Category Archives: language

Silence and language

Even in silence, the linguistic apparatus of our brain continues in the background wash of thought. Even when we avoid the incessant temptation to follow, to identify with thoughts as they arise, we know they are there, spinning their webs of language in the corners of our awareness like spiders in the corners of the window frame.

We can attend to our breathing, to our proprioception, to the sensations of our body resting where it rests; but the thoughts with their language continue as before. What if we were to use the linguistic yearnings of our mind in our contemplative practice itself?

Stephanie Paulsell: “Contemplation… [i]t’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God… There are these things… reading, meditation, prayer… you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift…”

And then there are the prayers of repetition, acting almost as a semantic container for presence, a way of using the mind’s own hunger for language as a route to silence.

True contemplative silence is no more than resting in the objectless awareness that lies at the end of words. And Stephanie Paulsell is right – it is a gift – one that no intention, no act of will can secure. But we can remain still; it seems that, for me at least, stillness is the central thing “you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available”.

All of practice comes down to stillness in the end; and it is only in stillness that words can finally settle out like sediment in the troubled pond of thought, to leave the steady light of what is in the unobscured clarity of awareness.

What to do?

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When we are silent and still, we come in touch with an energetic vibrancy that we might call formless presence, pure consciousness or spirit. No words can capture it. This aware, awake presence feels open, vast, spacious, uncontained, boundless, limitless, empty and immensely alive. It is empty of any place to land or anything to grab onto. It cannot be objectified. It isn’t a “thing” among other things, or an idea to believe in…

This entire phenomenal world is a movement of that radiant darkness, a waving of the great formless ocean… Each wave includes and is a movement of the whole ocean. The ocean can’t be pulled apart or grasped and held onto. Life is like this. Consciousness is like this. We can only be this. And we already are this. This is all there is.

But consciousness can be lost in its own creations, in the very convincing illusion of separate, persisting, independent forms, and in the illusion of being a separate self existing in an apparently outside world. Consciousness can be mesmerized by the narratives and dramas in the ever-changing movies of waking and dreaming life. These movies can be appreciated if we know they are fictions, but when we take them too seriously and become identified as the main character, suffering follows. What to do? …

Maybe simply see what you are doing! Stop, look and listen. Explore what is. See how this living reality actually is, instead of how you think it is. And as I always say, go with whatever works, whatever sets you free. That can change over time, and what helps one person may not help another. You have to find what works for you in THIS moment here and now. And don’t worry about whether it might be “dualistic” or “not advanced enough.” Everything has its time and place. And it’s all happening by itself! It’s all an impersonal movement of the whole. The individual, apparently autonomous author-doer is an illusion. Nothing can ever be other than exactly how it is. You truly can’t get it wrong. The problem is always imaginary…

No metaphor or analogy is ever perfect. The word is not the thing to which it points. The map is not the territory it helps us to navigate. So the invitation in spirituality is always to put the book down and dive deeply into the territory. To be still. To stop, look and listen. To be this vast listening presence without borders or seams.

Not someday. Not forever after. Not “me” being “that.” But right here, right now, noticing that this is how it always already is…

Joan Tollifson, What Really Works

It always comes down to this. There’s no method, no dogma, no set of rules that dictates what we should believe, let alone practice. All the names, all the structures and doctrines – they are only metaphors, ways we have found for a moment to talk about that which is inaccessible to words. Because we have to try – we have to tell each other. We have to try and share what we have seen: this vast and living ground, this utter isness, this no-thing that is before all things.

What we call it – God, rigpa, Being – matters no more than how we get there – shikantaza, Centering Prayer, vipassana – which is to say that it matters to the one practising, matters absolutely in is own time; and yet times change. Tollifson’s wisdom is to see this, “Everything has its time and place. And it’s all happening by itself!” Even the author of the Old Testament book of Proverbs saw it, all those years ago: “All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?” (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV)

We don’t have to agonise over this, desperately wondering if we’ve made the right choice, taken the right path, subscribed to the right statement of faith. There is no judgement that awaits us. Where we are is where we need to be. All we need is trust, and a place to sit.

