Category Archives: Contemplative practice

The doors of perception

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[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

William Blake wrote, in 1790, “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 passage has inspired many works and attributions, notably the name of Jim Morrison’s band The Doors, and Aldous Huxley’s 1954 study of the spiritual implications of the use of psychedelics. But there are ways to enter here that do not involve the sudden, often perilous, force of pharmacology.

Our exclusive concern with purposeful action crowds out a vital part of human fulfilment. Some of the most valuable human experiences, observes [Arthur] Machen, come about when we simply look around us without any intention of acting on what we see. When we set aside our practical goals – if only for a moment – we may discover a wealth of meaning in our lives, which is independent of our success or failure in achieving our goals. Matter may not be soft and ductile as Machen’s reclusive mystic [in the short story ‘N’] believes, but our lives are changed when we no longer view the world through the narrow prism of our purposes.

John Gray, A Point of View, BBC website

Setting aside our practical goals, as did Arthur Machen – and the hero of ‘N’ – to wander the streets of London, or the byways of Dorset, for that matter, is one way to avoid the clangour of purposeful action long enough to glimpse the wordless isness beyond the doors of perception. When I lived in London myself, in my early twenties, I spent many hours doing just that. But another way is simply to be still.

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

What am I doing here?

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What is this project, sitting in silence for so many minutes every day? Is this a religious practice, or a psychological therapy of some kind? And what’s it for? Where is it supposed to get me, or anyone else who does this kind of thing? What’s the goal?

In Sōtō Zen there is a name for just sitting in silence: shikantaza. Brad Warner describes it like this:

When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is.

And in this moment what can you attain? You have what you have right now. Maybe in the future you’ll get something. But that’s not now.

Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.

Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space and Being

This is not a religious attitude, I think. It contains no belief that we are required to subscribe to, no creed or sanctified text, no “social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices” (Wikipedia). It doesn’t have a goal, either, not even the goal of some kind of mental or spiritual state of peace, or bliss.

What is more, especially practiced that way that I have fallen into over recent years, not being part of a church, or sangha, or Quaker meeting, even, it is quite useless. It is merely sitting still.

Ken McLeod, in an article quoted by Brad Warner on his YouTube channel, (Tricycle magazine, January 2017) writes,

Obviously there are personal choices to be made… But I think it is reckless and presumptuous to tell others how they should live their lives. Chuang Tzu describes a crooked, twisted tree that grows near a road. It is so crooked that no woodworker would ever think of cutting it down. It is just there. It may be that one day, a traveler stops beneath it to find shelter from the rain or shade from the sun. Or maybe it just stands there, because that’s what trees do.

That tree, of course, is rooted quietly in the unnameable no thing, the ground of being and the source of all that is, that’s all. But it isn’t thinking metaphysical thoughts, or instructing anyone about anything. It “just stands there, because that’s what trees do.”

Freedom

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“The freedom of love is based on the perennial renewal of love itself; it can actually grow. It is this simple: your whole life is a curriculum of love.” Jack Kornfield, No Time Like the Present.

Sitting still, to drop right back from the front of the mind, where your attention is so tightly engaged with reacting to the contents of thought and feeling, is to fall into the vastness of awareness itself. One becomes conscious of indefinable space, of a boundless clarity within which every thing, whether perception or sensation, thought or emotion simply appears, and resolves back into no thing, the ground of being itself, as transparent as the summer sky, and deeper than oceans. Wide awake, it is the source and the completion of all that is, and yet truly it is the clear emptiness long before any thing at all.

Jack Kornfield (ibid.) says that “spaciousness, love and awareness are intertwined.” He goes on, “It’s really simple. Whether it’s physical or emotional pain, anything you give space to can be transformed. Whatever the situation, widen the space; remember vastness; allow ease and perspective. Spaciousness is the doorway to freedom. Your spacious heart is your true home.”

Habit forming

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The single most important thing I have done in all my years of contemplative practice is to make a habit of it. I am just as bad as anyone else, and much worse than many, at putting things off. If I didn’t have a set time, or at least a set place in the day’s events, to meditate, I wouldn’t. There would always be something else I’d need to just get done first, or a train of thought so involving that I’d just have to look up what else had been written about it before I settled down to sit.

Someone once wrote (I can’t remember who it was now) that the best kind of practice for each of us is the one we actually do. That’s entirely true. However good and effective a practice may be, it won’t be effective for us at all as long as it is left undone.

