Tag Archives: practice

Being present to death

1 Reply

Now is the only moment we will ever know. Our memories of the past are experiences in the present. So are our thoughts about the future. So when we talk about not being present, we mean our attention is not on the present moment. It is focused on thoughts about the past or future.

We can be present in three ways. First, we can live for today, not worrying about yesterday or about what tomorrow may bring…

A second way, common to many meditation practices, is being aware of our current experience. Whereas most of our thoughts are about the past or the future, our sensory experience is always “now.” This is why basic meditation techniques often focus the attention on the body — the heartbeat, the breath, or some other sensation. The feelings in the body are always in the present.

And there is a third way of being present that can develop from this: being present to how it is to be present — not so much noticing your experience of the moment but noticing how it feels to be in the moment…

Savoring how it actually feels to be present motivates us to return here more often. As we do, the familiar, delightful feeling of being here now becomes a beacon drawing us home.

Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing

Death, it seems to me, is not a mishap or some kind of failure; it is as much a part of what we are as birth or love. It is not a horror to be evaded at the cost of our health, our happiness, our kindness; it is, as Hamlet half-suspected, really a consummation devoutly (but not impatiently) to be wished – a consolation for all ills, a reward for patience and a gentle homecoming at the close of day. It is a gift to be received alertly and with grace.

One of the blessings of growing old may be that it is harder by the day to forget that death is common to us all, without exception. Being present to one’s own death – whether in prospect or in actuality – may be perhaps the greatest liberation available to us.

In being present, though, one must as Russell says be present to presence itself – only so, I’ve found, is it even possible to know death for what it is, our oldest friend.

What is this light?

2 Replies

In the west today, we are very interested in what consciousness (our field of awareness) can reveal when focused on the external world. For instance, if we focus our awareness on plants we can build a system of botany, and if we focus it on rocks we can build a system of geology. But mystics of all traditions have been interested in what we might call the nature of consciousness itself. What is this light inside our heads that the philosopher Colin McGinn has called the “mysterious flame?” In the same way that we acknowledge an external world to be explored, mystics have recognized an internal wilderness, also to be explored—and with rich reward…

To use an analogy, in the west we’ve traditionally or habitually assumed that consciousness operates like a standard light switch on the wall; it can be turned either on or off, and so we are awake during the day and “off” during the night. However, in the mystical traditions, it’s believed that consciousness can vary greatly, functioning more like a dimmer switch; that is, the “light” of our consciousness can be turned “on” but it can also be turned “up,” increasing its luminosity.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.28-29

Despite a blossoming in recent years of academic research and discussion (Daniel Dennett, Anil Seth, Susan Blackmore, Phillip Goff, David Chalmers and many others) consciousness remains a difficult field to study:

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?

Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, p.1

The weird idea of using consciousness to investigate itself is precisely what I have been up to for most of my life, despite being distracted by the need to earn a living, and confused by the persistent claims of religion to have a corner on the field. As Blackmore herself knows (see her delightful Zen and the Art of Consciousness) what might broadly be called mystical experience is precisely this: the direct encounter of mind itself with mind itself.

It won’t have escaped my readers that this is also a decent definition of phenomenology; Martin Heidegger, following his mentor Edmund Husserl, makes this quite clear, as does, especially, Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

Consciousness is not behind the body—it is in the body. This is Merleau-Ponty’s radical idea: To perceive is already to act. To act is already to understand. This destroys the mind/body divide far more thoroughly than Descartes ever anticipated.

Robert Flix, Merleau-Ponty in Plain English: Understanding Perception, Embodiment, and Experience, p.75

The point here is one that contemplatives of all traditions would recognise: mind and body, body and being, are a unified field. What occurs in one occurs in the others – not that they are “others” – and primary awareness holds the field just as it is, without the fragmentation to which our everyday mind has become so accustomed.

