Category Archives: faith

More on faith and belief

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Last month I wrote a post quoting Alan Watts:

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The more I think about this, the more crucial it seems to me for the non-religious contemplative life. Religion, as defined in Wikipedia, “is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, is perhaps best defined by Sam Harris:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Waking Up

Faith is often used (and Sam Harris is sometimes guilty of this) merely as an alternative word for belief, whereas Watts’ definition seems to me far closer to the mark: “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.” This is precisely the kind of faith I find I need to continue with a contemplative practice, which is almost by definition “a plunge into the unknown”: the psychonaut casting off from the shores of consensus (conditioned) reality. (In this context, it is worth remarking that in a theocentric society, religious belief is consensus reality!)

18 months or so ago, I wrote,

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

As I grow older, and gradually (if sometimes inconsistently) settle into a life outside any religious framework, in companionable solitude, married eremitism, call it what you will, I find I am relatively happy not calling myself anything in particular. Ethically, I am a humanist; spiritually, it’s harder to say. While I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I am happiest just getting on with it. The path, or whatever it’s called, is its own place. Names separate; in the ground itself there is no separation.

Opening into…

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As we go on into whatever it is our practice is opening into, it seems to me to become apparent that the underlying or enclosing ground of being, isness, is neither a metaphysical abstraction nor a psychological apprehension, but a reality so profound that to think of it as a thing, or condition, is to miss the mark. This is why I keep on coming back to the word God, not as a trademark owned by one or another institution, but as the only way to speak of something more real than the earth beneath my feet, more alive by far than I am myself.

Now of course I’m aware that “God” comes with a vast deal of emotional and conceptual baggage for most of us, and for some of us that baggage may be a dead weight. For me, though, not having been brought up as a child to the profession of any formal religion, it is a treasury of bright images, a boundless resource for understanding where I may find myself.

Laurence Freeman writes, “By beginning [a settled practice] we learn pretty quickly that we meditate as disciples, not as entrepreneurs.” That is indeed how it feels to me; it is too easy, perhaps, to make our practice itself, or its imagined “goal” into the centre of this life, rather than following the light to which it tends.

Freeman again:

What happens is that a whole set of forces, inter-connected in the unity of our spirit, is released in our centre and radiates outwards to our lives. But it is not even this that is the fundamental goal. It isn’t this we are asking about when we say, ‘When will it happen?’ All these real and necessary dimensions, all these inter-dependent forces are signs and symbols of one unified force, the one unified reality. This is the power of the reality of the Spirit of God who dwells in our heart, in the final depth of our spirit, the Spirit of all creation which is also the ultimate goal and meaning of our life… Because we then know that ‘it’ is the Spirit which is both the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega. It is the beginning and the end of our meditation, of the whole journey of our meditation taken from the day we begin until the last day of our life.

Faith and mercy

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We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Watts’ distinction between faith and belief has become crucial to me recently. Belief is a willed assent to some proposition. Faith describes an encounter. It happens to one; it is not something one can decide to do. That seems to me to underlie statements like this one of Paul’s: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV)

No thing, the ground of being encountered in the loss of the believed certainties, in the emptiness of the apophasis, is just such a gift. J.P. Williams: “When we talk about divinity, though, we’re not trying to exclude a set of things and point to what’s left over: we’re trying to talk about what is beyond all things. We’re not pointing to anything, really, but to the source of all things.”

It is hard to use words. Emptiness is the expanse of what is, dimensionless, preceding space and time, holding “all that is made” like a nut in the hand of Christ, as Julian of Norwich saw. And yet as I once wrote, “We are creatures of the word, we humans. We know ourselves by our names first of all, and our least thought comes ready dressed in words. And yet it is in silence that we draw close to God, becoming open in the stillness to the presence that is always with us, nearer than our own breathing.”

Prayer, it seems to me – prayer as stillness, openness, not as asking for things – is not quite the same as meditation. There is a reason why centering prayer is so called, though it is so similar in practice to vipassana meditation, and there is a reason why the Jesus Prayer is a prayer and not a mantra; and I think that it is in this surrender to what may come – rather than in an irritable reaching for what is expected – that it is found.

I cannot help myself. If I follow the path of self-emptying honestly, through meditation; or if I follow, to the best of my limited understanding, Alan Lightman’s journey Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, I find myself back here, at the mercy of no thing at all, but the wholly beyond – only to be given just that, mercy.