Reality is only what is. It cannot be what was, or what might be. It is only when we actually sit still that we can see. Everything else is just a picture, a synthesis the mind presents, like one of those painting-by-numbers outlines: something to help us get from here to there, wherever there might be, even when there is the place where we have intended to sit.

[R]eality is like a huge and all-encompassing ocean. There may be different kinds of fish and seaweed and rocks, but they’re all contained inside one ocean. In the same way, there’s just one awareness, with seemingly multiple objects inside of it. If you look closer, you’ll see that there are no independent objects or distinctions––there is nothing but this one awareness. If you push this understanding one step further, you’ll realize that since it is just one awareness, you cannot even it call “one” awareness. When you know that there are two awarenesses, then you can call this “one awareness.” But when there is no “two,” there is no “one” either. It just is.

Haemin Sunim, in Tricycle, January 2020

The ground in which we rest, Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, is nothing other than this light of open awareness that we find in stillness. Tara Brach:

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.”

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Sitting, still

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Just sitting, we find out everything. Keeping still, watching, you can’t do this practice wrong. There is nothing to achieve, nothing to strain after; nothing needs to be different in any way.

Sitting still, “[a]ll you’re going to do is sit, and experience whatever is going on. This means feeling whatever you feel (emotionally or physically), think whatever you think – and just watch. There will be parts of your experience you want to (and try to) avoid and parts you want to (and try to) cling to. Just watch that too.” (Ordinary Mind Zendo)

To be conscious is all we can do, anyway. Everything that arrives, arrives in awareness. The plain mind is fundamentally bright, a mirror without stain or pattern, not different from the unconditioned light itself. Things pass through. There is no trace. This is the heart’s ease, the gift itself and the spring of compassion. What else could it be?

It is home

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote quite a long blog post on the subject of trust. As time goes on I am increasingly sure that what I said there is true:

Trust is fundamental to being human. Perhaps in fact it is fundamental to being alive, in whatever form of being we may find ourselves. It is a value that transcends culture, transcends opinion, transcends our reactions to our circumstances – even ones that strike at our very existential security, and, in their threat to future generations, strike at our evolutionary sense of purpose as inhabitants of Earth.

There is a trust that rests on a far deeper foundation that our frail lives. Each of us will die: that is the one thing of which we may be utterly certain. But our death, like our life, rests in the ground of being from which we cannot fall.

This short guided meditation from Jack Kornfield’s 2008 book The Wise Heart brings us to the heart of what practice is. The road to the encounter with our own true nature is long, and for some of us tortuous, but it is the road home:

Sit comfortably and at ease. Close your eyes. Let your body be at rest and your breathing be natural. Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice those that are loud or soft, far and near. Notice how sounds arise and vanish on their own, leaving no trace. After you have listened for a few minutes, let yourself sense, feel, or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Sense that your mind is expanding to be open like the sky—clear, vast like space. Feel that your mind extends outward beyond the most distant sounds. Imagine there are no boundaries to your mind, no inside or outside. Let the awareness of your mind extend in every direction like the open sky.

Relax in this openness and just listen. Now every sound you hear—people, cars, wind, soft sounds—will arise and pass away like a cloud in the open space of your own mind. Let the sounds come and go, whether loud or soft, far or near, let them be clouds in the vast sky of your own awareness, appearing and disappearing without resistance. As you rest in this open awareness for a time, notice how thoughts and feelings also arise and vanish like sounds in the open space of mind. Let the thoughts and feelings come and go without struggle or resistance. Pleasant and unpleasant thoughts, pictures, words, joys, and sorrows—let them all come and go like clouds in the clear sky of mind. Then, in this spacious awareness also notice how you experience the body. The mind is not in the body. The body sensations float and change in the open sky of mind. The breath breathes itself; it moves like a breeze. If you observe carefully, the body is not solid. It reveals itself as areas of hardness and softness, pressure and tingling, warm and cool sensation, all floating in the space of awareness.

Relax. Rest in this openness. Let sensations float and change. Allow thoughts and images, feelings and sounds to come and go like clouds in the clear, open space of awareness. As you do, pay attention to the consciousness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is clear, transparent, timeless, and without conflict—allowing for all things but not limited by them. This is your own true nature. Rest in it. Trust it. It is home.

