Category Archives: Religion and spiritual traditions

The fundamental unknowability of God

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In the Wikipedia entry on Panentheism, we read:

Baruch Spinoza… claimed that “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. “Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.” Though Spinoza has been called the “prophet” and “prince” of pantheism, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza states that: “as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken”. For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world.

According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) Spinoza did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God’s transcendence was attested by God’s infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God’s immanence. Furthermore, Martial Guéroult suggested the term panentheism, rather than pantheism to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, “in” God.

It seems to me that in this sense Spinoza’s God is almost the Western philosophical equivalent of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of the Tao. The Tao is not itself “the ten thousand things” (i.e. material existence) but “The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” (Laozi) To sit quietly and recall that the coming to be of things in time is no more than the result of things that have been, and that things themselves rest in the open ground as wavelets rest in the flowing stream, is to see that the stream itself – the Tao, God, Being – is prior to all that is. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17 NIV).

As Spinoza himself pointed out, there are three kinds of knowledge:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.

2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.

3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing. 

(Microsoft Copilot, in response to user query, 31 October 2025)

The second kind of knowledge, rational thought, cannot make the connection with the Ground. But to sit still with the knowledge, to sit stil in the impossibility of speech, like a Zen monk with a koan, is to allow “the fundamental unknowability of God” (Wikipedia) to open into the Ground all by itself. When we come to an end of what we can say – what we can think – the only path open is the way of emptiness, into the infinite pleroma of what actually is.

[First published 16/11/2025]

A sense of naked inadequacy

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Apophatic spirituality has to start at the point where every other possibility ends. Whether we arrive there by means of a moment of stark extremity in our lives, or (metaphorically) by way of entry into a high desert landscape, the sense of naked inadequacy remains the same. Prayer without words can only begin where loss is reckoned as total.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.36

It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

I have observed that contemplative practice does not have about it the linear quality we are used to in many other kinds of practice: if you practice a skill, say playing a musical instrument, you will get better at it. As time goes by, if you practice faithfully and intelligently, playing will become almost effortless – you will not have to think at all about where to find a note, or how to finger a certain scale or chord – they will just be there for you, embedded in muscle memory and musical instinct; and over the years it just gets better. But contemplative practice is not like that at all. One is never an expert; things you thought you’d learned months ago suddenly leap out as real difficulties, real terror even. The simplest thing, like keeping a slip of attention on the breath, as an anchor to return to if lost in thought, will unexpectedly appear horribly difficult. One day you hardly notice a thought as you sit, peacefully and still; the next you are plagued with anxieties, fantasies, mundane recollections, until you feel like getting up and doing something useful instead.

What is going on? I think we forget that it is in brokenness, in extremity, that the the way to the bright fields of being opens, not in experiences of bliss or jewelled visions. In fact, not in  experiences at all.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

To meditate, year after year, it seems to me, is to find oneself continually in extremis: nothing is achieved – there is no ladder, and in any case half the rungs are missing, and the ones that remain are cracked and treacherous. One only practices this way if every other possibility has failed, if the easy way has turned out to be no way at all. Only this way can we hope to come across the sunlit uplands; and yet even there, the light will skin our littleness like sand in a gale. It is all we come to long for, the only place we will be at home.

Faith and contemplation

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

There’s a kind of hunger that draws one in, further and further. It’s not that present practice is wrong, or inadequate; but that there’s always more, literally infinitely more, and the heart cannot rest – it has to go on, further in and further up. This is, to put it in rather technical words, part of the phenomenology of contemplation – first person experience, in everyday words.

One of the great pitfalls of the spiritual life is to refuse to see, or understand, what is given to us in first person experience, because it does not fit what we have been taught, or have come to believe. Perhaps this is why contemplatives and the contemplative way seem so often deeply threatening to both religious authorities and secular presumptions, and why they so often provoke resistance and even oppression. (One has only to read the biography of St John of the Cross, of Gutoku Shinran, or even of Eihei Dōgen, to see what I mean.)

Faith, in one sense at least, is just this “unreserved opening of the mind” to contemplative experience, and the acceptance of its implications for one’s life, however difficult or unlikely they may seem.

