Category Archives: Philosophy and phenomenology

Atheism and stoicism

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People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant’s recollection and there it is: complete tranquillity. And by tranquillity I mean a kind of harmony. So keep getting away from it all—like that. Renew yourself. But keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough to ward off all [anxiety] and send you back ready to face what awaits you.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV

I remember that when I was in my early twenties and living in London, I was sometimes obliged to go to parties, as often happens at that age! I say “obliged” because that is how it often felt; I am too much of an introvert really to enjoy parties, however much I liked the people who’d invited me. Oddly, it was amidst the over-loud music and the chatter of slightly tipsy people that I spontaneously discovered what Marcus Aurelius describes here: the ability to turn inward, briefly, to a place of stillness and absolute tranquility – sitting on the stairs for a minute, perhaps, or taking refuge in the bathroom.

Remember, this is a blog post – I don’t mean it to be any more than another of my road songs – but it has occurred to me recently that Stoic philosophy is another of those things that has been unjustly neglected over the years of Christendom, having largely been discarded in the medieval period as just another of those pagan ideas (see Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World).

Not only though, I recalled, had I long ago discovered for myself Marcus Aurelius’ “micro-contemplative” moments, but I had much later found that the philosophy of Stoicism runs remarkably close to the practice of choiceless awareness in Sōtō Zen, in Advaita Vedānta, or in the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti. There is an old Buddhist saying to the effect that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. Stoicism is far from the emotionless indifference it is sometimes caricatured to be, but it does imply almost exactly the same approach to suffering as that old Buddhist adage.

Severe illness is not something we have control over. We can mitigate the symptoms or use healing therapies hoping that the patient recovers. But the results are not up to us. Nevertheless, the patient can decide which position they take in regards to the situation. When the sickness is fully accepted, and the possibility of death as well, a human being can reach a state of inner peace (this is not medical advice – it’s philosophy). Staying calm during adversity, and letting go of the results, may come across as indifferent. However, this tranquility helps us to act in agreement with reason, instead of being overwhelmed by emotion. This probably leads to making better choices which increases the chances of recovery.

Einzelgänger and Fleur Vaz, Stoicism for Inner Peace

Absent the insistence of religious creeds and the framework they impose on belief and the interpretation of experience, the doors of perception are free to open once the power of powerlessness becomes clear. As I wrote in that post last year, “The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.”

Part of a whole

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In an excellent article on the Humanists UK website, Jeremy Rodell quotes Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe – a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for those nearest us…

There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.

This comes very close to my own sense of the ground of being as not simply another name for a personified God, but (as Paul Tillich himself saw) the metaphysical source, Being itself, (forgive the capitalisation!) from which anything comes to be at all. Perhaps the closest expression I had found before I read Rodell’s article was the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen sense of the pristine awareness that is the fundamental ground itself.

Rodell goes on (ibid.):

Almost all humanists would agree that the scientific method is by far the best way to understand objective truths about the world, including brains. But subjective experience is not, by definition, open to direct observation by anyone other than the person experiencing it, though it is undeniably both ‘real’ to that person and, as far as we know, unique, as we can’t get into the minds of others other than through their descriptions, or their artistic expression.

This “experiential spirituality” (Rodell’s phrase) is the realm of contemplative practice, surely. Our practice is very simple, no more than a matter of being set free from the entanglements of discursive thought in order to find ourselves consciously resting in the “groundless ground” of all that is. This is our home, after all; we can never fall out of being, and if philosophers like Philip Goff and Annaka Harris are right (not to mention the Dzogchen teachers like Longchenpa) even consciousness itself is fundamental to coming-to-be. The part, in effect, is not other than the whole!

Resting in the ground

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I think we have an inbuilt tendency, we humans – and it has grown worse, not better, over recent years – to division and factionalism. “Pick a side!” we shout at anyone who looks like sitting on the fence, or any other reasonable, considered position of balance. I need not point out how this works in politics and society; what concerns me here is how it can mislead us when it comes to spirituality.