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart: Buddhist Psychology for the West

Trust

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It is becoming a cliché even to say it, but we are living in exceptionally difficult times. We are just emerging, with hesitant and uncertain steps, from a global pandemic that has asked us all to accept, often on unsure pretexts, unprecedented restrictions to civil liberties and public services, to find ourselves on the brink of a world war – some would say already engaged in one – instigated by the lethal idiocy of a country whose leadership has made a career out of disinformation and untruthfulness. The economic ravages of these two circumstances are now beginning to cause real suffering (especially, as always, to the poorest among us) as inflation rises to a level many of us have not seen in our lifetimes. And all this under the umbrella of an increasingly urgent despair concerning the process of anthropogenic climate change and its effects on all life on our planet, human and otherwise. The very tools we might use to help us combat such devastating circumstances, from artificial intelligence to globalisation, are now often perceived as their causes rather than as potential means for their healing.

Distrust has become a civic virtue, it seems. We feel we cannot trust our politicians, nor the politicians of countries we have for long regarded as our allies; we feel we cannot trust the business organisations that can generate the wealth we need to overcome our difficulties; we feel we cannot trust the technological systems that allow us the ease of communication that we so desperately need to help each other think this through; we feel, we deeply feel, that we cannot trust each other. Anyone, friend or mentor, son or mother, might be a traitor in a rebellion whose causes are as muddled and uncertain as the things that caused them, might at any moment step across the shifting line of right and wrong – right and wrong as defined by whom? Certainly by no one we can trust…

Radhule Weininger writes:

Soften your gaze and connect with the world around you. Trust what you feel. Even when our world is being gravely damaged by climate change and war, we can rely on our intention to trust in a wider perspective, as well as on our dedication to open our hearts to all suffering beings. This intention and dedication situate us into our heart space and allows the energy of the heart to radiate outward into our world. Resting in the felt sense of our heart space allows us to feel calm, warm, and connected. Trust reminds us that there is a bigger context in which we are embedded. Trust allows us to relinquish, to surrender, to let go into uncertainty, while holding the faith that doors will eventually open for us. Trust allows us to go beyond our personal sense of being in control, especially in times when control is impossible. Trust allows our little heart to drop into the great heart of the world.

Tricycle magazine (April 19, 2022)

In a world whose values are defined by Twitter and Truth Social, this is culpable madness. But what if there are other values? Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape, argues that there are:

[Q]uestions about values—about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Values, therefore, translate into facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc. The most important of these facts are bound to transcend culture—just as facts about physical and mental health do. Cancer in the highlands of New Guinea is still cancer; cholera is still cholera; schizophrenia is still schizophrenia; and so, too… compassion is still compassion, and well-being is still well-being.

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (introduction)

Trust is fundamental to being human. Perhaps in fact it is fundamental to being alive, in whatever form of being we may find ourselves. It is a value that transcends culture, transcends opinion, transcends our reactions to our circumstances – even ones that strike at our very existential security, and, in their threat to future generations, strike at our evolutionary sense of purpose as inhabitants of Earth.

There is a trust that rests on a far deeper foundation that our frail lives. Each of us will die: that is the one thing of which we may be utterly certain. But our death, like our life, rests in the ground of being from which we cannot fall. Radhule Weininger continues:

Resting in this way situates us in a much wider perspective than in our personal, often fearful, little heart view. The Isha Upanishad of the Indian Vedas tells us, “This is full, that is full, from that fullness comes this fullness, if you take away this fullness from that fullness, only fullness remains.” If we allow our personal hearts to rest in the limitless, boundless, knowing fullness of the universe, then we can anchor ourselves in a reality that is inexhaustible, that does not shut down, burn out, or get overwhelmed. Resting our hearts in this inexhaustible field of awareness provides the security, the psycho-spiritual container, to hold our suffering…

Acceptance of what is allows us to let the reality of the world in, even though it may be harsh. Acceptance, here, does not suggest whitewashing or the condoning of wrongdoing, but, rather, it means seeing clearly. People can experience the feeling of acceptance when a skillful doctor tells them compassionately the truth about a difficult prognosis. The individual then has the chance to spend the rest of their life with what is essential to them. In a similar way we may be able to accept knowledge of a possibly devastating future with openness and a peaceful heart when we are held in compassionate and loving awareness.

