Category Archives: persistence

The master’s tools

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Sociologist Nancy Nason-Clark has researched the parallels between abusive religious environments and abuse in intimate partnerships. She has determined that individuals—women in particular—who have been in high-control religious environments are more likely to be in abusive partnerships. These individuals have internalized that their voice doesn’t matter, that someone else is allowed to control them, that they are supposed to forgive, and that it would be a sin to leave. The systems are the same whether they are in a marriage, in a church, on a team, or in a workplace. And when our sense of self is eroded or devalued, or when someone who has control over us tells us they represent the will of the creator of the universe, it makes sense that we wouldn’t recognize the dynamic happening in another context.

Hillary McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing p.80

Audre Lorde wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In other words, it will take something different from the tools we were handed by toxic and abusive systems to build communities where spiritual trauma doesn’t happen. We do something different each time we refuse to believe we are bad. With the courage of an open heart, we can stay connected to the pain within ourselves, we can see the pain we have caused in others, and we can hang on to the ray of hope that comes from telling the truth about what should not have been and who we really are.

Ibid. pp.141-142

It seems to me that perhaps the dangers Dr McBride outlines aren’t restricted to what she refers to as “high-control religious environments”; perhaps it is simply in the nature of organised religion – even in such apparently benign forms as a Quaker meeting or an Anglican parish – to set up these control systems, often quite unconsciously. It is not necessary to set out to devalue a worshipper’s own intelligence and their own voice: with the best will in the world, that is just what happens in religious systems, merely by virtue of what they are.

To attempt to put things right within the structures of organised religion – whether by reform or by some kind of “safeguarding” or other oversight – appears to me massively to miss the point. If I am right in suggesting that crafting a hierarchical organisation to oversee spiritual intuition is disastrously misguided – if humanly understandable, given our inborn instinct for community – then attempting to fix a religious institution from within is precisely a case of attempting to use the master’s tools to dismantle the house he has built.

Since the recent pandemic there has been a continued move away from the institutions of religion, despite the panicky efforts of religious nationalists to drag us back to some imagined “better past” – be it some kind of Islamic caliphate or the false memory of an ideal “Christian nation”.

I have written before (here, and here) of the benefits of a quiet life. Perhaps we are indeed coming into a time when the more or less solitary contemplative way has more to offer, not just to its practitioners themselves, but to the community generally, oddly enough. The intuition that has often led communities of prayer to strengthen their commitment rather than to disperse in times of war may not be so escapist after all, nor indeed so dependent on community as it might at first appear. The contemplative spirituality of a life apart is embedded very deeply in humanity; as so often in the past – look at the lives of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, or the earliest Quakers – it may prove indispensable in our own time.

Weltschmerz (ii)

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Conflict, turbulence, uncertainty, violence, deprivation and upset are nothing new. During the time when Chan (early Zen) Buddhism was developing in China, when Linji was alive, during one decade, two-thirds of the population died from war, famine or plague. During the lifetime of the great nineteenth and twentieth century Advaita sage Ramana Maharshi, who spent most of his life in silence, doing nothing and simply being present, there were two world wars, the rise of Hitler, the holocaust, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Spanish Civil War, a global pandemic (the Spanish flu), the creation of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, the independence of India and the partition of that country into India and Pakistan, a division that also involved violence, conflict, mass displacement and death. The human world has always been filled with disagreements, power struggles, violence, persecution, plagues, famines, injustices and wars. Empires have come and gone, millions have died.

People have responded to this in many different ways. Nondual traditions such as Zen and Advaita are two of those responses. Social service work and political organizing are another. I think of Zen and Advaita as being akin to those musicians on the Titanic, and I see political and social service work as being more like those trying to save the ship or ready the lifeboats. All these actions have their place…

Joan Tollifson, Stormy Weather

It’s odd, perhaps, but after all these years I still sometimes worry whether I am doing the right thing as a slightly eremitical contemplative, or whether I should be out there on the streets as some kind of activist, or volunteering in some local social enterprise. You would think that by now I would be at peace with my own choice, if choice it is. (Actually I don’t think it ever was a choice; temperament and circumstance have given me the place I find myself in. I have merely to get on with it.)