So when we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional–always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we too–in the words of Psalm 103–‘swim in mercy as in an endless sea.’ Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

No thing at all

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

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

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

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

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

When I awoke, light poured through the window across the bed. I was light myself, empty and crystal clear. No, I was not. I, was not; except that there was a gossamer memory that knew itself as me, someone who had, effectively, died in the night. “All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost.” (Andreas Müller)

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

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

What happened? I don’t know. Of course I don’t. What happened is not the kind of thing “I” could know. This seems like a clever answer, a smarty-pants way to get one up on my readers, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I can say, though, that it is not “something” that “I” achieved. Müller again: “What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.”

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

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

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

To awaken is to love

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To awaken is to love, and in that love the tiresome need to put up and defend our views and opinions dissolves, and right there is an insight into things that nothing else compares with. We have to discover through personal experience how that insight, our faith and our intelligence all interrelate. For me, words and the effort to give expression to the truth continue to be of profound necessity in training. To awaken and not give expression to that awakening would be a contradiction. The struggle to find the words and the struggle to find the form our lives must take are the same struggle. I find it important to recognize that the way we represent training and enlightenment to ourselves and to others is influenced by our own existential needs. Those needs can give rise to many mistakes, yet if we engage them intimately, they impart a resonance of authenticity. How we represent the truth to ourselves and to others needs to be examined with sympathy, care and intellectual rigour. To me, this is part of what it means to cleanse the heart.

Daishin Morgan, Buddha Recognizes Buddha

I have often wondered how my instinct to put things into words might fit with the journey of awakening. I have not often had the opportunity directly to teach what I have found, nor am I a member of any institution within which publishing might be a normal and indispensable part of my life and work. So I have drifted, I suppose, into blogging. Small though my audience might be – oddly enough, it was much larger when I was blogging in a Christian context – at least I am making some effort perhaps “to give expression to the truth”.

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

Almost as an aside, I have to say how profoundly grateful I have been to Sam Harris’ Waking Up course, both as a tool for learning and exploration, and as a wholly open community of practice. I came to the course through reading Harris’ book Waking Up, having had no idea that such a thing existed, and discovered right from the introductory course that I had discovered exactly the non-religious, intellectually honest and ethically sound path I needed once I had laid down my Christian contemplative practice. Without some such place to hitch the wagon of my nascent practice of open awareness, I might have found it much more difficult to avoid losing the thread altogether, or else attaching myself to a some avowedly religious community merely in order to keep some structure in my spiritual life.

Harris’ approach, which can best be summed up in his own words (quoted here before), was exactly what I needed at that time:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Sam Harris, Waking Up, p.206

The explorations I have chronicled here and in my other blogs will go on, of course – probably as long as I do – but at times it is hard to know quite what to write. Any attempt I make at direct description of spiritual experience is almost bound to descend into hyperbole or bathos, and to try and describe life in the light of awakening would probably end up more like poetry than anything else. Maybe the value of a blog like this then is merely to carry on trying to communicate a few insights from the path of practice itself: glimpses, perhaps, from some imagined railway.

Bridges

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I continually find myself drawn back to surrender. At times, the desire to relinquish the grasp of the self and fall back into the stream of becoming is almost painful, a sharp longing miles from any greed or physical hunger. It is like the need for solitude, in some ways – and in any case a degree of solitude seems to be necessary even for the inclination to begin.

But surrender to what, or to whom? In theistic terms the answer might be straightforward, but otherwise? A lay neuroscientific way to put it might be to suggest something like the left brain’s analytical, critical faculties giving way, for once, to the intuitive, creative pondering of the right brain – but I’m not sure this tells us much more than the idea of surrendering to God, except without the emotional and metaphysical baggage!

We seem to need a bridge between the human experience of, longing for, surrender, and that surrendered to. For intellectually, conceptually, anything we might surrender to seems lost in a bright mist, invisible to the mind’s eye. it would be fatally easy to take a shortcut, to fall on the one hand into new age woo woo, or on the other into some traditional religious formulation such as the indwelling Christ or the pure land of Amida Buddha.

But, given that these attempts to frame a clearly spiritual experience are trying to get at something beyond mere cultural personification, they may in fact be attempts at bridging the gap, at carrying some kind of message to the courts of reason from out in the coastlands of the spirit.

