Category Archives: Contemplative practice

Freedom!

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Abbot Christopher Jamison writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About being awake

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

Joan Tollifson, writing in Exploring What Is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All it comes down to

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

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

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

Being still

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To remain still is one of the fundamental conditions of contemplative practice, and yet it is also one of its fruits. Many of us will remember how hard it was to stay still as children, even –  maybe especially – when we were explicitly told to. And yet I found that when I as a child had no choice but to remain still, the effect of that simple action – or lack of action – had effects that remain with me to this day.

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought but fertile with becoming.

Mathieu Ricard writes (The Art of Meditation, p.93):

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no independent and permanent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as empty of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself. Once this essential idea has been understood and assimilated, our erroneous perception of our ego and our world gives way to an accurate view of the nature of things and beings – wisdom. Wisdom is not a simple intellectual construction or a compilation of information. It arises from a precise methodology that allows us progressively to eliminate mental blindness and the afflictive emotions that derive from it and, in that way, free us from the principal cause of suffering.

So long as we act in the world from our own will and desire, our own imagined, illusory sense of what is real, the emptiness of forms (“independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena”) will be invisible to us. It is only when we keep still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be will become clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest.

It seems to me that, short of illness or some other unsought but somehow accepted immobility, stillness can only be found in some kind of practice; as far as I am concerned, the simpler the better. Choiceless awareness – just sitting, shikantaza – or the steady releasement of Gelassenheit, are the ways that open themselves to me; gateways into silence and stillness so plain and simple that anyone can use them, regardless of skill or training. All that is needed is regularity and time – faithfulness, if you will – given to the simplest practice, for the “vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being” (Tara Brach) to open around us.

Breath

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The breath we have always with us, as long as we live.

It takes no skill, no technique, no memory to return to the breath. It is gentle. It does not judge. It stays close no matter what we do.

Turn back to the breath. That is all that’s needed; and you will find that within is stillness, silence, the endless healing of what is.

A vast and shining presence

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Silence and stillness sometimes seem as though they are, or should be, the same thing – but, as Leigh Anderson of the Spiritual Naturalist Society points out, this is not quite so in the contemplative life:

Silence in meditation transcends the mere absence of external sound. It represents an internal quietude, an expansive space where the mind’s constant chatter diminishes to mere whispers. This pursuit of silence is, in essence, a battle against our intrinsic human nature — a nature that fills every moment of potential stillness with relentless thought. The path to internal silence is fraught with challenges, as our minds are wired to think, analyze, and incessantly chatter. Yet, the rewards of cultivating this form of silence are profound, offering mental clarity, emotional equilibrium, and a profound connection to the present moment that feels deeply rooted and unshakable.

On the flip side of the meditative coin lies stillness — not merely the absence of physical motion but a deep mental repose where inner agitation dissolves. Within the realm of stillness, we discover the ability to observe our thoughts and emotions without judgment, to exist in the present moment without the compulsion to act. This stillness isn’t merely an end goal but a gateway; it opens us up to deeper introspection, fostering an environment where heightened awareness and profound insights can flourish.

In Quaker usage, silence – the context of meeting for worship – is always acknowledged to be more, and often other, than an absence of words. Birdsong, the traffic outside, Friends shifting slightly in their seats, breathing, voices in the street – these are all drawn into the silence of meeting, and become part of its fabric; and so it is in one’s own solitary practice. Extraneous sounds are not interruptions; they are an integral element in the silence itself.

Stillness, though, is an inevitably inward place. Ultimately, it is not other than objectless awareness, the second part of Martin Heidegger’s definition of Gelassenheit: “an openness to mystery”.

I was standing at a busy crossroads waiting for lights to change. Traffic was racing by, people buzzing back and forth; noise and fumes, action, restlessness, rush, impatience, thoughts, demands. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt my whole existence pause. I looked to see whether the green man was showing yet, followed by the pressurizing countdown of seconds allowed to cross the junction, people crossing over each other. But I felt strangely calm and quiet. I felt “otherness” deep within, a stillness, and my whole life shifted into the present.

Joanna Godfrey Wood, In Search of Stillness, p.13

Within stillness, all that obscures awareness seems to settle out, like the sediment in a disturbed pond when it is left in peace again. Just as the small sounds within and without a Quaker meeting house do not interrupt the silence but become woven into it, so passing thoughts and images, and physical sensations, merely become part of the nature of stillness itself. Tara Brach:

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.

Radical Acceptance, p.317

Mountains and rivers remain

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Should spiritual people avoid politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT of the world,” or “We are uniters, not dividers.” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would shut up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

Should spiritual people embrace politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT be worldly,” or “What use is spirituality if it is not engaged?” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would speak up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

And I wrote about shutting up or speaking up here. And Henry Shukman, a Zen teacher, quotes the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu from the eighth century:

“The nation is shattered. Mountains and rivers remain.”

Things are volatile in the relative realm of apparent separation, but they are unchanged in the Absolute realm. In The Way, I wrote, “I find that I live a better life when I live as if there is a Oneness, as if we are supposed to bring our understanding of the Absolute world, which is Oneness, to our relative world, which can seem disconnected and divided.”