Eastering*

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Jesus was not the lone exemplar. Jesus was not the standalone symbol for the pattern of the universe. Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah on this Easter morning, we’re also saying hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for.

Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naive to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away.

Of course, it’s an act of faith on our side. In our experience, our most cherished people, pets, and even places, fade away—but Jesus is the archetype of the shape of the universe. To believe in Jesus is to believe that all of this is going somewhere and that God is going to make it so. All we have to do is stay on the train, stay on the wave, trusting that by our crucifixions, we would be allowed to fail, fumble and die, and be transformed by grace and by God.

Richard Rohr

[Jesus] left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being “a new creation”: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart…

As Paul so profoundly realized, “up” and “down” do not ultimately matter, for in kenosis consciousness reclaims dominion over energy. The pathway to freedom, to the realized unity of our being, lies in and in fact is coextensive with the sacramental act of giving it all away, making “self-giving” the core gesture through which all the meaning, purpose, and nobility of our human life is ultimately conveyed.

Cynthia Bourgeault

The intuition that death is not the end, that the way to light is through the darkness of entire surrender, is fundamental to the contemplative life in all traditions. Easter is only one expression of it, though it is certainly the most powerful expression available to us in the West. Where we so often go wrong is in assuming that “life” somehow implies the survival of something like an ego. Ego is precisely what must be surrendered, in contemplative practice just as, ultimately, in death. Personhood, whether imagined as human or as divine, is not what we think it is. As Buddhism so clearly sees, there is actually no such individual self – it only looks that way; and that illusion ends with surrender, with death. Life cannot fall out of the ground of being; the ground is life; life is being.

I am gradually coming to realise that language and culture are inescapable; I can no more escape my native English, and Englishness, than I can change my own genes. No wonder the language of the Christian contemplative life has so strong a resonance for me; it is simply the way that I perceive things, left to myself. That, after all, is how the Gospels came to be peppered with imagery that looks as though it has been borrowed from its contemporary pagan surroundings almost as much as from its native Jewish culture; that is simply how language turned out for the New Testament writers when they tried to find words for a reality beyond words.

My innate Einzelgänger-ishness remains, of course. But maybe I can embrace, rather than struggle with, my native contemplative heritage. The sense of homecoming I felt at Willen Priory was perhaps not illusory after all, but a real intuition; not a homecoming to a place so much as to a language, to a way of understanding that which is beyond language.

*Eastering, as a verb, seems to have originated with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘.

Trying to put it simply

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Simply put I am an atheist. That is, I don’t believe in any kind of god. I think that the major religions of the world are dangerous selfish memeplexes that use a variety of tricks to propagate themselves and do great harm to both individuals and society – from preventing truthful education to justifying war and murder. However, most religions include at least two aspects which I would be sorry to lose.

First is the truths that many contain in their mystical or spiritual traditions; including insights into the nature of self, time and impermanence. Happily, these can be found through meditation, drugs, ritual and other methods and are not the sole prerogative of religions. I have had many spontaneous mystical experiences, and have practiced Zen meditation for more than 20 years.

The other is the rituals that we humans seem to need, marking such events as birth, death, and celebrations. Humanism provides a non-religious alternative and I have found the few such ceremonies I have attended to be a refreshing change from the Christian ones of my upbringing. I am also glad that these ceremonies allow for an eclectic mixture of songs, music and words. In spite of my lack of belief I still enjoy the ancient hymns of my childhood and I know others do too. We can and should build on our traditions rather than throwing out everything along with our childish beliefs.

Susan Blackmore

Unlike Susan Blackmore I was not brought up as a Christian; my long association with the Christian contemplative tradition began at the end of my twenties, when I first encountered real live Christian contemplatives at the SSM Priory at Willen, and became aware that there was still a living contemplative tradition within Christianity; and that texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, were more than curiosities for scholars of the medieval church. Before I knew it, I found myself launched on a lifetime of contemplation in the context, mostly, of the Anglican church, and based on the practice of the Jesus Prayer.