In an interview, Taitetsu Unno once said,

The way I understand it, the historical Buddha, like you and me, had physical form, was born, and was destined to die. But the content of his being did not die and continues to live. And that is immeasurable life. And not only life. Because it brings us to awakening, it is also immeasurable light. We call it Amida.

Even Dewdrops Fall: An interview with Taitetsu Unno, Tricycle, Summer 1995

If we are happy to let “the content of… being” rest as the underlying, existential ground, rather than ascribing to it some individual essence or soul (which I doubt Taitetsu Unno would have meant in this context) then we do have something a bit more like a bridge, perhaps. The immeasurable, unknowable isness which precedes all things, illuminates and gives life to all beings, is given a name.

Satya Robyn:

As foolish beings, it is easier for us to form a relationship with unlimited light when we give this light a form, a story and a gender. Sometimes we connect with this light through an enlightened human being, as was the case with Jesus or with Shakyamuni Buddha. Sometimes we connect with it through a relationship with a more mystical figure, such as Amitabha Buddha or the bodhisattva Quan Shi Yin. A mystical Buddha has the ability to appear in whatever form is most valuable to the seeker.

Behind our human spiritual teachers and our mystical figures is the light, and the light itself is beyond gender…

Satya Robyn, Coming Home: refuge in Pureland Buddhism

In a way, practice itself, in whatever tradition – given that we who practise are frail, temporary, limited beings anyway – is no more than a bridge over the incoming tide, at the estuary of the spirit. Beyond is the limitless sea that bears us all.

[also published on Silent Assemblies]

That which plainly is

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Perhaps the most important [thing] is that awakened awareness is not a state of mind; whereas mental states, no matter how exalted, come and go, awakened awareness exists prior to all passing states, as the ground of being in which all experiences arise and pass away. As I suggested earlier, it’s like space or air in this regard; without it, experiences would not occur…

Awakened awareness answers this question by providing a global, expansive, all-inclusive perspective in which the apparent center drops away and everything is welcomed for what it is, without being interpreted in terms of how it benefits or threatens the separate self. Not only that, but awakened awareness confers the realization that what’s looking out through these eyes and what’s being looked at, the apparent subject and the apparent object, are actually just expressions of the same limitless, uninterrupted, undivided field that’s inherently awake, luminous, and filled with love.

Stephan Bodian, Beyond Mindfulness, pp.28; 40-41

A statement like this risks raising hackles on the one hand on those who distrust metaphysics, and on the other on those who distrust language that tends towards the nontheist. There can be a sense of threat in a statement like this from Pema Chödrön:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves… Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, p.53 (Kindle edition)

Practice inevitably involves walking out on some thin existential ice, and it is necessary to trust, somehow, that either the ice will bear your weight, or the practice itself will keep you from falling through. But trust is essential: panic can be disastrous, in much the same way that a bad trip can be the disastrous outcome of an experiment with psychedelics, only here there is no drug to wear off.

It is here that the concretising tendency of religion is such a comfort – especially when, maybe unexpectedly, confronted with grief or mortality. Here is Chödrön’s “hand to hold”: the cosmic babysitter when the monsters begin to close in.

But is metaphysics just religion intellectualised? There are metaphysical underpinnings in any religion, however deeply hidden they may be; and at least some religion may be metaphysics mythologised, made relatable.

But there is more to all this than a kind of psychological empiricism, or you would not be reading these words, any more than I would have written them, I suspect. As Stephan Bodian points out, the ground of being, “the limitless, formless, all-pervasive essence of what is” (ibid., p.102) is identical to the awareness within which experience itself arises. The unceasingness of that in utter experience is the end of faith, in both senses of the word “end”: that destination beyond which it is no longer necessary to believe, since one is at rest in that which plainly is.

[also posted on my other blog Silent Assemblies]

Hope against hope

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I had been intending to write a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Hopeless?, when it occurred to me that I had written just such a post five years ago, on my old blog, covering the same subject, using some of the same sources, almost exactly, if you will make allowance for rather more overtly Christian language that I would probably use today. It is worth remembering, in this context, how closely parallel the Jesus Prayer and the Nembutsu are, as I suggested yesterday. Here it is:

——

In her luminous little book Mystical Hope, Cynthia Bourgeault writes of the difference between the mystical hope of her title and the standard, upbeat product that is tied to outcome: “I hope I get the job.” “I hope they have a good time on holiday.” “I hope Jill finds her cat.” “I hope the biopsy is clear…” If we are dependent on “regular hope”, she asks, where does that leave us when it turns out to be cancer, when our friends disappear on their holiday in the Andes?