Contemplative practice – of whatever kind, it seems to me – acknowledges this unity as axiomatic, somehow. We sit, we breathe, we are aware of sounds and of our own weight, and our direct awareness of this awareness allows us to step from observer to observed and back in one epoché in which the distinction collapses into illumination. As Eve Baker puts it so clearly in her own slightly different context:

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery…

But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

We do not see our hearts

1 Reply

There are situations when one owes solitude to other people, if only not to bother them. But more than this, the multitude needs solitaries as it needs postmen, doctors and fishermen. They go out and they send, or bring, something back—even if they send no word and vanish finally from sight. The solitary is as necessary to our common sanity as wilderness, as the forest where no one goes, as the waterfall in a canyon, which no one has ever seen or heard. We do not see our hearts. I do not expect to be all that solitary for, as a paradoxical person, I am also gregarious and favour the rhythm of withdrawal and return. But in the mountain, I watch the Tao, the way of nonhuman nature (if there is really any such thing) and feel myself into it to discover that I was never outside because nature ‘peoples’ just as much as it ‘forests’.

Alan Watts, from Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

It’s true – we do not see our hearts in the shadow of what we take to be ourselves. The end of our unknowing is the open ground itself; and that we cannot know, since it is no thing.

It seems an almost unbearable paradox that society should need solitaires just as it needs other tradespeople, and yet Watts is right. Somehow I have known this in the depths of my heart for most of my life, though most of the time I haven’t dared believe it, or it I have, I’ve allowed it to be concealed behind doctrine and religious explication. The call to this life of Einsamkeit is as real as any other, only we don’t like to talk about it. (We don’t like to talk about death either, the two things being more closely related than we think.)

Perhaps it’s just as well that the vocation of Einsiedler is not better known, since societies have a way of misunderstanding those whose paths lie outside the highways of commerce and politics. After all, it is not by being known that we can serve our fellow people, but by being unknown: hidden mycorrhiza in the soil of community. Julian of Norwich lived out her life as an anchoress, her life of prayer and solitude embedded in the city of her birth.

Books like Watts’ and blog posts like this one notwithstanding, all we need to do is to keep still and listen. What we may hear will be all our gift.

Part of the mystery

1 Reply

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Eve Baker, Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

As Steve Taylor writes: “However, awakened people travel lightly and transition easily. They perceive their existence as part of a vast network of being that will continue to flourish without them. They feel that they share their identity with the whole of the network, that something inside them is part of everything else.” The contemplative life is not a one-way relationship, as so often imagined by religious dogma. Sitting still, we find ourselves part of the unknowable ground as waves are part of the ocean: not other, and yet not exactly one with.

To live as part of the mystery, fully aware of our partial and temporary nature, might seem from an observer’s point of view a kind of death. In fact it is in truth a kind of death. The notion of ourselves as finite, detachable entities cannot live long in the desert. That is why we go there, into the desert of the heart. As Eve Baker puts it (ibid.), “The desert to which the solitary is called is not a place, but something that must be there below the surface of ordinary human existence. It is nowhere, a place of thirst…”

So much of this life is apophatic: we find ourselves in a trackless land, unknowing; what we are is no thing: in that we are part of the ground itself, nothing more. What else could we long for?

Small things

1 Reply

I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important.

In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’.

Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic particles which are sites of movement and energy. Solid things are largely made up of energy. Solidity itself is something of an illusion.

So yes, the reality we experience around us is, largely, an illusion. That ‘tree’ you can see over there is actually mainly energy, it is also a large group of small things, working together to be a tree. In that sense a ‘tree’ is a ‘society’, or even a ‘society of societies’ – we just think of it as an individual thing because that’s how it looks to us. In reality it’s nothing of the sort. And of course, the same is true of you, and the same is true of me. We are very complex, very sophisticated, societies. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it. Apart from anything else, you currently contain something like a kilogram of bacteria in your internal organs. Good luck living without them.

So here we are encouraged not to despise ‘the day of small things’ – even the smallest act of care has a real impact. Offering someone a glass of water is not ‘just’ symbolic of an alignment with their cause, it’s also a real piece of participation in the constantly evolving web of relations.