Larry Jordan

Larry  Jordan – who describes himself as “a follower of Jesus with a Zen practice” – is making a point very similar to Joan Tollifson’s, which I quoted the other day, where she wrote,

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

Mountains and rivers do remain. As Steven Pinker points out, no human, and no point in human history, stands alone. We are all part of an evolutionary current; as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is easy to forget. We are so readily, especially at times like the present, drawn into polarised positions, swayed by shouts of “Pick a side!”, that we lose sight of not only our indissoluble common humanity, but the metaphysical oneness of things, Being (Eckhart Tolle), the Tao, Rigpa.

Only be still, be quiet. The flickering passage of thought and emotion is no different to the impressions of the senses, the sound of the jackdaws settling into their roost in the old water tower, the rustle of tyres on the road at the end of the garden.

Out of stillness arises, quite by itself, what is needful. I nearly said, “what needs to be done”, but maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. Now is all that is real; if it contains doing, so be it. That will be doing, but in stillness. Like Chuang Tzu’s Cook Ding, following things as they are, we do what is needful without resistance. But only in stillness, only in quiet, can the way open, just as it is.

A pathless land

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Jiddu Krishnamurti, in his famous speech dissolving the Order of the Star in the East – the organisation formed by the Theosophical Society to prepare the world for the arrival of a reputed messianic entity, the World Teacher or Maitreya – spoke as follows (this is a short extract from a much  longer speech):

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others…

When you look for an authority to lead you to spirituality, you are bound automatically to build an organization around that authority. By the very creation of that organization, which, you think, will help this authority to lead you to spirituality, you are held in a cage.

I first read these words of Krishnamurti’s more than fifty years ago. It seems to have taken me most of those fifty years to take them to heart.

For whatever reasons of upbringing or character, I have been reluctant to trust myself, even to trust that I had truly encountered the moments of insight that have brought me beyond the self; that seem to have occurred periodically throughout my life. They have occurred more reliably the more reliably I have practiced stillness and quiet; but they have occurred regardless, even in the times I have felt most lost.

As a result, I have for most of my life sought an organisation, if not to lead me to spirituality, then at least to validate the spirituality I have come to know for myself. As Krishnamurti saw so clearly, when he was still a young man, it doesn’t work. What’s more, much as I now dislike organised religion of any sort, it isn’t fair to the local expressions of religious organisations for someone like me to mix himself up in them. Inevitably one finds oneself in various positions of responsibility, and then, in extricating oneself, letting people down.

The pathless land of which Krishnamurti spoke is found most clearly in choiceless awareness; as he said himself:

This journey I am proposing that we take together is not to the moon or even to the stars. The distance to the stars is much less than the distance within ourselves. The discovery of ourselves is endless, and it requires constant inquiry, a perception which is total, an awareness in which there is no choice. This journey is really an opening of the door to the individual in his relationship with the world.

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Madras, 7th Public Talk, December 13, 1959 Collected Works, Vol. XI

It’s difficult, sometimes, to try and explain what one is about when one talks of choiceless awareness. I have been writing this blog for five years now; Krishnamurti spent nearly his whole life travelling and speaking, albeit with far more to say than I have. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most concise, practical summary is Toni Bernhard’s. Perhaps I should leave it at that:

[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In 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. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself… Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. 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

Ordinary lives in quiet places

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Eve Baker, in Paths in Solitude:

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.

We need sometimes, I think, to remind ourselves of our uselessness. The end of the contemplative life – in the sense of purpose – is not a thing we achieve, not even a destination we arrive at.

Sandy Boucher (Tricycle Magazine, December 2017):

We share the physical elements and so much else with other beings; our lives are dependent on the conditions prevailing in our environment. This is being nobody special. How do we recognize and surrender to this without thought of image, achievement, comparison? Maurine Stuart advised, “All the simple, ordinary, everyday things we do—walking, cleaning, sitting—are ways to deeply penetrate this.”

So we become the true person without rank, the primordial person, who simply walks, eats, shits, works, sleeps, loves. We see that even the fully awakened condition that we call enlightenment or liberation, even this is not special but as inconsequential as a grain of sand. To be fully awake is the normal human condition. It expresses the deepest truth of our nature, our oneness with the energy of the universe. We meditate and study and practice to penetrate into, or relax into, this awareness.

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.

Mysterium Tremendum

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It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It 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 absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

In a sense, meditation does just this, in small, repeatable doses, if we have the resolve to sit through what seem at the time to be dark places.  We are out of our depth, conclusively – and it can be all too easy to draw back, reflexively, like drawing back one’s hand from an electric shock. If we can sit it out, literally, then we may receive one of the greatest  gifts of our practice.

Just last week, I quoted Eckhart Tolle. I make no apologies for repeating the passage here, since what he says fits so precisely:

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

As Rohr suggests in Immortal Diamond, this may be why initiation rites have traditionally mimicked dying, and why so much of the language of traditional monastic spirituality used the terminology of dying to self, and rising to God. But we are once again at the thin edges of language here, and what actually happens is not in the least metaphorical.

As Rohr suggests, actually to encounter the metaphysical ground is not an experience (if that is even the right word for it) that it is possible to take lightly. It is overwhelming, in every sense of the  word, not least in the way that volition, self-determination, self-anything, are swept away in what simply is. And yet, and yet – where else could one ever hope for?