Bourgeault goes on point out that there seems to be quite another kind of hope “that is a complete reversal of our usual way of looking at things. Beneath the ‘upbeat’ kind of hope that parts the sea and pulls rabbits out of hats, this other hope weaves its way as a quiet, even ironic counterpoint.” She goes on to quote the prophet Habakkuk, who at the end of a long passage of calamity and grief, suddenly breaks into song:

Though the fig tree does not blossom,
   and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
   and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
   and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
   I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
   he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
   and makes me tread upon the heights. 

Habakkuk 3.17-19

Here is a hope that in no way depends upon outcomes; a hope that lifts us up in spite of the worst, that leads us, with Job, closer to God the more “hopeless” the circumstances. It can be found too in the writings of William Leddra, Corrie ten Boom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Irina Ratushinskaya… But how? Where could such a hope come from, that sings even in the mouth of the furnace?

Cynthia Bourgeault suggests three observations we might make about this seemingly indestructible hope, which she calls mystical hope:

  1. Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions.
  2. It has something to do with presence – not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand.
  3. It bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of strength, joy, and satisfaction: an “unbearable lightness of being.” But mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward expectations being met, it seems to produce them from within.

Bourgeault remarks that one more quality might be added to the characteristics of mystical hope: that it is in some sense atemporal – out of time. “For some reason or another,” she says, “the experience pulls us out of the linear stream of hours and days… and imbues the moment we are actually in with an unexpected vividness and fullness. It is as if we had been transported, for the duration, into a wider field of presence, a direct encounter with Being itself.”

Thomas Merton (whom Cynthia Bourgeault also quotes here) writes:

At the centre of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

As Cynthia Bourgeault recognises, this awareness, whether sudden or gradual, of the “last, irreducible, secret center of the heart where God alone penetrates” (Mansur al-Hallaj) may come out of a clear blue sky as well as out of the storm. But perhaps I might be permitted to make a small observation from my own experience: it seems to be in times of absolute inner poverty, when almost all worldly satisfactions and securities have been withdrawn by pain and circumstance, when realistically there is no hope at all of the upbeat variety left, that these moments of clarity and presence most often manifest. Perhaps this is the sheer mercy of God coming to us when there is nothing else left to us, but there does seem to be one other factor involved here, and to me it seems to be crucial to understand this. Regular, faithful practice appears to be in some way essential. Now please hear me: I am not saying that practice will put us in control of these moments of illumination – they are pure grace – nor that practice will somehow bring them about. But practice will open our hearts to their possibility; it will dim the incessant clamour of thought and grasping, to the point where we can glimpse the initial glimmer of that inner light, and stand still and watch.

Another point occurs to me. If we look at what I have just written about inner poverty, and the lack of satisfaction and security, and about pain and straitened circumstances, one has almost a recipe for classical asceticism, for hair shirts, hunger and scourging, for enforced celibacy and for the enclosed life. This is, it seems to me, to misunderstand the mercy of God. It may very well be that God grants to those who have nothing else to look forward to but pain and lack, these radiant glimpses of glory, but to attempt to force God’s hand by artificially producing the external conditions of divorce, disability or the concentration camp seems to me to be foolishness, to put it as charitably as I am able. But practice, the “white martyrdom” of faithful and unremitting prayer, is another matter entirely, one where the Jesus Prayer, “hallowed by two millennia of Christian practice… consistently singled out… as the most powerful prayer a Christian can pray” (Bourgeault, op cit.), seems perfectly fitted to our path, not only as a means of hesychasm, of stilling the heart, but simply as a prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

——

I wrote the above text at a time when I was beginning to be seriously ill with a heart problem, and it seemed to me to be as clear an answer to my own questions as I could find. I would still stand by it today. Hope lies in the emptying of self, the abandonment of “regular hope” in the “objectless awareness” (Bourgeault) of contemplation. Perhaps Pema Chödrön (see her passage quoted in Hopeless?) has a point after all.

Hopeless?