Joan Tollifson goes on to quote from her own earlier book, Bare Bones Meditation,

As I see it, meditation is not merely a quest for personal peace of mind or self-improvement. In involves an exploration of the roots of our present global suffering and the discovery of an alternative way of living. Meditation is seeing the nature of thought, how thought constantly creates images about ourselves and others, how we impose a conceptual grid on reality and then mistake the map for the territory itself…

Meditation is listening. Listening to everything. To the world, to nature, to the body, the mind, the heart, the rain, the traffic, the wind, the thoughts, the silence before sound. It is about questioning our frantic efforts to do something and become somebody, and allowing ourselves to simply be…

Meditation is a powerful antidote to our purposeful, growth-oriented, war-mongering, speed-driven, ever-productive consumer civilization, which is rapidly devouring the earth. We retreat in meditation not from reality, but from our habitual escapes from reality. Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize. But meditation is much more (and much less) than all of this. Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.

I find this such a healing reminder amid the clatter and panic of the news media – not to mention the social ones – that I feel like printing it out and keeping it next to my heart. Of course we are intimately, intricately connected, one with another, and all that we do affects every one of us. To sit still in the storm is perhaps the single most powerful act we can contribute; it just doesn’t feel very powerful, because we are so used, so addicted, to purposeful action, discursive thought, polarised and polarising emotion. To the ego, meditation is doing nothing. The ego is right. Nothing, though, is what needs doing.

Sitting still like this, the webbed patterns that connect us all become clear, like bright wires against the dark; all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right, and our presence now is all that is needed. It is all that was ever needed; it is what we have been given, our work and our home, both of these.

Coming to be

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Each morning invites you to be open and aware, as spacious as the sky that passes through you, recognizing “the precious nature of each day,” in the words of the Dalai Lama. No matter how frenzied you feel, no matter how shoved and strangled by the rush of events, you are standing in a single exquisite moment. No matter where you are, no matter how lost, you are standing at the perfect center of four directions. No matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of perfectly balanced forces. Even if you feel abandoned by all that might comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see.

Kathleen Dean Moore, adapted from Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers, in an extract published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2022

What we are part of goes back and back, and on and on. I’m not sure if it has a beginning or an end, actually. It is indestructible, being just what comes to be, even if that is the coming to be of an ending, or many endings. That balance, that helpless all rightness that underlies all that appears to be so perilous and contingent, is always there. There isn’t anything that has to be done, or refrained from, in order to bring it about. It has always been, before all that has been.

One could go on and on like this, and not explain anything. Words just don’t convey what I’m attempting to say. I suppose they may remind someone, but that’s perhaps the best they can do. I’m often reminded of my frustration when first reading Jiddu Krishnamurti: his words were wonderful, hinting at the very thing I’d been longing for, but there was no practice, no method, not even the suggestion of a pill one might take.

What Krishnamurti was writing about was choiceless awareness, the quality of openness to what is, just as it is, in the instant that it is perceived. Wes Nisker:

Choiceless awareness allows the meditator to see how our experience creates itself; how sense impressions, thoughts, and feelings arise without our willing them; how they interact and influence each other. By engaging the quality of choiceless awareness, we can extract ourselves from the contents of what we think and feel and start to explore how we think and feel.

The tool, the means to choiceless awareness, the thing I’d been looking for all those years ago is vipassana, which at its simplest is really no more than mindfulness. “Vipassana, where you’re taught to cultivate a quality of mind called ‘mindfulness’… [is] simply a state of clear, non-judgemental, and undistracted attention, moment by moment, to the contents of consciousness.” (Sam Harris, on the Waking Up app)

Now, mindfulness is a word that has come to be used, and misused, over and over for most of this century. Nisker writes (ibid.) a few pages later, “As mindfulness spreads into many corners of our culture, it would be unfortunate to forget the original and most significant use of this power of mind—as the key to self-awareness and spiritual liberation.”

To sit still, watching no more than the in and the out breath, hearing no more than the sounds from the window, feeling the weight and presence of the body against the good earth beneath the building, noticing thoughts as they rise and fade; nothing else is needed. It is just that simple, and yet it is the work of a lifetime. Of course it has to be learned, like anything else, and there are better and worse ways to begin. I’ve included an Advice page on this site.

Plain ordinary mind

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In her beautiful essay The Gift of Contemplation, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard writes:

In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

…

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

Yesterday, I wrote of the dimensionless metaphysical ground that is Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit. I know this kind of thing can sound wilfully abstruse, and yet it is truly the simplest thing; well, except that it is no thing! To sit still, aware of nothing except what is – whether the sound of tyres on the road beyond the garden, or the continual appearance of unsought dreamy thoughts, or the solid floor beneath – is as plain and ordinary a thing as one could find to do. To remain merely aware of whatever enters the field of consciousness is not even slightly complicated, and yet it is the work of a lifetime.