It’s part of that idea: “for the want of the nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the battle was lost…” The smallest things, the most insignificant things, have real importance.

So here the writer imagines a network of households choosing to offer welcome to emissaries of Jesus, small things, vulnerable things. Moment by moment choices that shape the future. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a deeply encouraging idea, or a terrifying one.

Simon J Cross

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with small things – the spray of stamens on a Rose-of-Sharon, a harvestman resting spread-eagled on a brick wall beneath a windowsill, the tiny black bristles at the corner of a sparrow’s bill – these have seemed to me more precious, more freighted with meaning, than the ambitions of men.

The reality of things is relationship. Nothing can be without other things; that there are things at all depends on their relations one with another; depends, ultimately, on the ground of being itself.

TAO engenders One,
One engenders Two,
Two engenders Three,
Three engenders the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry shade
And embrace sunlight.
Shade and sunlight, yin and yang,
Breath blending into harmony.

Laozi, Tao te Ching, tr. Addiss and Lombardo, ch.42

Thought cannot embrace the quantum fields in which things consist: theoretical physics can learn about them to some degree, but to know reality at its fundamental level is impossible for the rational mind. Unknowing, remaining still, we can perhaps touch the skirts of this unseen world. All that is, we are; in the quiet, that we can know as we know a lover’s breathing. In the quiet, we can come home to that.

Presence again

1 Reply

Human beings are probably the most inappropriately named species on our planet. Most of us spend very little time being. It would be more accurate to call us human doings, human thinkings, or perhaps human wantings – with being somewhere near the bottom of the list.

Most of us find it very difficult to be – to be inactive, or to do nothing – and so spend most of our time doing, filling every moment with activities and distractions. When we have nothing to focus our attention on, we usually feel uneasy and immediately reach for some means of occupying our minds…

Presence, or being, is an essential quality of wakefulness. Awakened people are centered in the present. Since they don’t experience inner discord, they don’t feel the impulse to escape the present and so spend much less time in a state of absence. Rather than finding presence a burden, they relish it. To awakened people, simply to be – to take in the reality of their surroundings and their experiences in the Now – is one of life’s greatest delights.

This is why awakened people savor solitude and inactivity, which allow them to be present and to experience the simple joy of being.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.59-61

Continual attention to presence, whether through formal practice or through moment by moment mindfulness, not only frees us from inner distraction and disharmony, it allows us to become aware of our own attitudes and assumptions, our unthought reactions and ways of seeing. This isn’t always pleasant: we find we can’t avoid seeing how we all too easily fall into characteristic patterns of relating to the world around us, and to its creatures, human and otherwise.

To observe our own predeliction for commodifying our fellow creatures, for reacting to imaginary slights and misunderstood communications, for looking away from each other’s distress, is deeply damaging to our comfortable self-conceit.

But presence is essential freedom; freedom not only from abstraction and distraction, but freedom from self-deception, and from self-absorption altogether. Practiced thoroughly. persistently, it becomes a delight and a refuge – somehow a homecoming after a long and broken time away. All that we thought were falls away. All that is left is what is.

Rebuilding the UI

1 Reply

It seems to me that our practice is in a sense no more than a phenomenological user interface (UI) for the metaphysics of the contemplative life. What we are, beneath the structures of our frail and temporary selves, is no more than the open ground itself. We are appearances, wavelets that come and go, and flicker for a moment in the brief light of our human consciousness; but wavelets are water. They are the stream itself, waving for an instant here, and then there.

Our fellow creatures, human and otherwise, are likewise ripples on the same measureless stream. Whatever we each of us does disturbs the surface minutely, or substantially. Perhaps to do so intentionally and with love has more effect than we dream, even. At least it cannot fail to change things, somehow, in the direction of good. Charles Williams called it coinherence.