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In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness…

It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope…

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

This brings us close to what has become for me a key issue in practice and in experience. Chödrön goes on to point out that this sense of hopelessness, of “nowhere to turn” and no one to turn to, lies at the heart of non-theism. There is no cosmic babysitter, she explains: “In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”

Now, there is a decided attraction in such a point of view. For all the relinquishment of the sense of “a solid, separate self” it is fatally easy, down this road, to see oneself as some kind of Raymond Chandler anti-hero, hat pulled low, collar turned to the rainy night, face starkly outlined by the light of a match held in cupped hands. “There’s no hope now, baby. And y’know, that’s okay…” The End.

The Buddhist opposite, I guess, is shinjin. Here the practitioner is giving up not hope, but self-reliance. She abandons her self to the tariki, the “other-power” of Amida Buddha inherent in the nembutsu, the core practice of Pureland Buddhism. As Jeff Wilson points out,

The nembutsu that we say, that others can hear, is only the tip of the shinjin iceberg; the nembutsu we recite is only the most visible sign of the working of Other Power within the shadowy ego-self. That inner working of shinjin may show through as nembutsu, but it can also show through in a hug, a gift, a kind word, laughter.

Nembutsu is a vital avenue for expressing our faith, but it need not be taken for the whole iceberg. There’s really no limit to the possibilities of expression of the trusting heart….

Humility and trust go hand in hand, forming the second part of the true trusting mind. Shinjin is another name for this development of humility-entrusting.

Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness

The issue of humility is one, of course, with which I had continually to struggle during my long years as a Christian contemplative. My practice was always the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” – a prayer repeated in very much the same manner as the nembutsu, formally for regular periods each day, and spontaneously from time to time for the rest of the day – and night, too, given the way it tends to pop up whenever one turns over in the night, or half-wakes to look at the clock.

The Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer are both ways of abandonment: not of the abandonment of hope so much as the abandonment of self-will, of giving up not hope but self-reliance, of giving up oneself into the continuum of something not other but utterly interpenetrating. Jean Pierre de Caussade puts it solidly (in Christian terms of course) in his title Abandonment to Divine Providence or The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The fall out of self is the fall into now, into the ground of being, that isness that is always now and in which all beings rest.

The more I go on, the more fundamental this abandonment seems to be for me. However threadbare devotional practice can be, however compromised and compromising the religions we humans build around our moments of clarity and truth, there is no way past the frailty and limitation of the self, its littleness and its bombu imperfection. All its struggles for self-validation will sooner or later have to be given up in death anyway. To let it dissolve in light is no loss, but limitless grace.

Settling in

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Ultimately, even the nembutsu arises not from ourselves, from our own ego, but is experienced as the call from the deepest level of reality, from the depths of our own being, in which the flow of emptiness/oneness is realized in each manifestation of form and appearance.

Mark & Taitetsu Unno, from the foreword to Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart, Wisdom Publications 2009

In the Shin view, awakening isn’t something we strive desperately for and obtain through our own efforts at study or meditation—it is something we settle into and receive.

Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart, Wisdom Publications 2009, p.4

Over the years of my Christian contemplative practice, and perhaps even more so now, I have felt keenly that contemplation is not so much something we do as something we enter, however intentional that entering may have to be. I have never felt that practice was – for me at any rate – a matter of self-improvement, or even attainment. (This may be why I have always been uncomfortable with contemplative metaphors such as the eponymous ladder of John Climacus, and some of the rather Baroque imagery associated with Vajrayana Buddhism.) The sense is not one of passivity (as some have felt applicable to the concept of infused contemplation) but of receptivity, openness to something of which we are already part, albeit unconsciously. Practice, then, could be conceived as a way of becoming conscious, waking up, to this.

“This” of course, is really no more than “things-as-they-are”, that which actually is (Eckhart’s istigkeit) regardless of the ego’s samsaric constructs through which we, half-asleep, tend to experience objects and events: “Rather than desperately trying to bring about our own buddhahood, we recognize that if we relax and don’t stick our foolish egos in the way of things, then the Dharma will naturally bring about our transformation… Amida is the means by which the Dharma, the truth of things-as-they-are, acts upon us to help us awaken to liberation… what we need to do is develop trust in the embracing ocean of the Dharma.” (Wilson, op. cit., p. 33)

Perhaps this is why I have always been drawn to practices like the Jesus Prayer and the Nembutsu, which are explicitly simple practices for simple (bombu) people. For all the words we use, for all the complexities we in our anxieties construct, it is that just simple. All we need to do is stop thrashing about, and settle in.