Category Archives: blogging

Godless?

At this point in my life, I think there isn’t a god or Higher Being out there 100% of the time. My renouncement of God is too fresh, and a major reason I felt relief at my unbelief was the end of the cognitive dissonance I experienced for so long. I don’t think of the universe as a god-substitute, somehow working with will and intention to bring people and opportunities our way. I truly believe that no one is in charge anywhere out there in the background of our lives.

Yet I considered the label “Christian atheist”… not because I do and don’t believe in God, but because I feel like I am an atheistic cultural Christian, akin to a secular Jewish person. Because I continue to be culturally involved in Christianity while I attend church with my family and socialize with predominantly religious friends. I still enjoy discussing (picking apart) the Bible, and I enjoy debating spiritual theories. I like this approach because as I laid out earlier, Christianity created me. The foundation of my life was centered around Christ. It greatly contributed (for better or for worse) to so much of my essence—my values, my morality, my language, my behavior, my tastes, my sexuality, my life choices.

Sarah Henn Hayward, Giving Up God, p.155

Although for most of the middle years of my life I would have called myself a contemplative Christian of one kind or another, I never really shared Sarah Henn Hayward’s sense of being a cultural Christian. I grew up as the child of a single parent, outside of any formal religion. My mother, a painter and sculptor, was an early example of someone who might today refer to themselves as spiritual, but not religious; and while most of my twenties were spent trying to find some kind of spiritual compass, the last place I thought of looking was within the Christian faith. Most of the time my adult friends were not Christian – some were militantly atheist – and I was rarely entirely at home in a church milieu.

Nevertheless, since my own “giving up God” experience over the last five years, I have experienced something of the tension Hayward describes. Like her, I found Christian language had become “infused into the air I breathed” (ibid. p.156), and it has been difficult at times to live without it. Appropriating another religious language from a culture far removed from my own would not have helped – long ago I discovered that, intricate and finely honed as it was, Buddhist language and iconography didn’t really do it for me. Inevitably I do find I borrow technical terminology here and there, but that live electricity of a sacred poetry deeply embedded in my own culture is lacking.

The language of scientific materialism, while I tend to agree with many, if not most, of its conclusions, doesn’t do very well when it comes to the phenomenology of spirituality. It is probably best left to those who use it in their daily work; in any case, stretched too far, it begins to sound like pseudoscience, after the manner of Deepak Chopra or JZ Knight.

To muddle on, as I have done over the last few years, occasionally using the word “God” in Paul Tillich’s sense of the ground of being, or Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, occasionally repurposing bits of Scripture, occasionally filching Buddhist or Taoist phrases to use out of context, seems to be the best I can do; although even academic philosophers often seem to find themselves reinventing language to suit their own formal requirements – Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work comes to mind, not to mention Spinoza’s Euclidian complexities in his Ethics. In any case, I have no formal philosophical training whatsoever; and moreover, I usually find myself distrusting academic philosophy when applied to spiritual intuitions.

Perhaps I am doing the best I can. Certainly over the last year or so I have become more comfortable with what I can’t do in terms of language. I know that my writing can verge on the incoherent, but at least I feel as though I’m beginning to be able to say what I mean, to put words to what David Jones so memorably called “the actually loved and known”.

An admission

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It seems to me that perhaps I may have been precipitate in switching back entirely to Blogger as a platform. It is hard, sometimes, to admit that one may have made a mistake; but possibly I have done just that.

Instead of my readership from the WordPress blog following me over to Blogger, I now seem to have two separate sets of readers – with a few honourable exceptions. Certainly my list of subscribers on WordPress remains constant; they do not appear to have resubscribed on Blogger en masse!

For the time being, then. it appears that I may have to run both plaforms in parallel until something settles out and I can continue on one or the other. That having been said, I shall post repost here the handful of posts from the last week on Blogger; for a while at least I shall publish any new posts on both platforms.

Needless to say, I shall be interested to hear from any of my followers – once the initial sense of nuisance has passed, perhaps – which of the two platforms you find most useful as a reader.

Back to Blogger!

