Category Archives: Contemplative practice

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?

A very plain stillness

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Joan Tollifson, in one of her Substack essays, writes:

This so-called awakening stuff is so slippery to talk about. Is there anything to do? There is nothing to do, and yet in a way, there is, but it’s more like an undoing, a relaxing, a seeing through, a letting go, or a dissolving, and there’s no one to do it, and what is relaxed into includes seeking, resisting, contracting, and feeling separate. It includes everything! How to make sense of this? The mind simply can’t…

And then, what exactly is “the ocean” in the ocean/wave metaphor? Some say it’s Consciousness or Mind, some say it’s thorough-going impermanence and interdependence, some say it’s radiant presence, some say it’s God or the Ground of Being, some say it’s groundlessness, some say it’s emptiness, some say it’s intelligence-energy, some say it’s spirit, some say it’s no-thing-ness. But this is a good question to keep alive, because it’s very tempting to make something out of no-thing, to put a self or a Self (an author, doer, chooser, decider, creator, controller, manager, observer) where none in fact exists—to reify the ungraspable and slip into dualistic thinking. Thought can even turn “ungraspable no-thing-ness” into Something that it can cling to and worship. Thought is a slippery creator of illusions.

“Thought is a slippery creator of illusions…” and words decorate the illusions with glittering enticements to believe. But as always, the antidote seems to be no more than sitting still in plain awareness, while the thoughts do whatever it is that thoughts do on their own. What seems to happen is that the words peter out when they are not followed, not elaborated upon, but merely allowed to be little upwellings from the silence into which they quietly return.

The ground of being – at least so long as you  leave off the capital letters – carries none of the anthropomorphic frills of doctrine. It simply is; without it, nothing would be.

I wrote here of the “ocean/wave metaphor”. In that post I concluded: “To be still, listening, beside the open ocean, is all it takes; then our fretful wavelets still for a moment, if only between one breath and another, and we can sense the non-differentiation of Istigkeit, the unending of no thing. We are not other than what is.”

The nature of silence

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In Larry Rosenberg’s new book, he writes:

There are many ways to quiet ourselves, all of which are valuable. There’s a silence that comes from reading a book filled with magnificent ideas. There’s a silence in seeing beauty in any form—in nature, taking a swim in the ocean or a walk in the woods, or just being in solitude. But I’m talking about a measureless kind of silence that grows out of the practice. You could say it’s the heart of the practice because the deepest essence of our innermost being is silence.

This silence is shy. You can’t find it through the intellect. You can’t reach it with your emotions. In fact, you can’t search for it—the search itself would cause stirrings, movements, vexation. You can’t order it, expecting to receive silence by command. That would be like commanding love—we all know you can’t force love into existence. Silence likes humility, gentleness, innocence. It likes to be valued for itself. Thought goes into abeyance gently, gracefully, peacefully, without a struggle, without any bloodshed…

This silence is not a rarified experience. Stillness or silence or emptiness is not reserved for mystics who live high up in the Himalayas, wear loincloths, eat one grain of rice a day, sit cross-legged for weeks while freezing cold, or stand on one leg for ten years. It’s part of the human constitution.

The emptiness I’m talking about is not dead; it’s not a vacuity. When the mind gets silent, you’re tapping into the energy of the universe. Though we’re part of the universe, we typically just receive it in little drips—drip, drip, drip, like a faucet that’s not fully turned on. When we let go of who we think we are—all the notions, concepts, images, and delusions—we channel the energy that animates the whole universe. Silence is an energy that’s packed with life. It’s highly charged.

Larry Rosenberg, in an extract from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness, published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2025

I’ve often written of silence on this blog, but Larry Rosenberg’s words here seemed to say something I’ve been trying to say for a long time, and probably failing to capture. Silence, the silence of spiritual practice that is so intimately connected with stillness, is not the absence of noise.  It thrives on the presence of background sounds, whether gentle and quiet like the wind in the tall trees behind the garden, or rather less so, like the occasional sirens from the main road – which are actually not all that occasional, since we live near a major hospital. It will grow quite happily, as I wrote the other day, in an airport departure lounge.

