Category Archives: Contemplative practice

Seeing in the dark

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Sitting this evening by the window, with the small sparkling lights of traffic flickering down the garden from the road beyond, there seemed to be no border, no place in myself or in the luminous dark beyond the glass where I could find an end or a beginning. Great upwellings of thought came and dispersed, leaving no memory I could discern in that moment. Somehow it was as though a crystalline space surrounded me; and yet I was that edgeless expanse just as much as I was the almost motionless body whose weight now rested in an immeasurable skein of gravity conditioned by who knew what accretions of mass and causes, out beyond discerning.

“The spiritual warrior fights darkness not other humans”, said Tara Brach in a recent podcast; and yet it is not a fight as anyone would think of combat. It is merely a settled intent to understand, to love, what is – David Jones‘ “…for only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“. Jones is referring, I assume, to Spinoza’s use of the phrase: to see something sub specie aeternitatis being to understand it as a part of the infinite and eternal substance – God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) – beyond the constraints of time and place. (Ethics 5, p23s)

To sit in silence, and to love what actually is – this is possibly the most revolutionary act we are capable of. And yet even to say that is a thought; but what it represents is not. It is no thing; and to see it is to be no more than the night air, and the evening star over the leafless hazels. Only be still.

Merely to bear witness

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When we discuss, as I did the other day, the question of free will and determinism, it is all too easy to get caught up in intellectual debate, but this was not my intention. I wrote then, “Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time.” To see this directly for oneself, rather than think about it, is the beginning of our actual awakening.

But the state of accepting realisation that Spinoza refers to in his Ethics as “blessedness” is not arrived at by debate or dialectic, despite Spinoza’s own sometimes misleading phrase “the intellectual love of God”. It is simply the immediate embrace of this “radical acceptance”, in Tara Brach’s phrase, of what actually is.

In her book, Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes:

The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…

[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” [Dzogchen].

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.

To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet if we remain still enough to see that all that appears – sense objects,  thoughts, feelings, memories – are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed – from which all change proceeds.

Bowing to rocks

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The longer I keep on with this contemplative life the more it seems to me that a life apart from the main current of consensus reality, as well as apart from formal religion, is essentially a spirituality embedded in the everyday.

Rodney Smith, in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010, wrote:

When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment once performed by Krishnamurti: I placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.

The Buddha statue, the zafu [cushion] we sit upon, the saintly picture or poem, the states of mind accessed in meditation, solitude, or even nature itself, can all become accentuated beyond the ordinary by infusing them with special attention. When we invest the sacred into specific conditions, we feel spiritual only when we are having those experiences. The rest of life goes spiritually unnoticed…

 It is… in the middle of our total involvement that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.

The alert reader will probably have picked up something of this in my own writing, where I describe with such affection the window where I normally sit to practice! (Of course, there is a healthy side to this too: keeping to a routine, spatially as well as temporally, takes away the unnecessary complication of deciding the where and the when of sitting.) But practice is not special – it is the simplest and more ordinary thing to do; and a life lived in the mindfulness it affords is not a life of drama and strangeness so much as a life more deeply than ever embedded in ordinary things, in other people, and in the countless plants and animals, fungi and minerals with whom we share our world.

It is not that the insights and presence that come with practice are not sacred; it is more that through their sacredness all the everyday accidents and affects of life can be seen in their actual, intrinsic sacredness, and unless we live in and for them, we cannot realise the truth that lies within us all: that we all rest in the same ground, and are ripples on the same stream. Each of us, human or mouse, ant or mountain, is born and dies according to our time; and yet it is the one isness from which we are born, within which we live, and to which we shall return.

Endings and beginnings

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So many blogs and newsletters across the internet at this time of year are looking back over the last 12 months, and on into the next 12, reflecting on the changes their writers have seen, and the things they expect to come. I don’t think I’d have much to add to this conversation per se. What interests me is the nature of endings and beginnings themselves, and whether they are what they usually seem to be.

So often we look at events as having discrete boundaries: they begin here, where there was nothing before, and they end there, leaving things different from how they had been. After the end of an event, there is a time when nothing is happening; and then, Boom! There’s another event just beginning out of the empty place that was waiting for it to begin.

If we sit still, though, and listen, what we find is that there is a ceaseless rippling of the bright water of the stream of coming-to-be. Sounds, and presence, and thoughts, and weight, without their own duration or dimensions. Where is the beginning of a wave, and its end? They are only arbitrary points on an oscilloscope trace: the wave waves. It has no beginning in reality, nor does it end. It waves.

Spinoza called these waves modes, and the stream substance: his one substance, God or nature (Deus sive natura) appearing in the modes of cats, or mountains, or people – rather as the Tao appears as “the ten thousand things” in the Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42). To see this, whole and undivided – as it is – is the end of fear, and the beginning of peace. May this peace be with you all, this coming year.