To learn to love what plainly is, as Goddard says, is the foundation of equanimity, the amor fati of the Stoics. And yet, this ordinary “resting in and into what is” is the very ground of isness itself. There is no other; and yet this unvarnished awareness is itself the most utterly fundamental reality, the open ground itself, before all differentiation. It is only.

The treasures of the storehouse

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In the past I have all too often found myself caught up frantically in the search for solutions, answers to dilemmas, where to go and what to do. When I was younger I so frequently struck out into uncharted and risky places, unhelpful relationships, odd career moves, simply in order to do something, get somewhere – anywhere – rather than live with uncertainty and indecision.

When I became involved with the Christian contemplative tradition, I encountered for the first time the concept of leaving such things “in God’s hands”; the idea being that in the fullness of time the Holy Spirit would convey the answer to the dilemma, directly or (more likely!) indirectly to the waiting mind. Now there is a very real benefit to be gained by such an approach, regardless of the prescribed methodology. The issue is left in abeyance for the time being, and out of the glare of anxious attention a solution may arise; or else the heart may become reconciled to the lack of one.

Of course there are alternative ways to explain this process to ourselves. “According to the left-brain, right-brain dominance theory, the left side of the brain is considered to be adept at tasks that are considered logical, rational, and calculating. By contrast, the right side of the brain is best at artistic, creative, and spontaneous tasks.” (Eagle Gamma, ‘Left Brain vs. Right Brain: Hemisphere Function’ in Simply Psychology, October 2023) So the problem the left brain has been desperately scratching at is left unsolved, until the patient, creative right brain has done its subtle work.

Needless to say, there is a Buddhist approach as well. Kaira Jewel Lingo, in an extract published in Tricycle Magazine:

These deeper life questions can’t be resolved at the level of the mind but must be entrusted to a different, deeper part of our consciousness. Thay suggests we consider this big question as a seed, plant it in the soil of our mind and let it rest there. Our mindfulness practice in our daily lives is the sunshine and water that the seed needs to sprout so that one day it will rise up on its own, in its own time. And then we’ll know the answer to our question without a doubt.

But we must leave the seed down in the soil of our mind and not keep digging it up to see if it is growing roots. It won’t grow that way! It is the same with a deep and troubling question. We ask our deeper consciousness to take care of it and then let go of our thinking and worrying about it. Then in our daily lives we practice calming, resting, and coming home to ourselves in the present moment, and that will help the seed of our question to ripen naturally and authentically. This process cannot be rushed or forced. It may take weeks, months, or years. But we can trust that the seed is “down there,” being tended to by our deeper consciousness, and one day it will sprout into a clear answer.

In Buddhist psychology this part of our mind is called store consciousness. This is because it has the function of storing our memories and all the various mind states we can experience in latent, sleeping form. For example, maybe you’ve experienced trying to solve a problem or find an answer to something that perplexes you. You think hard and circle round and round in your mind, but you feel you don’t get anywhere. Then you let the question go, and suddenly when you least expect it, inspiration or helpful ideas come to you in a time of rest, and you just know what to do. That is store consciousness operating. It is working on the problem for you while your day-to-day consciousness rests. Store consciousness works in a very natural and easeful way and is much more efficient than our thinking mind. When wisdom arises from store consciousness, it feels right in the body and we no longer have doubts.

But waiting for the answer to arise can be challenging at times, because we may really want to know the answer. We may find ourselves feeling deeply insecure and fearful if we don’t know what to do, which path to choose. We worry we will make the wrong choice, and we catastrophize about what will happen if we take this or that direction. It’s hard to find our way if we continue to feed this worry and fear. We can recognize that we are not helping the situation and stop. Returning to this moment, anchoring ourselves in our body, we will find the solidity of the home inside of us, which is capable of helping us find our way, if only we let it, and if we can let go of trying to figure out the future in our heads.

Whichever way we choose to understand it, the process – which can only take place in the heart’s stillness, whether through the explicit practice of mindfulness or by some analogous means – is profound and trustworthy. In fact, it seems often to be transformative, not only of our own lives but, in a deep and unexpected way, of the lives of those around us.