No, shy though the silence of the heart seems to be, it is actually a thing of greater power than we’d imagine. In this long extract published in Tricycle Magazine, Rosenberg goes on:

Silence is what spiritual life is about, at least this version of it. Behind all the commotion of our lives there is an unfathomable silence accompanied by unlimited space—an endless dimension. We’re psychonauts, whether we know it or not. Ours is an inner orbit. The Tibetans put it plainly: the cognizing power of emptiness. In silence, there’s an awakening of a kind of intelligence. Great healing, the most important healing, occurs in silence. In silence you find you’re more compassionate, wiser. All the metta, or loving-kindness, you could ever want is in silence.

The longer I go on with the contemplative life, the more obvious it seems to me that what actually happens in the silence is that our apparent separation from the ground, from the source of being itself, falls away. Separation is an illusion anyway, less substantial than moon-shadows on a cloudy night. We are not ever separated from the ground – else how could we exist? – but our enserfment to the useful illusion of our everyday life in consensus reality makes it seem as though we are. Just to sit still in open awareness allows the mind’s illusions to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond, until the clear presence can be seen for itself, the ground of all that is.

Vast, empty

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So it’s more about the recognition that the “me” who seems to be “doing” all of this [living and practice] is a mirage. It’s ALL a movement of this undivided whole. The vastness has space for everything, and it clings to nothing. It is open, playful and free. Free to wear robes and free not to wear them. Even free to feel contracted, encapsulated and separate. Whatever comes will eventually go. And if the mind starts looking for what doesn’t come and go, anything it finds will be another object, another imagination. That is what Toni [Packer, leading a retreat] was pointing out. And the objects can get very subtle in nature.

One of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, said, “Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.”

Joan Tollifson

Choiceless awareness is like this. It is not a specialised technique for meditation, nor a philosophical position, though it can be taken for either of those. I’m not sure – and this is the difficulty so many people have (myself included) when they first encounter the term in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s writings. What, exactly, are we being asked to do?

It has taken a long time, but gradually I have come to realise that just sitting, only that, aware not only of breathing, and the body resting in space, feeling what it feels, hearing what it hears, but also being aware of thoughts as they arise, and of the emotions and bodily states that can accompany them (fear, desire, wonder, grief…) as they well up and fade away, is nothing other than the vastness of which Joan Tollifson writes so movingly. Allowing it all, the empty awareness is itself the open ground, being-itself, Istigkeit.

But it isn’t something we do. That’s what is so difficult to explain. In stillness, it happens. As Tollifson writes (op. cit.), “And, of course, ‘we’ aren’t doing any of this. It is all happening by itself. Ever-fresh. Ungraspable.” It does happen all by itself. It always has. Just watch.

One small room

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You need one small room for yourself. This is very true: when you can really find yourself in a small room, then there is you yourself, and the whole universe is there, and the whole universe makes sense to you. Without your one small room, the whole universe doesn’t make any sense. So what you need now is a small room, and what you will need after your death is a small stone. That is the actual reality, which is always true for everyone.

Shunryu Suzuki, Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life p.32

I have grown increasingly to love my own small room. It has become soaked, somehow, at least in my own feelings, with the hours I have  spent there, and the changes I have seen in myself and in the seasons – in the years now, in fact – the trees growing and changing, generations of blackbirds coming and going across the lawn.

Strangely, though, I’ve also come to notice that the room travels with me. If I am aware enough of where I am, of the light moving across the floor, my own breathing in its little tides and intervals, then my own little room can be in a hotel, even a train seat or in an airport among all the other displaced travellers who wait with me, Stillness isn’t a thing you need to find so much as that you just need to step into, opening the  door and closing it behind you gently.

Perhaps the strangest thing I have found is that this small room of stillness is there, almost clearer and almost more precious somehow, in those times when the usual patterns of volition, of self-determination, seem to be lost, and whatever baneful thing is in the air has, finally, hit the fan.

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

Suzuki’s paradoxical remark about the universe begins to make sense. It is within now, as Tolle himself says, that what is is all there is. For once, we have dropped into the stillness that has lain beneath all that has come to be, and is beneath all that is becoming now. All the myriad contrivances of thought have dropped away; what is left is no thing – it is the ground itself, bright and unending.

A sensitivity to things not yet known

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We do not know, when we sit down to practice, what we shall find in the silence. It seems obvious to say it, but it is too easy to forget that practice is never routine: each time we are setting out on a voyage into trackless places. No one has been here before, least of all ourselves.