Ordinary lives

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I find myself at the moment unable to get away from a recognition that the impulse to the contemplative life is at bottom an impulse to an ordinary life.

We are so often taught that we should aspire to extraordinary things: to public recognition, to great acts of service, or great works of imagination or reason or commerce; and yet our humanity belongs in the little things, in the everyday acts of simple kindness, in the touch of the moving air, bird-shadows on cropped grass, in the quiet between places.

This ordinary hiddenness is the natural place of one who finds themselves on the contemplative way. Our everyday lives are our practice quite as much as any formal times of meditation or prayer (however we understand that almost inescapable word).

A hidden life is not a life that has failed to reach its potential, but a life that has found its home in the ordinary occasions of life among others, in the quietness of simple things, in the lives of the sparrows in the shrubbery, the wren in the ivy bank. These are the territory of plain contentment, and the source of contemplation itself.

Chasing after experiences

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If we’re referencing “being awake” or “liberation” to a particular experience or state of mind—maybe a very expanded, open, peaceful feeling—that will inevitably prove disappointing because that state will disappear. The open aware presence it reveals is simply what remains when the me-system is quiet or when it is totally accepted as simply the weather of this moment. That open boundless aware presence is actually ever-present, even when apparently obscured by obsessive, me-centered thoughts. It is the common factor in every different experience. And those thoughts are nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as thoughts. Experience is ever-changing like the weather. It’s never personal. It’s a happening of the whole universe. But if we take the stormy, cloudy, foggy weather personally, then it seems like we have lost that expanded openness that we tasted before. If we imagine that there is a persisting, independent self (“me”) who is either awake or not awake, that is only an imagination. No such persisting, independent self can be found. There is no experiencer outside of experiencing. Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them. And eventually, we see that every experience, whether contracted or expanded, clear or muddy, is always just this.

Joan Tollifson, Silence

I think that perhaps Tollifson has expressed here more clearly than anything I can remember reading why I tend increasingly to be suspicious of teachings that rely too much on technique – whether the use of any form of psychedelic substance, or any sort of psychological manipulation aimed at inducing particular experiences or “altered states”.

As Joan points out here, the “open aware presence” of the contemplative mind is “nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as…” whatever happens to be in our field of awareness right now. It might be the gentle passage of breath against the edge of our nostrils, or the bright stillness of the quiet mind; but it might just as easily be the grumble of a bus pulling away from the stop in the street outside, or a sudden metallic clang from the water company yard behind the old reservoir. Or it might be an old fear, or an old fantasy, or something we forgot to buy at the shops, rising unbidden to the surface of memory. Whatever the field of awareness contains now is just what it is. There is nothing else for it to be; and looking for another, better, experience is plain old fashioned confusion.

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…

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

Time and practice

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There is an odd thing about time: that practice which appears pointless, tedious, or irredeemably flawed nevertheless works just as well, in terms of growth or awakening, as the most apparently instructive or illuminating kind.

Time is the key, it seems. What happens during actual sitting matters far less than we might think; it is only over the months and years that the value of our practice appears, and even then with little reference to our memories of good – or bad – sessions.

Once again, it seems, all we need to do is to sit still, as patiently as we can manage. Something is going on beyond our conscious notice that we simply don’t understand; something that changes everything when we are not looking.

Our quiet breathing, the flickering, adhesive passage of thoughts, the sounds filtering up from the street, birdsong, weather – these are what matter in the end, it seems. How we feel about them at the moment seems to have little to do with anything. As the years pass things will change, as they do anyway; only we shall be changed in different ways – at times radically different – than we would have been without our practice. Could we have chosen differently? I’m not sure the question even makes sense. We are the change, ourselves; and what we were is no longer here.

Sit still. Watch. Nothing else is needed, except that we show up on time.

Unremarkable

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Eve Baker writes, in Paths in Solitude (pp.10-11):

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench. For the longest time I believed that these things would only be attainable, as an adult, if I were to live in solitude, and I had not the resolve or the leisure or the foresight to plan out such a life for myself.

But now, as a retired person and a contemplative, I am doubly useless. This is a blessing found at long last, after a life spent trying to thread my way through the necessity of work, the yearning to create, and the far deeper call, often hidden even from myself, to the contemplative way. Oh, for most of those years I managed to maintain – as much despite myself as wholeheartedly – a contemplative practice. But these days I find myself in sympathy with Uchiyama Roshi:

We shouldn’t imagine that life after retirement has to be miserable or impoverished. To be old is also one of our roles. When we’re young, our role is to work; upon retirement, we take up another role. Since we have less income, we should simplify our lives as much as possible. That is the way to fulfill the role of an old person. We should not judge it miserable, but just devote ourselves to that particular role. We function through our roles and exert ourselves in our occupations as a role. Finally, dying is one of our roles.