But it is hard to sit and take account of these things. Thought is merely about, not of. Human beings, all through recorded history – and undoubtedly before as well – have tried to engage directly with the vast space before things, and they have taken stories, images, songs from the culture in which they were born, teaching them to their children and their children’s children, until churches and ashrams and synagogues grew from the ache within the heart of each of them.

What are we to do, here on the edge of something we cannot understand? We need a user interface, a phenomenological UI of some sort. It is no good our carefully deconstructing the religion of our forefathers unless we have a way to understand – no, to stand under – the endless becoming that is the ground of all that is. One cannot interact with raw code; there must be some interface there – which was the genius of the uncountable generations before us, with their psalms and their parables, their songs and their stories.

We must, I think, learn to listen to our hearts. To sit still and listen is in many ways the hardest thing, and yet it must be the truest way. When a spirituality undergoes deconstruction, we often think we have to throw away our entire old user interface because we no longer believe in the literalist, dogmatic theology it was originally built for. Perhaps we don’t actually need to change the interface; perhaps we merely need to understand what its elements – buttons, widgets, liturgies, prayers – are actually for. In the silence, if we are patient, their names may appear. Only be still…

Perennial

1 Reply

It’s significant that the major characteristics of wakefulness I’ve identified through my research are essentially the same… as the main themes of wakefulness as described in the world’s spiritual traditions. (…[T]hese included union, inner stillness or inner emptiness, self-sufficiency, compassion and altruism, relinquishing personal agency, heightened awareness, and well-being.) This synchronicity validates the insights of spiritual traditions and shows that wakefulness can exist outside spiritual traditions and is more fundamental than the traditions themselves. It suggests that wakefulness exists as a psychological or ontological state in itself. It may be interpreted in terms of spiritual traditions, but it doesn’t have to be.

Theologians and transpersonal psychologists have long debated the existence of a “perennial philosophy,” a common core to the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. According to the perennial view, the same basic truths lie behind all spiritual teachings but they’re expressed in slightly different ways. They’re simply different paths leading toward the peak of the same mountain, though there are some superficial differences between them, of course.

On the other hand, some people dispute the existence of a perennial philosophy, believing instead that spiritual and mystical traditions are independent. There isn’t a common mountain — all the paths are heading in different directions toward different peaks. Any similarities between different traditions are the result of contact or influence…

This seems highly implausible to me. For one thing, even if there was a chain of influence in the way this argument suggests, surely the original teachings would have been altered beyond recognition over centuries of dissipation (similar to a game of telephone), rather than remaining essentially the same. But the best way of verifying perennialism is to look outside spiritual traditions, as we’ve done in this book. Most of the participants of my research had no familiarity with spiritual traditions or practices at the time of their awakenings, but still described them in similar terms to the mystics of many different traditions. (Some of them became familiar with traditions later — in some cases, many years later; in other cases, only to a limited degree.) This strongly suggests that there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.233-234

[T]he physical world is not ultimately separate from its transcendental foundation, and so the perennial philosophy is a non-dualistic view of reality. There is no barrier between the so-called physical and metaphysical dimensions of reality (i.e., between the universe and its transcendent source); the two are a Oneness rather than a duality, and this is in contrast to systems of philosophy or religion that place a firewall between the transcendent realm and the physical world. For Perennialists, the universe arises from the Ground of Being, or, put the other way round, the Ground of Being takes form as the world around us. The One becomes the many, just as one ocean can rise up into multiple waves. Furthermore, and because we too are “waves” on the surface of a cosmic sea, our physical selves also arise from the Ground of Being. The Ground, therefore, is not only the Ground of Being but, consequently, the ground of our being as well.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.33-34

Ever since I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy in my early twenties, I have been drawn to the clean simplicity of the idea. In the passage I’ve quoted above, Steve Taylor provides one of the briefest and most credible responses to the most common criticism from both humanist and religious points of view: that the contemplative traditions, rooted in such radically different religious soils, cannot have anything in common. As Dana Sawyer points out, a few lines on from the passage above, “…human beings have the latent ability to grasp the content of the two previous postulates experientially. That is, we have a capacity, whether we cultivate it or not, to go beyond intellectual descriptions of the Ground of Being (transcendent) and the Oneness of Being (immanent) to the direct experience of these realities, as did the mystics of the past—and as do some mystics today.”

