Category Archives: quietism

The master’s tools

1 Reply

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.

Unremarkable

5 Replies

Eve Baker writes, in Paths in Solitude (pp.10-11):

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.

I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench. For the longest time I believed that these things would only be attainable, as an adult, if I were to live in solitude, and I had not the resolve or the leisure or the foresight to plan out such a life for myself.

But now, as a retired person and a contemplative, I am doubly useless. This is a blessing found at long last, after a life spent trying to thread my way through the necessity of work, the yearning to create, and the far deeper call, often hidden even from myself, to the contemplative way. Oh, for most of those years I managed to maintain – as much despite myself as wholeheartedly – a contemplative practice. But these days I find myself in sympathy with Uchiyama Roshi:

We shouldn’t imagine that life after retirement has to be miserable or impoverished. To be old is also one of our roles. When we’re young, our role is to work; upon retirement, we take up another role. Since we have less income, we should simplify our lives as much as possible. That is the way to fulfill the role of an old person. We should not judge it miserable, but just devote ourselves to that particular role. We function through our roles and exert ourselves in our occupations as a role. Finally, dying is one of our roles.

From Tending the Practice Ground, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Tricycle Magazine, November 2025

Eve Baker writes later on in the book I quoted above (p.105):

Solitude is of course an interior disposition, which external solitude confirms and strengthens. One can be quite solitary in the midst of a crowd, and one’s opportunities for solitude during the day are not necessarily those when one is entirely alone, but times when one’s attention is directed inward and away from the distractions which surround us. The mind can go flying about, following one stimulus after another, captive to a dozen things which grab our attention. The secret is to look beyond these things by focussing upon the one point, which is God… Like falling in love, it is a process where we are taken beyond ourselves into an unknown world.

As contemplatives, we are not here to lead anything. Most of us are not even here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to live our ordinary lives in quiet places. Our solitude is so often a merely interior solitude, so that we cannot even claim the romantic status of some kind of hermit.

Here we are, unremarkable, at the edge of the mystery. The endless ground lies open before us, and we walk down to the nearest shop with our little bag, and our comfortable old shoes. This is all we are; our little sisters and brothers the sparrows chirp to us from the hedge, and the rain is coming on, again.

Mountains and rivers remain

1 Reply

Should spiritual people avoid politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT of the world,” or “We are uniters, not dividers.” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would shut up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

Should spiritual people embrace politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT be worldly,” or “What use is spirituality if it is not engaged?” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would speak up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

And I wrote about shutting up or speaking up here. And Henry Shukman, a Zen teacher, quotes the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu from the eighth century:

“The nation is shattered. Mountains and rivers remain.”

Things are volatile in the relative realm of apparent separation, but they are unchanged in the Absolute realm. In The Way, I wrote, “I find that I live a better life when I live as if there is a Oneness, as if we are supposed to bring our understanding of the Absolute world, which is Oneness, to our relative world, which can seem disconnected and divided.”

Larry Jordan

Larry  Jordan – who describes himself as “a follower of Jesus with a Zen practice” – is making a point very similar to Joan Tollifson’s, which I quoted the other day, where she wrote,

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

Mountains and rivers do remain. As Steven Pinker points out, no human, and no point in human history, stands alone. We are all part of an evolutionary current; as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is easy to forget. We are so readily, especially at times like the present, drawn into polarised positions, swayed by shouts of “Pick a side!”, that we lose sight of not only our indissoluble common humanity, but the metaphysical oneness of things, Being (Eckhart Tolle), the Tao, Rigpa.

Only be still, be quiet. The flickering passage of thought and emotion is no different to the impressions of the senses, the sound of the jackdaws settling into their roost in the old water tower, the rustle of tyres on the road at the end of the garden.

Out of stillness arises, quite by itself, what is needful. I nearly said, “what needs to be done”, but maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. Now is all that is real; if it contains doing, so be it. That will be doing, but in stillness. Like Chuang Tzu’s Cook Ding, following things as they are, we do what is needful without resistance. But only in stillness, only in quiet, can the way open, just as it is.

In the way

2 Replies

In her recent Substack essay, ‘Is Spirituality an Escape?‘, Joan Tollifson writes:

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

So, all of this was swirling around. Round and round goes the mind. The body contracts and tightens. Feelings of anger and judgment arise, and I seem to lose touch with love and joy.

But then, miracle of miracles, I stop and sit quietly and simply feel the open, spacious aliveness and presence of this one bottomless moment here and now. And the whole conundrum disappears. And I know in my heart without a doubt that this openness, this stillness, is the deepest truth. It is where I want to come from, and what I want to communicate, this possibility of peace and unconditional love that is always right here, at once boundless and most intimate.