The Sufi scholar Oludamini Ogunnaike, speaking in an interview:

There’s a famous Ḥadīth that says, “God is beautiful and that he loves beauty.” Here beauty is not just a distraction or temptation, but instead a reflection of the Divine, it is the Divine.

But this can mess you up.

The analogy that one of my teachers uses is birds flying into windows. The world is like that, a fun house of mirrors. You see the beautiful face of the Divine reflected everywhere, but if you just run toward it at full tilt, you’re going to keep smacking into it. You’re not going to get to kiss your beloved. So you have to learn to navigate the world of reflections of Divine Beauty. The sweetness we taste in sugar is a reflection or manifestation of Divine Sweetness, but if we just eat sugar all day, we’re going to get very sick. So it’s a process of recognizing and understanding the manifestations of the Real in every phenomenon and treating each with the proper adab or courtesy it demands. You can see God in a crouching tiger, but it’s still usually good adab or manners to give it a wide berth.

Contemplation seems to require patience, and stillness. I know from my own past life the danger of running to kiss reflections! But still the hunger, and the excitement, call us on. To sit still, in silence, in faith, when the tides of yearning are at flood, is perhaps the hardest and most necessary thing we shall have to do.

Keeping it simple

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Remember that thoughts are only the product of the momentary confluence of a great number of factors. In themselves they do not exist. Thus, the moment they arise, recognize that their nature is emptiness. They will immediately lose their power to produce other thoughts, and the chain of illusion will be broken. Recognize the emptiness of thoughts and let them relax into the natural clarity of the transparent and unaltered mind.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, quoted by Mathieu Ricard in The Art of Meditation

In my last post I wrote of the conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know to becoming vulnerable and available to illumination, to open objectless awareness.

The obstacle, of course, is the incessant passage of thoughts through the mind – a stream which of course we cannot halt, since they are in this context no more than noise thrown off by the machinery of the conscious mind. But mere recognition will loosen their grip on our attention; and as Dilgo Khyentse points out, they will fall away of themselves from the awakening mind.

Simplicity, poverty of intent, remains at the heart of practice for me. The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm (contemplative practice based on the Jesus Prayer) 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. But really, faithfully and regularly sitting still – whether formally, as in shikantaza, or just resting for a moment on the way – is all that is needed in the end.

“The zero on which all other numbers depend”

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Faith is not the same as belief. Faith is what Jay Matthews described as staying at the center with God. In my lexicon, God is simply another word for wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality, the heart of being. What Jay is saying points to an abidance in and as wholeness. Being unconditional love. Seeing as God sees.

In my experience, this means waking up here and now, returning again and again to the openness and the listening presence that is most intimate, the boundless awareness that is always accepting everything and clinging to nothing.

And although this wholeness is never really absent, paradoxically, the realization and embodiment of it generally takes faith and perseverance, falling down and getting up again and again, feeling lost and confused and then once again returning Home. It’s not about believing an ideology. It’s trusting in something that’s not a graspable thing of any kind, something that is not “out there” at a distance. It’s THIS here-now presence that we are and that everything is. It’s closer than close, most intimate, and at the same time, all-inclusive and boundless.

God and faith are religious words, and that’s probably part of why they both resonate here. I’ve always been a religious person. I wasn’t raised in any religion, but religion has always attracted me. I’ve never really fit into any organized religion, although throughout my life, I’ve wandered in and out of various churches and Zen centers, sometimes joining them but eventually always leaving. My path seems to be solitary, nontraditional and eclectic, but my life definitely seems to center on religion—a word I’ve tended to replace with spirituality, as many others have done, but maybe religion is not such a bad word…

God is pure potentiality, the germinal darkness out of which everything emerges, the zero on which all other numbers depend, the very core of our being, the timeless eternal unicity, the sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, that which is subtlest and most intimate. God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from the perspective of wholeness—seeing and being the whole picture. God is unconditional love. Awakening is about opening to God, allowing God, abiding in God, dissolving into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is only this vast openness. God is at once most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, transcendent. God is not other than this presence here and now, and yet, God is also a relationship, a dialog of sorts, a way of listening to myself and the whole universe. God is impossible to define or pin down.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

Tollifson quite uncannily puts her finger, here, on my own condition. I always find it quite difficult to write this kind of thing, since I know that I all too often come over as didactic when actually I am merely trying to find my way in the desert places.