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

We do well to hesitate. There is no place here for preconceptions. 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 most radical – in the literal sense of the word – thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to; no maps, despite the reams of paper that have been expended on the subject, for this utterly solitary journey. Each of us has to go there alone; each of us has to find out for ourselves what is there.

To cast away knowing, to give up the idea that words can hold the open fields of what merely is, is sometimes called the apophatic way; but really it is no more than giving up the attempt to describe the indescribable.

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) is not a kind of daydream, or an altered state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention, or imagining some kind of goal or outcome towards which our practice is supposed to lead. “For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth. For who seeks that which he believes that he has found? Who explores a territory which he claims already to know?” (Quaker faith & practice 26.39, from which passage the title of this post is also taken)

Toni Bernhard:

[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.

How to Wake Up, p.104

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that perhaps it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow, that there is someone who is prepared to do this, quietly getting on with it, day after day. Perhaps someone needs to.

Umwelten again, but cleansed

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The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species’ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it. For example, around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the water and adapting to life on land. In open air, these pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer distances than they could in water. The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and strategic thinking  Instead of simply reacting to whatever was directly in front of them, they could be proactive. By seeing farther, they could think ahead. As their Umwelten expanded, so did their minds.

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Senses always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli [heat, touch and scent]. “However, the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, pp.7-8

When Aldous Huxley wrote his astonishing 1954 study of the effects of psychedelics on the human mind, The Doors of Perception, he pointed out that the human brain and nervous system, in their normal configuration, function so as “to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the ‘Mind at Large’.” Under the influence of mescaline, however, the “miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” becomes apparent, unfiltered, just as it is.

Now of course this is not an escape from the sensory component of the human Umwelt – we are still constrained by the information our senses can respond to (mescaline cannot enable us to see in ultraviolet, or accurately to sense the earth’s magnetic field) – but it is at least a partial escape from the functional processing of that information stream that presents us with the familiar, usable world of the everyday. As Huxley himself pointed out, it is possible to perceive directly Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the untrammelled isness of things, the being-itself that our minds dissect in order to construct our daily lives; in itself, it is, as William Blake remarked, infinite: “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 Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Absent hare-brained theories of medieval magic mushroom culture, Eckhart was not under the influence of psychedelics. The contemplative technology of unenclosing humankind has millennia of research and development behind it, and as texts like The Cloud of Unknowing reveal, it was highly developed in at least some strands of medieval European monasticism.  To see things as they are to our unedited senses – through our own cleansed Umwelt – is as basic a human ability as breathing; only most of us have forgotten how. As Eckhart Tolle points out in our own time,

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

The Power of Now, p.63

No one there

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In his brief introduction to Dzogchen, Sam Harris (Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion), pp.18-140) writes,

Think of something pleasant in your personal life—visualize the moment when you accomplished something that you are proud of or had a good laugh with a friend. Take a minute to do this. Notice how the mere thought of the past evokes a feeling in the present. But does consciousness itself feel happy? Is it truly changed or colored by what it knows?

In the teachings of Dzogchen, it is often said that thoughts and emotions arise in consciousness the way that images appear on the surface of a mirror. This is only a metaphor, but it does capture an insight that one can have about the nature of the mind. Is a mirror improved by beautiful images? No. The same can be said for consciousness.

Now think of something unpleasant: Perhaps you recently embarrassed yourself or received some bad news. Maybe there is an upcoming event about which you feel acutely anxious. Notice whatever feelings arise in the wake of these thoughts. They are also appearances in consciousness. Do they have the power to change what consciousness is in itself?

There is real freedom to be found here, but you are unlikely to find it without looking carefully into the nature of consciousness, again and again. Notice how thoughts continue to arise. Even while reading this page your attention has surely strayed several times. Such wanderings of mind are the primary obstacle to meditation. Meditation doesn’t entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

But how could you actually be a thought? Whatever their content, thoughts vanish almost the instant they appear. They are like sounds, or fleeting sensations in your body. How could this next thought define your subjectivity at all?