These are, to say the least, difficult and puzzling times. The merest glance at the headlines will suffice to demonstrate that, and to demonstrate the further fact that the media, almost without exception, have a perfectly understandable commercial interest in keeping our hearts in our mouths. In the face of massively publicised and widespread cruelty and injustice, violence and deceit, it is increasingly hard to avoid the current zeitgeist of taking sides, adopting entrenched positions, and demonising the “opposition”.

This jarring sense of disconnection between the contemplative life and the activist’s “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” is something that has troubled me for many years, as it has been troubling Tollifson and so many of her fellow Americans. But it is nothing new, I fear.

Simon Barrington-Ward wrote of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him.

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practiced this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness…

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am no longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

(The Jesus Prayer, of which Bishop Simon is writing here, is of course the central practice of hesychasm, the great mystical tradition within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, centred on cultivating inner stillness (Greek: hesychia) and uninterrupted communion with God. It was the central practice, too, of my own Christian contemplative years.)

Again in the Christian tradition, Karen Karper Fredette and Paul Fredette write, in Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life (p.213):

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and the Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening. We cannot, either by the force of our own will, or by the eloquence of our pleading, bring about the healing for which we long. And yet, like the Fredettes, and like the hesychasts of Mount Athos during the Second World War, we know beyond words or reasoning that our calling matters – far more, perhaps. than anything else we could do.

In the Tao Te Ching (51) we read:

The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

Not knowing

1 Reply

In order to explore different dimensions of not knowing, we have to establish and cultivate a willingness to put aside what we may think we already know—about ourselves, the world, Buddhism, or dharma practice—to really engage with what we don’t know.

Consider the range of views you may have about dharma practice, or about Buddhism, for example. There could be a religious view: one that attempts to describe reality, and maybe gives us codes of behavior for how to be in that reality. You may or may not subscribe to a religious view of Buddhism.

There’s a philosophical view that attempts to understand reality rather than simply describe it. A philosophical way of knowing about Buddhism, for example, is replete with ideas: those many lists of the eightfold path, the five precepts, or the four noble truths. In all the ways we can find those views helpful, or illuminating, they can also just reinforce a knowing about, a knowledge-based view, or a philosophical view.

The self-help view of Buddhism, which may be the way many of us have first engaged with dharma practice, is designed to offer a better way to cope with reality, rather than trying to merely describe or even understand reality. In this view, one hopes to put aside some of their confusions, neuroses, and difficulties. You hope to cultivate certain mental and emotional skills, so as to better meet the life around you, the people around you, the world around you, and the world within you.

There’s also what we could call a liberation view that—in addition to describing reality, understanding reality, and better coping with reality—points us to that capacity to fully merge with reality and to know a freeness as we navigate through reality. On the one hand, liberation view is about this one, brief, lifetime, and on the other hand, it’s also about the immensity of consciousness, of awareness, and the knowing of all time and space as being available right here.

This “right-here-ness” is the open doorway, a portal to fully meeting reality. We can access a living engagement with right here through our capacity to not know. To put aside the familiar, the well-worn, the conceptual, and the habitual, and instead engage with the immediate, the mysterious, the constantly surprising, and the conceptually ungraspable.

Martin Aylward, ‘Why We Should Turn Towards Mystery’, Tricycle Magazine, February 2023

To live quietly, away from the maelstrom of news and rumour, paranoia and opinion that seems to constitute social and public media, appears to me to be the best ground for cultivating the mystery. Practice, silence and stillness flourish in these long, quiet days of my retirement; but they can too in moments of quiet in a busy life – on the bus, perhaps, or sitting alone in a city square during lunch hour.

Lewis Richmond writes of the early days of the recent pandemic,

As terrible as that period was, I did notice that it resembled certain qualities of the monastic life with which I was familiar. There were few distractions. Life was simple; we got up, made our meals, dusted and cleaned, and sat after dinner in silence together without much distraction. We didn’t watch TV. We discovered that that enforced quiet was paradoxically the most genuine way to be connected with the world, which was living through the same angst that we were.

For me too, this was a strangely fruitful time. (You can read something of my own experience here.) Connection to the world does not require connection to the firehose of the media; it merely requires the deep awareness of the mystery of being, the unknowability of life itself – the curious realisation that however close one may grow to another person, their own inner world is forever theirs, and you can only know of it what they choose to share, or what you can yourself deduce, nothing more. And yet this existential aloneness is the community we share; it is what it is to be human.

