Category Archives: Contemplative practice

Just noticing…

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Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

There is always a risk, of course, in talking like this. People who like things cut and dried are often suspicious of what appears to them to be an impractical vagueness; those from a background of religious orthodoxy will wonder if there’s a heresy lurking in there somewhere.

Robert C Solomon writes:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand. This is not to say that intelligent people are more spiritual, but neither is it to buy into a long tradition of equating spirituality with innocence misconstrued as ignorance or even as stupidity.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either. Toni Bernhard suggests that,

[i]n this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Earlier this year I wrote:

We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.

Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen from a mountain hut.

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow – and here I hesitate, as Krishnamurti suggested – that someone is prepared to do this, and perhaps to ‘fess up to doing it on a regular basis. Maybe someone has to…

Now, or whatever it is

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Now, this moment, this placeless place between then and then, is more than the growing point, more than a beginning or a terminus. I would say it was timeless, but actually it is less than that. It is dimensionless, empty of any thing, emptier than anything. Perfectly void, it is the source of everything; infinitely less than an instant, all times flow from it, inexhaustible.

If you can be still enough, before and to come may drop away like leaves from the stem of now. The empty instant appears, immeasurable, perfect, unperishing. The aeons and their gravities flow from it and it is not lessened; the curving distances and their sheaves of light are born in the hollow of its unbeing.

Little and quiet, its unwearying expanse supports the stars. There is nowhere you could go that it is not, nothing you could remember that it doesn’t precede; no future you could dream of or wait for that it is not already awaiting.

Now is the safest place, the final refuge, the healing of every loss. You cannot fall out of now, cannot lose or forget it. It is gentler than sleep, stronger than death. Perhaps you could call it love.

Changes beneath the surface…

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This is another basic element of what we already know about meditation: What happens during your times of meditation is not important. It is a difficult truth for us to swallow, especially at the beginning of the journey, because we are looking for something to happen. We are investing the valuable time we have into meditation, so we want to be able to judge from immediate results what is happening. It is only gradually that we learn to let go of that greedy, rather technological, approach to meditation. We learn that what happens in meditation is much less important than what happens in our life as a whole, and that it is in a new view of life, a new vision of life, and above all in our relationships with one another and in our perception of the priority of love, that the real experience bears fruit.

Laurence Freeman

This is one of the key understandings when it comes to contemplative practice: that the point is not really, at bottom, any metaphysical conclusion so much as the effect on one’s life. This is where the contemplative life is set aside from philosophy in the conceptual sense, and becomes a way of living more than a way of thinking. Not only does one’s conception of life and the world change; but one’s whole pattern of relationships to it: one’s feelings and one’s very perception come gradually to change – imperceptibly at first – only later does one discover what has happened, how peace may have replaced anger, curiosity taken the place of worry.

Surrender

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From time to time, it dawns on me that surrender is at the heart of what contemplation has come to mean, at least in my own practice. It’s a state that doesn’t really lend itself to being described dualistically – surrender to anyone or anything – but more a quality of attention that relinquishes any attempt to interpret, let alone direct. It doesn’t take an object, in fact.

Such surrender is easier to conceive of, or at least to describe, in religious terms; but that brings us again to that dualistic “surrender to”, and that is not what I am trying to express. An inner sense of release is more like it: alert and wakeful, but not irritably questing, or looking for words to describe something that might be carried off like a prize back to the world of the transactional.

Of course there is a paradox here – there always is! – but language can only go so far, helpful as it is. Richard Rohr writes:

Reality is paradoxical. If we’re honest, everything is a clash of contradictions, and there is nothing on this created earth that is not a mixture at the same time of good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, endearing and maddening, living and dying. St. Augustine called this the “paschal mystery.”

Western Christianity has tended to objectify paradoxes in dogmatic statements that demand mental agreement instead of any inner experience of the mystery revealed. At least we “worship” these paradoxes in the living collision of opposites we call Jesus…

The easiest thing, so easy that we mostly do it without ever recognising its being done, is to put our own interpretation on spiritual events. If we know what we have experienced, if we can even stand over against it as one who experiences, then we feel we can keep it – and in so doing, it is lost. Or we are; only if we truly admitted that, we might be back on track.

Stillness, then, is at the heart of our – what, prayer? It is more than a mere discipline, this sitting still. What rises in the stillness holds us, as it always has. It is the source and end of all that is, and precedes time itself. Light is possibly as near as we can get…

Form and mystery

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Your consent to God in [contemplative practice] is something of a paradox. You consent to both sides of God—form and mystery. The mystery of God is beyond concepts, forms, and images, yet concepts, forms, and images emerge out of this transcendent mystery to lead you deeper. Where are you led? Deeper into mystery…

David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer

All contemplative practice is, it seems to me, rooted in stillness and quiet. Our silence is the anchorhold of all our being present, the place where what we are drops away into what is.