In an interview, also in Tricycle magazine, the Buddhist LGBT+ pioneer Larry Yang says,

As activists, we can be invested in the goal or specific change. Take your time. Experiment with the teachings yourself and see if they assist you to navigate the complexities and stresses of your own life. Explore for yourself how the impact of the mindfulness and heart practices can influence your work. Please feel invited to exploring freedom through the process, rather than the outcome. Freedom is distinct and different from justice. Working toward justice and equity are indispensable activities to level the disparities that create oppression. However, freedom is not dependent on external circumstances—not even justice. Can we do the difficult and hard work of social justice without our hearts becoming difficult and hard as well? Can we deeply engage with working toward justice from a place of inner freedom within our minds and hearts and use wisdom and compassion as forces to change the world? That is the invitation that I am passionate about exploring for myself…

Creating the stillness in the vortex of our lives helps us to create some sense of calm and tranquility in a world that seems to be crazy with violence and fragmented in its differences and conflicts. As we transform our own experience and relationship to our realities, we cannot help but affect those around us in radiating circles into the larger culture. These moments of freedom and transformation begin to change and elevate the consciousness and awareness of the world.

Contemplative Reading

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I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.

If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.

I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.

I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway  – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.

A (very) short booklist:

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Doors

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There is something about doors. They are curiously inevitable. Largely unchanged long into history, they can let their users in or out, keep them safe or keep them prisoner; let them rest or let them run.

Our senses are only the doors of our perception; what we see or hear is as much story as data. Turn off the processing, the algorithms of interpretation that make us who we are, and the crazy lights of elsewhere will threaten to wipe all we ever knew like words written in the steam across a bathroom window. That’s the hope and the fear of psychedelics; but we cannot know what is real by simply breaking down the doors of what it is to be human.

All we are is the infinitely delicate pattern our minds trace on the fields and particles of our fleeting scrap of what is there. Beneath it all the ground holds, beyond beginning or end. The doors we are given are ways in to what is real, our own dear and transitory lives; they let us in, not shut us out. Stillness, patience, the gentle breath: these are the ways to the fields of wonder, the steadiness of being.

The way of persistence

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If there’s one thing that’s truly essential in contemplative practice, it’s keeping on keeping on. Sheer persistence lies at the heart of contemplation: session after session, day after day. Sometimes I think keeping at it is more important than what it is we keep at. Inevitably, over the years, there will be changes – sometimes radical, as mine have occasionally been – more often slight and gradual, as we reveal to ourselves more about the nature of mind, and of the way things come to be.

Importantly, though, we need to understand that practice doesn’t make anything happen. Perhaps though, for me at least, practice does make a place where it is possible for things to happen. Maybe practice functions 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. Awakening itself comes, it seems to me, from some kind of slow, unseen growth or change in the mind itself. Mindfulness, self-awareness, openness to what is – a more religious mindset might call it grace…

Breathing in, where do you feel the breath sensation? Breathing out, where do you feel it? You maintain this sense of bodily sensations that come and go. It’s not imagination. It’s not an image. You’re just learning this art of allowing, which in more religious language would be called surrender. Surrender to what? To what is, to the natural law that the breath is obeying as the lungs fill up and empty.

As you follow this way of practice, you take your seat and you’re upright and relaxed. You’re sitting, breathing, and learning how to stay with one theme: breathing in the context of the whole body. As you do that, of course, the world doesn’t stop. Wherever you are, there are sounds. Some of them are pleasant, like the birds singing “chirp, chirp.” Others are not so pleasant, such as the trucks, cars, ambulances, and police cars that speed up and down city streets. Letting sounds come and go, you’re learning to peacefully coexist with all that’s other than breath…

This comprehensive approach can be especially helpful for intellectual people, because there’s no verbal content; the intellect isn’t being fed. In this approach, you’re not for or against thought. You’re not trying to fix anything, not trying to use the breath as a stepping-stone to get anywhere. Rather, you allow the mind to think itself in whatever way it wishes. You’re learning how to temporarily let things happen. You’re learning how to let the mind do what it does…

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Slowly, slowly. Sometimes things will happen suddenly – walls will fall, dark places illuminate – but more often, far more often, it will be so gradual that even the practiced attention won’t notice, until one day everything is different. Rosenberg again:

Maybe not all at once, but little by little, as breath awareness becomes more continuous, something very good comes out of it—you feel more calm, more peaceful. There’s joy. Otherwise, why bother doing it? If you haven’t experienced it, you will. It’s not mysterious. As the breath awareness develops, the body starts to relax because they’re all interrelated. Finally, you’ll see that it is just one life happening.