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I’ve been becoming increasingly despondent about WordPress’ attempts to turn themselves from a blogging platform into a social medium, so I am reverting to good old Blogger. For future posts, please go to An Open Ground, using this link. You can request an email subscription by using the Contact Form in the right sidebar, below the RSS feed buttons. See you there!

Home again

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We’ve been away in Durham, visiting old haunts, and we’re just beginning to pick up where we left off. In the meantime, some words from Bankei, who always manages to surprise me:

Don’t hate the arising of thoughts or stop the thoughts that do arise. Simply realize that our original mind, right from the start, is beyond thought, so that no matter what, you never get involved with thoughts. Illuminate original mind, and no other understanding is necessary… all you’ve got to do is acknowledge with profound faith and realization that, without your producing a single thought or resorting to any cleverness or shrewdness, everything is individually recognized and distinguished of itself. And all because the marvelously illuminating Buddha Mind is unborn and smoothly manages each and every thing.

…that which isn’t concerned with self-power or other-power but transcends them both is what my teaching is about. Isn’t that right? When you listen this way with the Unborn, you transcend whatever there is. And all the rest of your activities are perfectly managed like this with the Unborn too. For the man who functions with the Unborn, whoever he may be, all things are perfectly managed. So, whoever he is, the man of the Unborn isn’t concerned with either self-power or other-power, but transcends them both.

Peter Haskel, Bankei Zen, Translations from the Record of Bankei

Lenses, or doors

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Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes…

The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ – phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage – so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air.

There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoché – they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly.

Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Thinking and writing as I do about spiritual experience and practice carries with it at least one persistent difficulty: that of finding words for that which is by definition, almost, beyond words. When I confine myself to quasi-scientific language, shunning anything that sounds too “religious” or “woo-woo”, I all too easily find myself in a barren, materialistic wasteland, bereft of the living inwardness of actual experience. On the other hand, if I allow free rein to words like “God”, and “mystical”, it is almost impossible to avoid the “isms”, and the coloured lenses through which they force me to see, to describe even to myself, the inner landscape of the spiritual.

You see, sometimes religious terminology, whether Buddhist or, more seductively for me at any rate, Christian, seems to be the most appropriate – if not the only possible – language in which to discuss the spiritual. But then I find myself thinking in religious language, and before I know it I am experiencing my experiences as scenes in some sort of inner stained-glass window. I don’t merely describe them to myself in those terms: they actually arrive as those sorts of experiences, tinted and glittering with two millennia of resonant imagery.

Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, [Husserl teaches that] one is… able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.

Wikipedia

If all is going according to plan, of course, one’s practice should provide the necessarily astringent antidote to general or naive isms of all kinds. But in trying to write, I have to think; and if I think in the terms that I’ve adopted in order to write… you see the problem?

The danger – and it is a danger, not just an inconvenience – is that a disconnect may occur between the living, wordless awareness at the ground of things, and the view through the lenses that religious language, and all that that entails, have dropped between the experience and the experiencing mind. If this is not seen in time, then the usual remedies of mindfulness and attention may no longer work, and one may find oneself in a spiritual crisis, “often called spiritual emergency, awakening or psycho-spiritual crisis… a turbulent period of psychological opening and transformation”, when the mind’s reliably everyday interface temporarily shatters under the pressure of massive cognitive disconnection. Too often, these events or states are mistakenly diagnosed as psychotic or depressive illness, with disastrous consequences.

The power of religious language over even the most rigorously honest thought and expression can be seen in the work of any number of last century’s poets, from David Jones to TS Eliot to Dylan Thomas. The escape route, it appears, was spotted almost two centuries earlier by William Blake, when, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he wrote, “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 narrow chinks of language, the language we use to describe even to ourselves what is beyond language, must swing away before the bright ground of all that is.

What all this means for the poor spiritual writer is another matter, perhaps. Effing the ineffable is a perilous endeavour, choose how. But we must do our best with the tools at our disposal, whether they are home-produced or borrowed from another culture. We just have to be especially careful, perhaps, not to cut ourselves with the sharp edges.