Frenette goes on (ibid.) “The life that you are given by God, the life you are given by God’s breathing, is beyond symbols, concepts, and anything that is normally called psychological. God’s presence is more ontological—rooted in the nature of being itself.” It is this “nature of being” that is the nature of silence itself (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV).

Ground level

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The ground of being is simply what is, at its deepest level: Eckhart’s istigkeit. All that is rests in the ground by its own nature, and that includes us. But we are conscious; more than that, self-aware. In being aware of our own being, becoming truly aware in silence of our own isness as not separate from what is, we realise that the ground of our own self is not other than the ground of all that is.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “Mystical hope would simply be what happens when we touch this innermost ground and it floods forth into our being as strength and joy. Hope would be the Mercy – divine love itself – coursing through our being like lightning finding a clear path to the ground.”

She goes on,

You may have noticed that those three experiences Bede Griffiths mentioned as “pathways to the center” have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come hack from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

This realisation of our own identity with the ground (it reminds me of the Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā) seems to me to be precisely Bourgeault’s “back staircase.” It is only in the total poverty of silence and stillness that we can find it, but it is our only home.

What is present

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The present is unconditioned, radically permeable; you could call it eternity. So little of the activity of the mind appears to be concerned with the present – there are worries about the future; regrets at the past; what-ifs, endless what-ifs of every colour and condition – but actually to keep still in the present, that is more difficult, and yet it is our only solace, our only freedom.

Of course this is why we practice, really. There is nothing in our mind, not in our thoughts or our imaginings, not in our desires or our interpretations of what we sense, that is truly now. By the time we perceive, by the time we identify and analyse what we see or feel, it is already past.

But suppose we could just sense – not remark upon, identify, classify – just sense. Whether we sense our own body and its autonomic systems – breathing, sitting, even digestion – or whether we simply register the input from our senses as it is (sound without its being the sound of anything, light without anything lit up) perhaps we could be as close to the present as it is given us to be in life.

Now is not then, nor is it to come: it is not even the space of some minute fraction of a second, it is infinitely thin – and so it is infinite, without time. It rests in the ground directly, and so it is our true home. For us, though we cannot know what it is, perhaps it alone is true.

Groundswell

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I use the phrase “The Ground of Being” – though I don’t normally capitalise it – often on this blog. It is usually credited to Paul Tillich, who used it in his Systematic Theology to refer to God as being-itself, though I doubt if he was its originator. The concept itself has been around for centuries, in Christian mysticism, in the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition, in the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao…

The ground of being is there, and only there, when we come to an end of ourselves. It lies far beyond all we know as self, or other – though it can appear to us so utterly other that we are tempted to hide from it – and yet the way to it is inward, into the extreme depths of what we are. In Cynthia Bourgeault’s words, “it is the spring at the bottom of the well of our being through which hope is continually renewed.”

Ontologically, the ground of being is the source of all that is; in Paul’s words, “He [Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) It is hard to get away from what would appear to be religious language here, though it is as approximate and metaphorical as any other. Matthew Fox writes, “Divinity is found in the depth of things, the foundation of things, the profundity of things. We all have a depth, a ground, a presence and there, says Eckhart, lies divinity, for ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.'”

Yet the ground of being is no thing: it precedes thingness. One can’t really use it, in any meaningful sense, as the object of a sentence, and yet it keeps us wanting to use it as a verb, which is perhaps the reason why the writer known as John opened his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 NIV)

It seems that actually to encounter the ground is way beyond our pay grade. All we can do is to be willing to be encountered by it (though to be without it would be to be without existence at all). Cynthia Bourgeault has a quote for us:

Bede Griffiths, one of the great contemplative masters of our time, claimed that there are actually three routes to the center. You can have a near-death experience. You can fall desperately in love. Or you can begin a practice of meditation. Of the three, he said with a somewhat mischievous smile, meditation is probably the most reliable starting point.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

The ground is the end, that to which all things return. Kathleen Dowling Singh wrote, “[Death] is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being…” It is the safest place, out of which one cannot fall: it might even be called Love. In Dowling Singh’s words, again, “Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process, love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the formless.”


Hic sunt dracones

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Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

David Bohm, quoted by Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan

Yesterday I mentioned the difficulty of writing, or even thinking, about spiritual realities without a set of symbols (like Christian iconography, or the elaborate tantric mythologies of Vajrayana Buddhism) that can provide a means for grasping the ungraspable, and the despair that can result from the loss of such a symbology. But there are – I hesitate to call them techniques – paths that undercut the whole ideational thing that symbols allow. To use examples from the two religious traditions I mentioned, the practice outlined in The Cloud of Unknowing, and the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dzogchen, both cut through Bohm’s circular paradox like Alexander’s sword through the Gordian knot. Sam Harris points this out neatly in Chapter 4 of Waking Up, in the context of the risks that may attend non-dual teachings without an accompanying discipline.