These are things that can only be found in stillness and waiting. Our long hours of practice are nothing more than this; they are no more like the bright awareness beneath all phenomena than soil is like the flowers of the hebe bush, but they are just as necessary.

Quietly

1 Reply

This body is undeniably growing older, gradually disintegrating, moving toward its eventual disappearance, like a wave merging back into the ocean, which it never actually left. This growing up and growing old—like the ocean rising, cresting, and falling—is a movement in time, and time turns out to be a kind of imagination, a way of conceptualizing or thinking about what is happening. The only actual reality is the eternity of Here-Now, this one bottomless moment, from which we never depart, except in imagination, and that imagining only happens now…

As the body ages, I become in some ways more limited. I know, for example, that it’s too late to go to medical school, and I know that there are many people and places dear to my heart that I will never see again. That vast realm of future possibility is closing down and shrinking. And as I wrote about in my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that limitation is actually a blessing. It forces us to find freedom and fulfillment right here in this very moment.

And indeed, I feel increasingly unlimited in a deeper sense. I’ve been freed from the seductive allure of future possibilities. I’ve been brought home. I find myself ever more deeply appreciating the simple moments of love and joy in everyday life—a few words exchanged with someone I pass on my morning walk… the gorgeous song of a bird and my own heart leaping with joy on hearing it and another bird responding, the three of us somehow dancing together in a field of love… sitting later in my armchair, seeing the shadows of a flock of birds passing quickly again and again over the walls of the buildings across the way, shadows flashing out of emptiness and vanishing, and each time, the heart again leaping with joy, while the green leaves on the red bud tree outside my window shimmer in the light and the breeze. How simple it all is.

Joan Tollifson

Increasingly I feel that Tollifson is right, here. Growing old, I have been brought home in some strange way. Without entirely withdrawing, in the eremitic sense, from life and community, I seem to have found a peace in the midst of things that I had not expected to find.

How much of this rest and quietness of heart is down to aging, or to good company; how much is due to practice, and how much to sheer grace I have no idea. I don’t really know if those distinctions make any sense, even in their own context. I do know that I would not exchange these days for any, or all, of the days of my youth.

The last light of evening between the trees is a soft lilac grey, a colour beyond imagining, that will last only minutes now. The fringe of ragged cloud above is darkening moment by moment, and the birds have gone quiet, even our neighbours the seagulls who breed and roost on the buildings across the road. After what seems like weeks, the air is cool and damp. There is more rain on the way.

Gifts of hiddenness

2 Replies

As I grow older, I’m struck more and more by the heroic effort ordinary people are making every day: the people here at the retirement community where I live who are walking with walkers, recovering from strokes or falls or dealing with Parkinson’s or MS…

Many of us noticing the time it takes now to do things once done quickly and the enormous effort to do things that once seemed easy and some of us requiring help with our most intimate tasks. So much we once took for granted is gone. And the gift hidden in this, as I’ve said before, is that we are brought home to right here, right now, just this, just as it is—finding the beauty, the joy, the freedom in the midst of limitation.

Joan Tollifson

Epicurus’ phrase, lathe biōsas, “live in obscurity”, is coming more and more to describe the way I find myself not only living, but being profoundly grateful to live. Growing older comes of course with all the limitations Joan Tollifson describes, but just as she says, it is full also of hidden gifts; gifts of hiddenness, in fact.

Like Tollifson, we too live in a retirement community, and many of the friends we made when we moved in here ten years ago are gone now, whether dead, or just moved on to a care home. We are among the youngsters here, I suppose, and we are still relatively capable. But to live where achievement, acquisition, progress is no longer expected is in itself a blessing. There is no need to explain, no need to prevaricate. Contentment is not seen as a character flaw.

In such a setting, the freedom to study, to practice, to write comes easily. Silence and stillness are gifts too, and as precious in themselves as the soft scented air of evening through the window, the little sounds of birds settling in for the night, the soft tapping of my keyboard. To be alert to the infinite in the tiny moment, the limitless ground beneath each breath; these are mysteries within the plain fragments of passing time that no one would suspect who didn’t live among them, obscurely and at peace.

Quietism, merely

1 Reply

I have written on several occasions before – most thoroughly perhaps here – about quietism on this blog. But what exactly is it?

Quietism, as a contemplative tendency – it is too diffuse in time and background to be called a movement – is usually described as “that [which], in general, holds that perfection consists in passivity (quiet) of the soul, in the suppression of human effort so that divine action may have full play. Quietistic elements have been discerned in several religious movements, both Christian and non-Christian, through the centuries…” (Britannica)

Quietism, despite having a chequered history among Christians – it was often spoken against as a way of passivity, an accusation levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among nineteenth century Quakers – is a no more than a basic and essential practice of simple unknowing in most schools of contemplative life, from the early Taoists in China,  through the Zen pioneer Dogen’s teaching of shikantaza (just sitting) in thirteenth century Japan, to the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti in the twentieth.