It may take years of observing the contents of consciousness—or it may take only moments—but it is quite possible to realize that consciousness itself is free, no matter what arises to be noticed. Meditation is the practice of finding this freedom directly, by breaking one’s identification with thought and allowing the continuum of experience, pleasant and unpleasant, to simply be as it is. There are many traditional techniques for doing this. But it is important to realize that true meditation isn’t an effort to produce a certain state of mind—like bliss, or unusual visual images, or love for all sentient beings. Such methods also exist, but they serve a more limited function. The deeper purpose of meditation is to recognize that which is common to all states of experience, both pleasant and unpleasant. The goal is to realize those qualities that are intrinsic to consciousness in every present moment, no matter what arises to be noticed.

When you are able to rest naturally, merely witnessing the totality of experience, and thoughts themselves are left to arise and vanish as they will, you can recognize that consciousness is intrinsically undivided. In the moment of such an insight, you will be completely relieved of the feeling that you call “I.” You will still see this book, of course, but it will be an appearance in consciousness, inseparable from consciousness itself—and there will be no sense that you are behind your eyes, doing the reading.

Such a shift in view isn’t a matter of thinking new thoughts. It is easy enough to think that this book is just an appearance in consciousness. It is another matter to recognize it as such, prior to the arising of thought.

The gesture that precipitates this insight for most people is an attempt to invert consciousness upon itself—to look for that which is looking—and to notice, in the first instant of looking for your self, what happens to the apparent divide between subject and object. Do you still feel that you are over there, behind your eyes, looking out at a world of objects?

It is possible to look for the feeling you are calling “I” and to fail to find it in a way that is conclusive.

That insight – that there is nothing there in the place where we have been accustomed to find ourself – can be profoundly disorienting; if fully realised it can be alarming, perhaps even terrifying. I think this is one reason – apart from the fact that it can actually be remarkably difficult actually to carry out the seemingly childishly simple act of looking for the observer within – why traditionally Dzogchen has been a teaching delivered only in person, and only to advanced students of meditation.

But Sam Harris explains it very well here – and teaches it explicitly and effectively as part of his more advanced “Deconstructing the Self” practice on the Waking Up app – and it is an essential tool if we are directly to investigate for ourselves Daniel Dennett’s “benign user illusion” metaphor for consciousness.

Elizabeth Reninger, in her brilliant Introduction Taoism for Beginners, explains in rather less dramatic terms a traditional Taoist practice for achieving the identical realisation:

Turning the Light Around is a simple yet powerful Taoist meditation that you can easily explore on your own. The “light” that’s referenced here is the light of awareness—the very awareness that is aware of these words right now. And turning this light around means withdrawing the focus of awareness from external phenomena and toward progressively more internal phenomena until, eventually, the light of awareness is shining on itself alone, like the sun illuminating only itself.

Here’s how:

1. Instead of paying attention to the sights and sounds of the external world, turn your attention—the light of your awareness—inward to the movement of breath in your body and other physical sensations. With your eyes closed—and preferably sitting in a relatively quiet place—feel the breath and other internal sensations for a couple of minutes.

2. Now, become aware of the awareness that’s doing the noticing (of breath and physical sensation). Shine the light of awareness on awareness itself. Actually, there is just one awareness, like there’s only a single brightness of the sun even as it illuminates itself.

3. Simply rest in this awareness, which is the light of Tao, shining through your human body-mind.

These spiritual shortcuts (the Dzogchen practice is actually described as trekchod, “cutting through” the illusion of self and other) are probably only effective for those who have some solid experience of a practice like vipassana or shikantaza, and may actually, for those experienced practitioners prove to be unnecessary after all. But they are very powerful tools in themselves, and can seem irresistible to those navigating the inner waterways of the mind.

Scary though such techniques of radical nonduality can sound, they are in themselves utterly simple, and accessible within the framework of a stable contemplative practice. Despite the  impression you may get from reading some of the popular introductions to Vajrayaàna, they are not esoteric, nor are they in any sense unnatural; to recover the direct realisation of one’s fundamental lack of separation from the open ground of being itself – the Tao, Eckhart’s Istigkeit – is the source of unshakeable peace and wholeness. Sitting still, the bright plane of what simply is opens out; somehow, it is not other than limitless being itself.

[If anyone has been affected by anything in this post, or merely wants to know where help may be found, there are hopefully useful links to the Spiritual Crisis Network and other resources on my own advice page on this site.]