*If this post strikes too uncomfortable a chord, or if you simply would like to explore this question of spiritual crises further, I have added some hopefully useful links to the foot of my Advice page.

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.

Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin

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Einzelgänger (f. Einzelgängerin) is one of my favourite German compound nouns. It’s usually translated as “loner”, though Google Translate also offers “maverick, rogue, nonconformist”. Literally of course it means “single walker” – and that comes closer to the way I always think of it. There’s almost an eremitical flavour to it…

By nature I seem to be an Einzelgänger myself, though it has taken me a while to develop the courage of my convictions on the matter. In spiritual matters, of course, there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and of some tradition within that religion. Worse, one may become – especially in most Buddhist traditions – someone’s disciple. I’m not at all certain the guru/disciple (teacher/follower, etc.) relationship is always a healthy one, hallowed though it is by long use. Sam Harris writes:

One of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path is the basic uncertainty about the nature of spiritual authority. If there are important truths to be discovered through introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this—and one should expect to meet a range of experts, novices, fools, and frauds along the way. Of course, charlatans haunt every walk of life. But on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to detect. Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter. When learning to play a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can, in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. All the relevant facts are in plain view. If you can’t consistently hit the little white ball where you want it to go, you have something to learn from anybody who can. The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.

It may well be that for some people there are those, further along their own chosen path, who can wisely and compassionately provide the most helpful and literally enlightening instruction. Perhaps it depends to some extent on how closely that path happens to conform to one already mapped out – Vajrayana, perhaps, or traditional Advaita Vedanta. But more to the point, I honestly think, is simple temperament.

We are used by now to the way people may be broadly divided into introverts and extroverts, more precisely perhaps into the 16 personalities of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. We may even have stumbled across Elaine Aron and her concept of the highly sensitive person. I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship.

I truly believe that I have discovered more, about myself and about the way things are, in the last few years outside of any formal commitment than I had in decades inside. Of course I am getting old, and some might say – with at least a grain of truth perhaps – that this is all a function of age. But it doesn’t feel as though it is just that. It actually feels as though I have finally found the path I should have been treading all along. I only wish – in a manner of speaking, outside the constraints of cause and effect! – that I had had someone to explain this to me long ago: which may be the whole point of writing a blog like this.

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…

I am a humanist because…

Blogging (an aside)

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Not for the first time I’ve been reflecting on blogging as a medium, helped in this instance by a commenter on my post yesterday.

“A blog (a truncation of “weblog”) is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” (Wikipedia) A blog post, as I use the term, is a special kind of short-form essay, usually on a particular subject.

Blog posts have their limitations. Mine tend to be 700 words or so on average; anything over about 2000 seems to me to be unwieldy, and clunky in the way many long poems can tend to be. At their best they can be, as I suggested in my recent post ‘Road songs‘, a sort of literary form all their own. I wrote there,

At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Sometimes I’m guilty of biting off more than I can chew. In yesterday’s post ‘Atheism and contemplation‘ I attempted to introduce, by way of a few quotes from one of my favourite writers, Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’ model of consciousness. Now, I attempted to squeeze into a medium-length blog post something that takes Dennett – one of the great philosophers of our time – more than 450 pages (and two appendices) to set out (Consciousness Explained), using a few paragraphs lifted from the work of a psychologist, academic and memeticist. I am none of these things…

I am a contemplative, though, albeit an amateur, or freelance, one – being neither a monastic nor under any other sort of vows – and Dennett’s philosophy of mind is something that has spoken deeply to me. It put into words, and into careful argued thought, impressions that my own practice had already brought home. Reading Blackmore’s condensation of Dennett (Zen and the Art of Consciousness pp. 34ff.) was one of those, “Oh yes, of course!” moments for me – and it is this illumination I tried, rather than the theory itself, to squeeze into my post.

Does blogging work for these profound questions? Can it ever? I don’t know. I’m sure Daniel Dennett wouldn’t have written 450-odd pages (and two appendices) if he’d thought that 750 words would do. But to convey the immediacy of experience? Yes, I think it may – and that’s why, despite the perils and obvious difficulties, I do still go on blogging after all these years.