I’m all too clearly aware that an account like the one I published yesterday may, while intriguing, give the impression that whatever illumination I experienced came merely out of the blue. A commenter on Silent Assemblies, where I also published yesterday’s post, pointed out that others (he mentions the Quaker Isaac Penington in particular) may come to illumination “[a]fter a long period of seeking or contemplation, [when] there is a gradual loss of identity and sense of confusion, which can be very painful.” While out of the blue experiences may sometimes occur, (yesterday I mentioned Ramana Maharshi and Eckhart Tolle, who each, incidentally, had suffered deeply psychologically and spiritually, if without any preceding practice) I think Penington’s experience, and mine, may be more typical.

Once again, from a point of view deliberately outside of any religious tradition or language (though of course informed by their insights) I’d seriously recommend (re)reading Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I don’t know of a better introduction to this whole illumination thing than Harris’ book, especially since he, both here and online, carefully avoids recommending entering on the path of any religion, and “rejects the dichotomy between spirituality and rationality, … seek[ing] to define a middle path that preserves spirituality and science but does not involve religion.” (Wikipedia)

No thing at all

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Over the last few months I have written little. If I am honest, I should have to say that this has not been because I have had nothing to say, so much as that I had run out of words.

Over the long years of my Christian contemplative practice – from the age of thirty, maybe – I was able to draw on the deep well of Christian iconography, theology, the Bible itself, for words and images to tell myself about the journey I was on; words which I could readily share. Since then it has been more difficult, much more difficult. I am not a Buddhist. Despite my great respect for Buddhism’s 2,500 years of spiritual and psychological research and development, and my love for many Buddhist writers classical and contemporary, their words do not on the whole “do it for me” in the way that the Christian tradition so often has.

Nonetheless, despite a couple of abortive attempts to return to formal, organised religion, and despite nearly a year of trying to live out a kind of “churchless Christianity”, I could not with any intellectual honesty understand myself as a member of a Christian church any longer. The faith that is indistinguishable from community, from the gathered people (ekklēsia) that is the church, simply no longer functioned as a descriptor for where I found myself.

Increasingly, despite (or because of) my subsequent unwavering practice of broadly vipassana-based meditation, or a version of centering prayer, I felt lost, my heart clogged with the dust of broken words, dry and hollowed out. I had no idea who I was any more.

It came to the point where all I could do was cry out (to whom?) in the cold hours before dawn, that I was lost, so lost. No maps I knew showed this desert place, wherever it was, and besides, my compass no longer worked. In this condition, tired out, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, light poured through the window across the bed. I was light myself, empty and crystal clear. No, I was not. I, was not; except that there was a gossamer memory that knew itself as me, someone who had, effectively, died in the night. “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.” (Andreas Müller)

That phrase, no thing, was all that was left of language that morning. (It is a phrase that has been with me, resonant and entirely resistant to explanation, for many years.) I cannot possibly describe the freedom, the irresistible joy that was left where I had been.

Since, the joy and the freedom have not dimmed. The gossamer memory of me still seems to function perfectly well as a way to get around in the phenomenal world, but it is no longer convincing. It is as transparent as glass. I so love all that is, even if it is no thing. Especially as it is no thing.

What happened? I don’t know. Of course I don’t. What happened is not the kind of thing “I” could know. This seems like a clever answer, a smarty-pants way to get one up on my readers, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I can say, though, that it is not “something” that “I” achieved. Müller again: “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.”

So is this the fruit of meditation? The culmination of some kind of a process? Obviously not. And yet. Could it have happened without a couple of years’ steady practice of meditation, following nearly forty of Christian contemplation? Yes, obviously. People like Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi each had their illumination following moments of great stress or despair, not unlike, according to their own descriptions, the desert place where I had found myself that night. They do not seem to have spent long years meditating in preparation. Ramana hadn’t had time, anyway; he was only sixteen.

But perhaps, for me at least, practice made a place where it was possible. It just happened, that much is clear. For me, it seems to have happened while I was dreamlessly asleep. But maybe practice functioned like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. I don’t know. Something had to get me out there into that desert – something had to shear away the props that upheld the idea of a me who could get somewhere, even into a desert.

There is certainly nothing I could have done to force such a thing to happen (and from the point of view of “I” that would have felt not unlike some sort of suicide) and it doesn’t happen to or for “me” anyhow. It happens. What is beyond is no thing at all.