Perhaps this is more a semiotic issue than anything else. Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

We risk all manner of missteps when we conflate the term “spirituality” with concepts like religion, or the supernatural; and we risk worse when we consider it intrinsically opposed to science, or to critical thinking. Robert C Solomon writes:

[S]pirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

I am coming to see that my sense of myself as “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, [and] my naturally eremitical inclinations seem[ing] to have strengthened…” is not limited to time and circumstance, but is simply where I belong.

We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.

Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen from a mountain hut.

Ain’t superstitious

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In the old Willie Dixon song, he claims not to be, but believes the signs anyway: “Well, I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail…”

Stevie Wonder has a different take: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…”

Sam Harris writes, “Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die.” The same thing, perhaps, applies to metaphysics.

Metaphysics can be a slippery word these days. “Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.” (Wikipedia) But Harris (ibid.) lists it along with mythology and sectarian dogma.

While it is true that probably all religions are filled with mythology and sectarian dogma, they do not all approach metaphysics like magic – and it seems to me, from experience, that metaphysics, at some level, is inseparable from the contemplative life.

[W]hen we look closely, we can’t find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. These are both deeply counterintuitive outcomes, and this is where the mystery of consciousness starts bumping up against other mysteries of the universe.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all. When we view our own experience of consciousness as being “along for the ride,” we suddenly find it easier to imagine that other systems are accompanied by consciousness as well. It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism. If the various behaviors of animals can be accompanied by consciousness, why not the reaction of plants to light—or the spin of electrons, for that matter? Perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. It sounds crazy, but … it’s worth posing the question.

Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Sam Harris again,

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: Searching for Spirituality without Religion

Things that seem very strange at first glimpse (like Willie Dixon’s black cat) may turn out on closer examination to make an uncommon degree of sense. Annaka Harris (op cit.) quotes a personal communication from Rebecca Goldstein to the effect that, “[c]onsciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.”

If matter is, as it seems, fundamental to existence, or at least to the material universe, and if it is in some way intrinsically conscious, then Paul Tillich’s conception of God as “ground of being” (being-itself rather than a supreme being among, or above, other beings – as the apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides (Acts 17:28), “[f]or in him we live and move and have our being”) seems inescapable. Only, as Tillich himself suggests, we may then have to give up using the word “God”.

There is, it seems, no way to “fall out of” being. If being itself entails consciousness, then even to say that individual consciousness ceases at death is, to say the least, problematic. And in any case, our conventional sense of an individual self is an illusion, as contemplatives throughout history have discovered. It is only a fiction of convenience, a way for the mind to locate itself, for a moment, in the body of which it is aware. (See Susan Blackmore’s wonderful book Seeing Myself for the correspondence of contemplative and neuroscientific insights here.)

It ain’t necessary to be superstitious: the belief in things we don’t understand turns out to be a mistake. There is enough wonder in what is.

Everything changes

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Shunryu Suzuki is said to have replied to a student who asked if he could put the Buddha’s teachings in a nutshell with the words, “Everything changes”.

Everything does. The weather, the leaves on the trees, our own bodies. And the things we make change too: human society, relationships, artifacts, language. Change is inescapable; impermanence is the one constant.

Just as we cannot escape change, we cannot escape sadness. Love and change lead inevitably to sadness. The death of a friend, of a beloved pet, the passing of summer into autumn. Rain clouds cover the sun.

It seems to me that we grow up to fear change and impermanence. Children need to know that their parents will always be there; as they acquire things, toys, little collections of found items, favourite clothes, they naturally long for these things not to be lost, not to break or perish. But they do. Toys are lost or damaged, favourite clothes are suddenly too small. Children grow fast, and even with the most reliable of parents, their relationship with them changes. Love is tested by change, always.

It might be natural, then, to grow up not to trust, to fear and expect loss and yes, betrayal. Things, and especially people, change, and if you rely on their remaining static, you will feel that change as betrayal.

If you cling to static forms, whether made things or living, you will lose. If you try to avoid sadness, you will avoid love, too. What can you do, except trust the love that is the essence of sadness, that is the heart of change?

You have no alternative anyway but to trust; when you die, what will you do? What else could you do, except trust in the vast field of light and life into which you will dissolve, into which you will return in peace? Sit still, and the field of awareness will open, the ground in which all things come to be will hold you. The light and the land are one; beyond is no thing, and the life becoming just what is.