Of course in times of great peril and anxiety such quiet may seem an odd response, but as Andō pointed out in her post I reproduced yesterday, it may be the only true response. Hidden within the darkness and distress there is peace, and the coming light; but it can’t be seen from a place of fear and anger. From the standpoint of a febrile activism it truly appears not to be there. Only in absolute quiet, in an inward listening for the silence between appearances, can we touch the still point of the turning world (Eliot).

In some way that I struggle to explain in words, we deeply need those who, like Andō, have the courage to sit still in silence. To merely wait, hidden, in the “vast and shining presence” (Tara Brach) of what is, is perhaps the single most powerful thing that any of us can do.

To sit quietly

1 Reply

Some of our most commonplace concepts are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that they are actually concepts. “The world,” “the body,” “the mind,” “the self,” “consciousness,” “awareness,” “nonduality” – we throw these word-concepts around without ever stopping to wonder what we are actually talking about. And next thing we know, we’re lost in some conceptual confusion, very much akin to wondering what will happen to me if I step off the edge of the flat earth. That’s an imaginary problem, as all of us in the 21st century realize, but for people in earlier centuries, it seemed quite real. And our own conceptual conundrums seem equally real to us. “Will I still be here after I die?” or “Am I enlightened yet?” or “Do I have free will?” can seem like perfectly sensible questions, but they are every bit as absurd as wondering what will happen to me when I step off the edge of the earth…

When we try to figure out “the meaning of life” or “the nature of reality,” or when we try to come up with a conceptual understanding of Consciousness, Totality, God, or the Ground of Being, we inevitably end up frustrated and confused. Any conceptual picture of reality is always subject to doubt, and no metaphysical formulation ever satisfies our deep longing for Truth.

What satisfies that deep longing of the heart is the falling away of the attempt to make sense of everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t still make relative sense of things in a functional way in daily life. But we stop trying to take hold of Totality, or grasp the Ground of Being, or figure out the meaning of life. Instead, we relax into simply being life. We learn to recognize (to see, to sense) when we’re beginning to grasp or fixate, and in that recognition, quite naturally there is an ability to relax and let go. When we stop trying to figure it all out, we discover that it doesn’t need to be figured out, and in fact, can’t be figured out! When we stop desperately trying to get a grip, we find nothing is lacking and there is nothing to grasp.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp

The stillness of practice is exactly that: stopping trying to get a grip, stopping the discursive mind’s continual clutching after things to store away. “Aha!” it wants to say, “I’ve got this!” It wants to collect the Point of It All, and shelve it under Essential Facts, or something equally pointless. But it can’t.

The stillness of practice heals all that. It doesn’t solve problems or supply solutions: it lets them go. To sit quietly is all that is needed, truly. This is not inaction; it is the place where right action starts, if action is needed. Surprisingly, often, it isn’t. The way opens out of the stillness in its own time, and usually it has nothing to do with anything we think. As Tollifson says, it doesn’t need to be figured out.

In the stillness, we become aware of awareness; and it isn’t other than the ground, that is no thing, and is before, and holds, all that comes to be. There is nothing to choose, nothing to find. Be still, that’s all.

Pathless

2 Replies

As time goes by, I seem to be drawn more and more to simply sitting still: choiceless awareness, as Jiddu Krishnamurti called it. For me, this necessarily implies – as it seems to have done for Krishnamurti also – growing to be increasingly at variance with institutional religion, whether Christian or Buddhist, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society. My naturally eremitical and inward inclinations seem to have strengthened, too, and I feel increasingly at home out in the saltmarshes of the spirit, away from the familiar communities of philosophy and practice.

[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In 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. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself. In the quotation that begins this chapter, Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. 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

One of our potential pitfalls as humans is our tendency to observe events (this may be a semantic issue at root) as apparently going forward in time, and think that as a consequence their coming to be – eventuation – implies progress, whether in terms of continuous economic growth, personal development, technological advancement or whatever else. I am not saying that these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves; what strikes me here is that, misleading as they can sometimes be in the fields of economics or psychology, they inevitably lead to a disastrous misunderstanding when applied to the spiritual life – even our use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere; that we are practising for as for a musical performance, or an examination. In overtly 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 increasingly 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 divorced from contemplation are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need those who will 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 one who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere, “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). There are good, and necessary, things to be seen from quiet places far from known ways.