It doesn’t matter, either immediately or ultimately, whether the experience in question occurs within the taught practice of any one religion or philosophy; as Taylor explains above, “there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.” I can testify to this myself: my earliest unitive experiences of inner stillness, emptiness and heightened awareness came around the age of five, long before I knew anything of religious or contemplative teachings in any form.

The simple phenomenology of contemplation – inner experience itself (by which I don’t mean experiences, altered states or spectacular changes in perception, but plain awareness) – will teach the foundational fact of oneness with the ground. Merely to sit still is usually quite enough…

Just noticing (edited and republished)

1 Reply

I had intended to write a post here this evening when it occurred to me that I had already written, very nearly two years ago, almost the exact article I’d been planning. So here it is (somewhat edited):

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

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.

There is always a risk, of course, in talking like this. People who like things cut and dried are often suspicious of what appears to them to be an impractical vagueness; those from a background of religious orthodoxy will wonder if there’s a heresy lurking in there somewhere. 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.

Robert C Solomon writes:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand. This is not to say that intelligent people are more spiritual, but neither is it to buy into a long tradition of equating spirituality with innocence misconstrued as ignorance or even as stupidity.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) 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. Toni Bernhard suggests that,

[i]n this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

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 – and here I hesitate, as Krishnamurti suggested – that someone is prepared to do this.

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 sometimes from a mountain hut.

Strange days

1 Reply

Today, however, we’re in the midst of a spiritual renaissance that differs markedly from those of the past. No longer confined to the faiths of our own cultures, we have access to many traditions, from the dawn of recorded history to the present day. Moreover, the insights of contemporary teachers are readily available in books, recordings, videos, and online, none of which was possible before.

Whereas past spiritual revivals were often led by a single teacher, today many are contributing to this growing rediscovery of the timeless wisdom. Instead of the truth becoming increasingly diluted as it is passed on, our discoveries are reinforcing one another. As the cultural overlays are stripped away, the core message not only becomes increasingly clear but gets simpler and simpler. And the path becomes easier and easier…

None of this would have been possible were I not alive in this epochal time — a time of ever-increasing change and opportunity, a time of proliferating crises and potential catastrophes, and a time of unprecedented spiritual renaissance. Two hundred years ago, my only counsel in this area might have been from a local priest, who, most likely, would have known little of the topics I’ve been exploring here. Or perhaps, should I have been so fortunate, from a local sage. Today, I’ve been privileged to travel the world, sit at the feet of various masters, study teachings from across the ages, listen to and watch numerous recordings, and learn from many companions on their own journeys of awakening. To all these various teachers, I give thanks.

Peter Russell, How to Meditate Without Even Trying, pp.109,114

Caught between solastalgia and the BBC news, we can be forgiven for thinking, as so many have throughout recorded history, that we live in times of quite unprecedented strife and difficulty. But it’s more complicated than that.

In the almost 34 years since the world wide web went live, access to information, and, with AI, the ability to process it, has grown beyond anyone’s imagining – and, of course, since we are human, so has access to misinformation – a fact that underlies much of the grief that feeds the dystopian embroideries of the news media. But there is another side to all this, as Peter Russell points out.

It may perhaps be, if we manage to hang on as a viable species long enough, that these years at the beginning of the 21st century will not be remembered for their paranoia, misogyny and bone-headed despotism so much as for their glorious renaissance of the spiritual life. Blogs like this one are not merely lone voices squeaking in the midst of chaos; we are part of something much bigger and more hopeful than any of us. And yet, as Caryll Houselander once wrote, it is only the silence of each individual contemplative that shows us the open ground of being beneath us all.