Radhule Weininger, ibid.

In our practice we touch the centre of not merely our own lives, but of what it is to be. Awareness, the simple stillness of open awareness, can see that we are not other than that ground itself: tat tvam asi.

Harris again:

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.

Sam Harris, Waking Up, p.206

Simples

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“Simples!” as that price comparison meerkat used to say on the British TV ads. It should be. Meditation is in practice the simplest thing: just sit still. And yet, since even before the beginning of written language, countless thousands of words have been recorded on the subject of meditation, not to mention the philosophical implications of living with a practice at the centre of one’s life.

In our own time, things have only grown more that way. As well as all the books, there are now websites, blogs (like this one!), formal and informal courses, retreats, apps – a whole industrial and scholarly ecosystem built on meditation, and now not only the philosophy of meditation, but the psychology, sociology, neuroscience of meditation – even, if you know where to look, the politics of meditation. Meditation at work, meditation in educational settings, meditation and sex, meditation in prison, in hospital, for forces veterans, mothers, children…

Now all these things are in themselves good things, and have often proven beneficial, even transformative, for those who have become involved. I am myself a good customer of publishers and others. I add my own trickle to the ocean of words. But…

THERE IS ONLY one thing we need to know. It’s utterly simple. Our job, as humans who want to experience life fully, is to pay attention when we experience something…

It’s easy to get caught in the trappings of practice. There are a lot of things about practice that can be very nice, but they’re not crucial. It’s fine to wear robes, but it’s not crucial. It’s fine to chant, but it’s not crucial. It’s nice to have a very simple beautiful space to practice in, but it’s not crucial. We come to a sitting practice not to get answers but to become more aware. Sitting is simply to maintain awareness. It’s not something fancy. To maintain awareness is to be alive as a human being. There isn’t something special called Zen practice. We just try to maintain awareness, as much as we can. By awareness, I mean awareness of our mental activities, awareness of anything in our own body that we can notice, and awareness of the environment in terms of the air temperature, cars, the heat, anything that you can pick up outside yourself. Awareness; awareness; awareness.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice, pp.3,18

“It can’t be that simple!” we think. But it is. It is just that simple. All the trappings, the books, the apps, the philosophy, the religion, even – they lead (or they lead nowhere) to keeping still, and keeping aware. That’s all. Things that lead here are good; things that don’t are a distraction at best. Sit still and listen, that’s all.

These things are not other

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Andō writes:

To sit still and silent may relieve you of motion and noise.

But it won’t relieve you of the motion and noise of your mind, if your attention is there.

True stillness can be found in the midst of motion and noise. Because motion and noise arise in stillness.

No need to shut them out. Simply turn your attention to the stillness, from which all phenomena arise, including motion and noise, and you will realise you are already home.

Stillness isn’t missing, you’ve simply been looking away.

So often we look for stillness, as if it were something we could find, something we have lost, or not yet discovered. We have this sense that if only we could find the way, we might achieve enlightenment, or peace, or inner rest. These things are not other. We have not mislaid them. They do not remain to be discovered. They are already here; we are already in this place. We have just been looking at something else all the time.

One Mind

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[D]o not let the idea that your body will scatter into the four elements make you feel that everything is pointless. Instead, you should understand the principle that everything continuously scatters and then gathers together again. Practitioners do not see this world as futile, because they realize that the very impermanence of the world enables them to awaken to the truth.

If you think that, in order to know the Buddha-dharma, you have to throw away your body because the flesh is worthless, then this is an extremely misguided thought. If there was no body, what could you see and hear with? How could you encounter the world, how could you think, how could you broaden your wisdom?

Because the son exists, you can know that the father also exists; through the existence of the servant, you can see that the master exists. By understanding visible phenomena, you can come to know the invisible essence, the non-material foundation, that gives rise to and animates all visible phenomena, and which always works together as one with all things. The body is not an eternal entity, but because you have a body, you can know the workings of the foundation, the source of life and all phenomena.

Daehaeng, One Mind: Principles

Open awareness, the still acceptance of our intrinsic nature in silence, quietly reveals that the ground of being, the very foundation of all that is, is not other than itself. We do not somehow land on the ground of being like metaphysical helicopters: we exist, so we are not other than that from which we arise. There is nothing to find, nothing to become. We are already that open, bright and boundless space within which all things become.