some methodical practice where you repeat a mantra, visualize a deity, label your thoughts, or try very hard to keep your attention focused on the breath. I’m not opposed to those practices if they are of interest to you, but what I’m talking about is something much more open, a way of being that is without control or manipulation. I’m talking about being awake, being present in this moment (this ever-present Now) in an open way that is at once relaxed and alert—allowing everything to be as it is, not grasping or resisting anything, not trying to change anything—simply being.

Meditation is a kind of open inquiry into the living reality Here / Now—not opposing anything, not trying to achieve anything. There is no method in this approach, no set of instructions to follow. It is a pathless path, an open discovery, ever-fresh, ever-new. In Zen, the only instruction you may get in the beginning is to just sit down and see what happens.

Can you hear the bird singing, cheep-cheep-cheep? And the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the traffic? The sound of the airplane passing overhead? Can you feel the breathing and all the different sensations throughout the body? Can you see the thoughts that pop up, the headlines they deliver, the stories they tell, the conclusions they assert? Can you sense the spaciousness of the listening presence, the awareness, that you are? Is it possible right now to be awake to this whole undivided happening just as it is?

True meditation can happen on the city bus while riding to work or in a waiting room before an appointment. It can happen while stuck in a traffic jam or while sitting quietly at home in an armchair. It can happen on an airplane or on a park bench. It can happen while walking through nature or while walking through the city. It can happen in your kitchen or in a prison cell, in a hospital bed or at the office. It can happen with eyes open or closed, in the lotus position or stretched out in a recliner, in solitude or in the midst of a crowd. It can happen in formal meditation or it can happen spontaneously and unexpectedly while drinking a cup of coffee or sitting at a stop light. It can be a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours—it is outside of time. It is always Now.

Formal (i.e. deliberate, intentional) meditation, if you strip away all the whistles and bells that often get added on, is nothing more or less than a kind of simplified space where we stop all our usual activity (all the talking and doing) and simply be here. We put down the books and magazines, the smart phones and tablets, we turn off the TV and the computer and the music, and we sit quietly doing nothing. Simply being this awake presence, this present happening. By slowing things down and stripping away all that typically demands our attention, energy can gather Here / Now in bare presence and awareness. We begin to notice the ever-changing non-conceptual happening of this moment in ever more subtle ways—the sounds of traffic, the sensations in the body, the smell of rain, the breathing, the chirping of a bird. We may begin to actually feel the spaciousness and the fluidity of what’s here before we think about it. And we may notice that every sound, every color and shape, every sensation, every thought, every breath appears Here / Now in this vast unbound space of awareness.

This is just what I mean when I so often say that all that is needed is to keep still. It is Heidegger’s “openness to Being”, Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit; the essence of both the mystical and the philosphical understanding of Gelassenheit. In other words, just sitting still. The “vast unbound state of awareness” is not a thing to achieve, an accomplishment of some kind. It is no thing: it is always there, now. If it made any sense (it doesn’t) to ascribe to it intentionality, you could say it is “always waiting to reveal itself”. I would want to say that it is, now; and that we merely miss it, always thinking, as we do, of then.

What is it? If I may be permitted to use nouns (they’re not really the right things, but we’ll have to do our best with what we have) then it is the ground of being itself, open, dimensionless, before space or time, before extent or becoming: Istigkeit (Huxley) – that which solely is.

The trouble with all these words, of course, is that helpful though they set out to be, they actually obscure as much as they illuminate. The only illumination is Now; present, but without duration. Oh, do just sit still – it will explain itself.

All it comes down to

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All that practice comes down to, in the end, is acceptance: that open stillness that listens to the unsaid, watches quietly for the opening of the undifferentiated ground beneath all that is, the Istigkeit that is no thing, but Being itself.

What Spinoza called “intuitive knowledge” (see Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, p.30) is only this: the releasement of grasping – the surrender of the idea of the separate self – that is reached directly in choiceless awareness.

There is nothing else, really. The house of peace (Heidegger’s Wohnen) is no less than this: to let go of all striving: to accept, finally, one’s oneness with the simple, undifferentiated ground. Sitting still, the door just opens of itself, that’s all.