As I wrote here recently, to write, or even to think, about the contemplative life (or indeed spirituality more generally) is much easier if one is prepared to use the time-worn language of religion. The difficulty arises when one discovers, as I have all too often, that the language has taken over, and is actually determining what one can say or think. So far from experiencing the attributes – “accidents”, to borrow from Aristotle via Thomas Aquinus – of religion as comforting or nostalgic, they have come to represent, for me at any rate, a real danger: that of finding myself actually experiencing my own experiences through a stained-glass filter of religious imagery.

None of this happens, of course, in practice itself; it is only when I attempt to think and write about it that I fall prey to such phenomenological distortions.

The reassurance of familiarity, the resonance of well-loved and much used phrases, can come to blanket the clarity of direct experience like a valley fog. The more difficult task, that of somehow finding a language with which to write of secular mysticism on its own terms, is perhaps the reason why I persevere, despite my frequent mistakes, with this blog.

Apophasis

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It occurs to me that the dilemma I wrote of in my last post, that of being unable to find words for spiritual realities outside of one or another religious tradition, is similar to one faced by theologians and philosphers since classical times, which led to the development of apophatic theology, the discipline which attempts to speak not of God, but of what God is not. Words apply to things, and God – at least God as understood as the ground of being itself – is no thing.

Undifferentiated being, the ground and source of all that is, cannot have attributes – accidents, to use the theological term – that can be described. Being as it is the source of all, and the foundation of awareness itself, it cannot rightly be the object of any sentence. We can assign to it a term, Being (with a capital B) perhaps, as Eckhart Tolle prefers, or God; but all that does is function as maybe a placeholder for a name. That is about all it can do.

We can, of course, speak and think and write of practice; we can think, and write, critically of others’ thoughts and writings. To try to do this without unduly borrowing from avowedly Christian – or Buddhist, or Taoist, or whatever – terminology is certainly a good thing; but what is really essential is to try and avoid doing it with the phenomenology of the contemplative life itself. We must somehow find a way to speak only of the inwardness of the way, without attempting to explain or justify it. Writers like Tolle himself, or Nisargadatta Maharaj, often seem to get it right; whereas ones like Sam Harris or Chris Niebauer, with their heavy borrowing from Buddhist teachings, sometimes do not.

Perhaps my problem in all this comes down to diffidence, as much as anything. To endeavour to write truly about the spiritual life, and the reason for the spiritual life, without borrowing from the lexicon of one religion or another, requires a kind of self confidence I have always found difficult to acquire. Maybe it does come down to too much willingness to think, after all.

The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being “at one” and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested — at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Lenses, or doors

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Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes…

The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ – phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage – so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air.

There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoché – they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly.

Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Thinking and writing as I do about spiritual experience and practice carries with it at least one persistent difficulty: that of finding words for that which is by definition, almost, beyond words. When I confine myself to quasi-scientific language, shunning anything that sounds too “religious” or “woo-woo”, I all too easily find myself in a barren, materialistic wasteland, bereft of the living inwardness of actual experience. On the other hand, if I allow free rein to words like “God”, and “mystical”, it is almost impossible to avoid the “isms”, and the coloured lenses through which they force me to see, to describe even to myself, the inner landscape of the spiritual.

You see, sometimes religious terminology, whether Buddhist or, more seductively for me at any rate, Christian, seems to be the most appropriate – if not the only possible – language in which to discuss the spiritual. But then I find myself thinking in religious language, and before I know it I am experiencing my experiences as scenes in some sort of inner stained-glass window. I don’t merely describe them to myself in those terms: they actually arrive as those sorts of experiences, tinted and glittering with two millennia of resonant imagery.

Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, [Husserl teaches that] one is… able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.

Wikipedia

If all is going according to plan, of course, one’s practice should provide the necessarily astringent antidote to general or naive isms of all kinds. But in trying to write, I have to think; and if I think in the terms that I’ve adopted in order to write… you see the problem?