Unseen water

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Gill Pennington, writing in The Friend, quotes John O’Donohue:

The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world.

Absent a theistic metaphysics of prayer, I have often been puzzled how to explain to myself, let alone anyone else, my persistent sense that there really is some point to the contemplative life beyond the sort of solipsistic self-improvement promised by some of the more widely advertised meditation apps. O’Donohue has nailed it, and I am grateful to Gill Pennington for the passage she quoted in her Thought for the Week in The Friend.

Being fully present to all we encounter in this moment as it is, rather than as we might wish, or fear, it to be, we are present as aerials, signs, receiving stations. Even, perhaps especially, in “[our] own hidden life”, we  become a source of healing and peace. Hiddenness itself, the hiddenness of practice, of silence and stillness, comes like unseen water to a dry land.

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]

Ground and Network

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Merlin Sheldrake, in his book Entangled Life, discusses the way all life, on this planet at least, seems to be underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks (which is facilitated by the wider international academic and commercial scientific community), “It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you.” (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)

Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a “thing” over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don’t continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, competition between organisms (Sheldrake, op cit., pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.

For a long time now, Paul Tillich’s understanding of God as “Ground of Being”, beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (Theology of Culture, p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in Systematic Theology refers to God as Ground of Being as “Being-itself” – a concept which has always seemed to me very close to Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, “isness”.

This sense of the ground’s relation to “things” in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of.

Simon Cross writes, in one of his Weekday Meditations,

It’s extraordinary how quickly time moves, and with it, understanding of our world. Only in recent years have we come to recognise that apparently ‘non sentient’ forms of life are not only sentient, but apparently social too. Trees have been shown to communicate with one another, to share resources with one another, and to be interdependent in ways that were hitherto unimaginable. Or perhaps – imaginable, but impossible to demonstrate.

With this growing recognition that the world around us is alive in ways that we hadn’t realised, has come a renewed interest in the panpsychism, an idea that has its roots in centuries old philosophy which suggested that consciousness exists beyond ‘just’ the animal kingdom. Panpsychists think that consciousness of some sort may exist at a molecular level, which, when you come to think of it is pretty mind blowing. Although given the subject matter, that seems like exactly the wrong term, or perhaps exactly the right one.

Now, I don’t know anything much about panpsychism as a philosophy of mind, but it has been suggested that the concept of Buddha-nature may in some Buddhist traditions be interpreted as implying a form of panpsychism. Dōgen Zenji, the importer into Japan of the Sōtō Zen school, wrote:

Therefore, the very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are the Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature.

This impermanence, the dependence of things for their origin, one upon another, is surely the very place where we fall to the ground of all that is, or seems to be.

“Everything passes; everything changes; just do what you think you should do.” (Bob Dylan, ‘To Ramona’) Perhaps somehow we can be still enough to know.

Metaphysics?

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The term “metaphysics” seems to make many writers on what might broadly be called secular spirituality nervous: “Metaphysics is a distraction. By ‘metaphysics’ I mean that which is beyond physics… ideas that can’t be experienced here and now in the world and that we can’t know directly.” (Lambert); “Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that… there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness.” (Harris) “I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism…” (Wright)

Now, I’ve no wish to take issue with writers such as Lenorë Lambert, Sam Harris or Robert Wright, and I have quoted their work often enough here and elsewhere. I recognise as clearly as any of them the difficulty, described so well both by Wright and by Susan Blackmore, of a Western person encountering an elaborate, occasionally almost baroque, system of theologies, demonologies, geographies of life, death, and aeons of rebirth, prevalent especially in parts of the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions.

But I will keep on using the term “the ground of being”, and if that doesn’t sound metaphysical I’m not sure what does. It’s a term if not coined, then certainly made familiar by Paul Tillich. Tillich describes the ground of being as not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction, as “Being-itself” – which always reminds me of Meister Eckhart’s use of the term Istigkeit, “isness“.

For me, this isness is precisely that which can be known directly in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart, that can catch the breath and fill the eyes with tears. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains a kind of lodestone in my own unknowing of being and nothingness.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn is not in fact to worry too much about explanations, and certainly not about ideas, but just to practice, and to be true to what we find there.