From Tending the Practice Ground, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Tricycle Magazine, November 2025

Eve Baker writes later on in the book I quoted above (p.105):

Solitude is of course an interior disposition, which external solitude confirms and strengthens. One can be quite solitary in the midst of a crowd, and one’s opportunities for solitude during the day are not necessarily those when one is entirely alone, but times when one’s attention is directed inward and away from the distractions which surround us. The mind can go flying about, following one stimulus after another, captive to a dozen things which grab our attention. The secret is to look beyond these things by focussing upon the one point, which is God… Like falling in love, it is a process where we are taken beyond ourselves into an unknown world.

As contemplatives, we are not here to lead anything. Most of us are not even here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to live our ordinary lives in quiet places. Our solitude is so often a merely interior solitude, so that we cannot even claim the romantic status of some kind of hermit.

Here we are, unremarkable, at the edge of the mystery. The endless ground lies open before us, and we walk down to the nearest shop with our little bag, and our comfortable old shoes. This is all we are; our little sisters and brothers the sparrows chirp to us from the hedge, and the rain is coming on, again.

Open awareness

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I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats, The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763

Slowly it is being borne in upon me that open awareness is not so much a state of mind among other states of mind, but mind itself. Forgive me if I quote here again a summary of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, but it may help to refresh our minds:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

  1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
  2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
  3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.

(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)

What I referred to the other day as “our normal everyday consciousness” is Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge: limited, conditional and conditioned, irredeemably self-centred. The second kind of knowledge is the one we employ in thinking things through, whether how to hang wallpaper straight or the ontological argument – Keats’ “irritable reaching after fact and reason”. But the third kind is a leap into something entirely different.

The third kind of knowledge is direct seeing; and in my experience, just sitting, simply aware of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight and presence, you begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.

This is not a matter of academic philosophy  – in any case I have no formal training in that field at all – but of plain observation. Open awareness is an overarching presence, awareness itself, objectless and unconditioned. Within awareness itself things appear – the “ten thousand things” of the Taoists, the Śūnyatā of the Mahayana Buddhists, Spinoza’s modes – but open awareness, that holds and gives rise to them all, is no thing. It merely is.

Awake awareness

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Awake awareness has been described as the “groundless ground,” or the foundation out of which all phenomena rise and dissolve back into again and again. It’s a big idea, but it can be explored in manageable pieces. Developed in Tibet more than one thousand years ago and used by advanced meditators, the practice of resting in awake awareness has recently become more widely accessible through the teachings of [psychologist and Dzogchen meditation teacher Daniel] Brown and others. It differs from the well-known practice of mindfulness by involving a key shift in the state of awareness. The practitioner learns to release from thought and the sense of being an individual who is meditating, and learns to become part of a more subtle level of awareness that is not separate from self and that is everywhere. 

Imagine the ocean. Instead of identifying with the waves on the surface, which are like our thoughts that come and go, you can cultivate a calmer mind by sinking below the waves. You can open the experience of the mind to become the ocean itself. This subtle level of awareness, known as awake awareness, is limitless and boundless. It is lucid, calm, still, and has the quality of love.

When people learn to drop into the field of awake awareness consistently, or even just periodically, their relationship to this field allows them to develop basic trust in themselves and in life, even when they did not have a childhood that helped to establish trust…

Radhule Weininger, Deep Trust: Finding Our Footing in a Turbulent World, Tricycle Magazine, August 2022

Simple awareness is not in any way the same as our normal everyday consciousness, nor even a subset of it. Awareness, as Weininger points out, is an overarching presence, “limitless and boundless, and has the quality of love.” Being not separated – nondual, as it’s often described – it is “not separate from self, and… is everywhere.”

To “drop into the field of awake awareness” allows us to glimpse the underlying oneness of all things and events – modes as Spinoza calls them – and to cease trying to choose between them, to choose otherwise. In other words, to avoid the patterns of attachment and rejection before they begin.

In Buddhist and other contemplative traditions, one sometimes encounters the sense of three levels of mind: ordinary conditioned consciousness, mindfulness (attention to the present) and rigpa, awake (or open) awareness as Radhule Weininger describes above. It is not the same as, but somehow resonant with, Baruch Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge:

Spinoza’s Three Kinds of Knowledge

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

  1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
  2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
  3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.

(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)

To sit in open, choiceless awareness, in the plain light of what is, is in itself an act of radical trust. To let go of our cherished discrimination, our sense of ourselves as separate isolated selves sending messages to each other across a gap of disconnection instead of loving, is to realise all of a piece that there is nowhere else to be than the “groundess ground” from which all things arise. And that is uttermost trust in the “interconnected unfolding” (Weininger, ibid.) that is life, and death, itself.