The danger – and it is a danger, not just an inconvenience – is that a disconnect may occur between the living, wordless awareness at the ground of things, and the view through the lenses that religious language, and all that that entails, have dropped between the experience and the experiencing mind. If this is not seen in time, then the usual remedies of mindfulness and attention may no longer work, and one may find oneself in a spiritual crisis, “often called spiritual emergency, awakening or psycho-spiritual crisis… a turbulent period of psychological opening and transformation”, when the mind’s reliably everyday interface temporarily shatters under the pressure of massive cognitive disconnection. Too often, these events or states are mistakenly diagnosed as psychotic or depressive illness, with disastrous consequences.

The power of religious language over even the most rigorously honest thought and expression can be seen in the work of any number of last century’s poets, from David Jones to TS Eliot to Dylan Thomas. The escape route, it appears, was spotted almost two centuries earlier by William Blake, when, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he wrote, “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 narrow chinks of language, the language we use to describe even to ourselves what is beyond language, must swing away before the bright ground of all that is.

What all this means for the poor spiritual writer is another matter, perhaps. Effing the ineffable is a perilous endeavour, choose how. But we must do our best with the tools at our disposal, whether they are home-produced or borrowed from another culture. We just have to be especially careful, perhaps, not to cut ourselves with the sharp edges.

*If this post strikes too uncomfortable a chord, or if you simply would like to explore this question of spiritual crises further, I have added some hopefully useful links to the foot of my Advice page.

Recovering the sacred

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Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

What obscures this understanding in many of us is the belief that the silent retreat is a priority over other expressions of life. When we believe we are not where we need to be for spiritual growth, we relegate our daily life to a secondary tier. We energetically pull out of our spiritual life and wait for the appropriate secluded moment in order to fully engage. Leaning toward or away from any experience creates an anticipation of fulfillment in the future, and the sacred that exists here and now is lost. Discovering the sacred within all moments is the hallmark of awakening…

The lay Buddhist begins to recover the sacred in the most remote areas of life, in the midst of difficulty and dissatisfaction, loneliness and despair. The reality of problems is challenged and investigated, and life begins to thrive free of circumstances and conditions. The heart takes over and is resurrected from the conditioned habits of mind.

Rodney Smith, Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010

Smith has put his finger here on an issue that has long troubled me. There is that in me, if not in all of us, that so easily divides life into partitions: sacred/profane; spiritual/material; worthy/unworthy. Even the concept of lay Buddhism has for me too religious a connotation, tending to one side of the old religious/secular dichotomy. As I wrote last year,

So many of our practices find their roots in one religion or another – most often Buddhism – that they bring with them sticky remnants of their original religious context. Buddhist practices frequently imply a background acceptance of the concepts of karma and rebirth, for instance; and practices with Christian roots may come with background assumptions regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in the contemplative life.

…these things can be a problem. It is impossible to talk about, even to think about, the spiritual life without using words; and these kinds of words so often – especially for those of us with a past involvement in the formal contemplative life – help maintain an unconscious religious atmosphere that clings to the mere fact of practice itself, and can easily act like a tinted lens that colours our experience, and the ways we communicate it, even to ourselves.

If I were to adopt a label, I suppose it would have to be simply Humanist; a humanist of a particularly contemplative bent, perhaps, but a humanist nonetheless. If we are truly to recover the sacred – the “actually loved and known” (David Jones) – to be, after all, the bits and pieces of an ordinary life – all those things so often dismissed as merely “quotidian” – then it seems to me we need to flee these traces of formal religious language. It is so easy to lose the sacred among the habits and assumptions of our daily lives that to add these ancient designations to the mix seems unhelpful to say the least. As Rodney Smith generously concludes his article:

The lay Buddhist harbors no defense, seeks no shelter, and avoids no conflict for the resolution of wholeness. It is here in the middle of our total involvement [with daily life] that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.

Humanism and spirituality

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It is all too easy to find arguments that spirituality is too compromised a word to be used in the context of any discussion of humanism, or indeed atheism. As Marilyn Mason writes,

To sum up, “spiritual” and “spirituality” almost always require explanation if they are to communicate clearly, and so I think that it would be better to abandon them altogether, and leave them to the religious. If we are really talking about emotions or emotional development or emotional literacy, or aesthetic awareness or experiences, or love of nature or humanity, or love and goodness, or hope, why just not say so?

On the other hand, many would argue that spirituality is far too useful a word to be discarded merely because it has uncomfortable associations for some people. Jeremy Rodell:

Even if we accept that Humanists have a “spiritual dimension”, it can still be argued that we shouldn’t use the word “spiritual” because of its religious connotations and lack of clear definition.

The snag is that no other word will do as well if we want to communicate what we mean. Terms such as emotion, aesthetic awareness, love of nature, or simply love, goodness or hope simply don’t do the job. Just because it’s used for everything from the experiences of Catholic nuns to New Age gurus, doesn’t mean it’s off-limits to us. In fact atheists are uniquely positioned to understand that all of these people are really talking about the same thing, but they interpret it through the filter of their (to us irrational) beliefs. We shouldn’t allow the religious to ban a useful word from our vocabulary.

André Comte-Sponville believes that it is vital to reclaim the word:

Spirituality is far too important a matter to be left to fundamentalists. Tolerance is far too precious a possession to be confused with indifference or laxity. Nothing could be worse than letting ourselves be deadlocked into a confrontation between the fanaticism of some – no matter what religion they lay claim to – and the nihilism of others. Far better to combat both, without either conflating them or falling into their respective traps. The name of this combat is the separation of church and state. It remains for atheists to invent the spirituality that goes with it…

Atheists have as much spirit as everyone else; why would they be less interested in spiritual life?

The purpose of this blog is, as its subtitle suggests, to discuss contemplative spirituality and practice, so you would expect me to come down on the side of retaining such a useful word. But there is a more important reason to be writing this post, I think.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted here often before, writes:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

Later in the same book, he continues:

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.

Susan Blackmore (an atheist and patron of Humanists UK) has written an excellent little book, Consciousness, A Very Short Introduction, where she puts her finger on precisely the point at issue here:

What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

This is the question which underlies all my own searching, and while I am delighted to leave the neuroscience to the professionals – like Blackmore and Harris – those of us who have devoted a large part of our lives to contemplative practice need to offer our small contributions, from the inside, as it were. It is not only relevant, I think, to contribute our moments of vastness and wonder, but to bear witness to the daily process of insight that our steady work entails.

Earlier this year I wrote,

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 freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it…

The practice of choiceless awareness… that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either…

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow… that someone is prepared to do this, and perhaps to ‘fess up to doing it on a regular basis. Maybe someone has to…

Why?

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I realise that yesterday’s post may have seemed unnecessarily startling. “Atheist” is one of those words, like “evangelical” or “apostate”, almost guaranteed to produce a sharp intake of breath on the part of the reader. I apologise – but I did want to be definite, having prevaricated on the issue for so long.

Please don’t imagine that I’ve turned away from the contemplative life, or that I’ve decided to embrace some “There’s nowt but muck and brass, lad!” brand of materialism. I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting Sam Harris yet again:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

And that is the problem – if it is a problem – I have had to face here. It is far too easy to read the word “atheist”, as I sometimes did myself in the past, and imagine someone for whom “all talk of spirituality [is] a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception.” I am not that man.

In fact, until the relatively recent extremes of polarisation set in, many of those we think of as archetypal atheists, like Bertrand Russell, had hearts open to experience beyond everyday consensus reality.

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics)

I confess that having spent much of my life wrestling with spiritual insight on the one hand and unease with the concept of the supernatural on the other, I am profoundly relieved to be able at last to admit, to myself as much as to anyone, that atheist probably does come closer to describing my metaphysical attitude than anything else I can think of. I did consider using the softer “nontheist” (a term beloved of some contemporary Quakers) but I couldn’t get away from the sense that to use the term of myself was once again clouding the issue. I have to admit, though, that there is a passage using it, in Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, that comes as close to expressing my own feelings at the moment as anything I’ve read:

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… Nontheism 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.

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice

Category Archives: language

Silence and language

What to do?

Eastering*

Trying to put it simply

Apophasis

Lenses, or doors

Recovering the sacred

Humanism and spirituality

Why?

Surrender