I have found it increasingly difficult, despite my periodic protestations, to avoid this word “God”. As Joan Tollifson points out, it encompasses so much “wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality…” even “the heart of being” itself. In other words, this one little word will stand in for whole stacks of other, quite possibly defensive or political, or merely pompous, assertions and jargon on my part.

Too often we would-be contemplatives find ourselves drawn away into argumentation, activism, restlessness, no matter whether we are caught up in the activities of some religious institution, or in some humanist or secular-spiritual one. A long time ago, Isaac of Nineveh (613-700 CE) had this to say,

And this is the definition of stillness: silence to all things.

If in stillness you are found full of turbulence, and you disturb your body by the work of your hands and your soul with cares, then judge for yourself what sort of stillness you are practising, being concerned over many things in order to please God!

For it is ridiculous for us to speak of achieving stillness if we do not abandon all things and separate ourselves from every care.

Homily 21

For me of course, practice and prayer lie at the heart of it all. It is impossible to touch these realities – reality itself, perhaps – by any other means. And in fact it is not really a means; all we are doing is somehow getting ourselves out of the way of the light. Bishop Kallistos Ware:

The purpose of prayer can be summarized in the phrase, ‘Become what you are’… Become what you are: more exactly, return into yourself; discover him who is yours already, listen to him who never ceases to speak within you; possess him who even now possesses you. Such is God’s message to anyone who wants to pray: ‘You would not seek me unless you had already found me.’

The simple prayers of repetition, like the Jesus Prayer, John Main’s Maranatha, or the Pure Land Buddhist Nembutsu (all of which lead in any case into the silence of objectless awareness) are by their very simplicity and accessibility not reserved for religious professionals, nor are they ones that require training or qualifications, nor do they ask of us any unusual feats of memory. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom wrote of the Jesus Prayer that,

More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims at bringing us to stand in God’s presence with no other thought but the miracle of our standing there and God with us, because in the use of the Jesus Prayer there is nothing and no one except God and us.

The use of the prayer is dual, it is an act of worship as is every prayer, and on the ascetical level, it is a focus that allows us to keep our attention still in the presence of God.

It is a very companionable prayer, a friendly one, always at hand and very individual in spite of its monotonous repetitions. Whether in joy or in sorrow, it is, when it has become habitual, a quickening of the soul, a response to any call of God. The words of St Symeon, the New Theologian, apply to all its possible effects on us: ‘Do not worry about what will come next, you will discover it when it comes’. 

On prayer

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The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes:

It might be wonderful if we all prayed now and then. Prayer is a very powerful method. It is a means of inner liberation. Sometimes prayer is our last resort. If we have been walking the spiritual path, trying to become awakened, there may come a point when we realize that we can’t force ourselves to experience this thing called equal flavor. Then prayer is our last resort. Prayer is an act of surrendering and opening our heart, trusting something that is much greater than our own personality, our ego.

There is a deep impulse in each of us that knows how to pray. We don’t have to recite traditional prayers. We can all compose our own prayers. Did you ever have the experience when you were in trouble or when you were confused, that you naturally started praying? Maybe you didn’t know that you were praying. Maybe you didn’t have any concept of who you were praying to. There are some traditions where you have someone divine or sacred that you pray to. There are other traditions, nontheistic traditions, where you pray but you are not praying to anybody. When we are struggling with anything in our consciousness, we can always pray, remembering that we don’t have to be religious or Buddhist to pray. We can ask the universe, “May I have the readiness to overcome my fear.” Or if we are struggling with resentment, we can pray to the universe to help us overcome that. Praying to the universe is a very safe thing to do. We can ask the universe to bestow a shower of blessings on us and help us to overcome our inner demons of resentment, fear, and anger.

In the act of prayer, you can feel yourself surrendering all your hopes and fears, and you are freed from your resistance to accepting that you have no control in life. You feel true humility, in which you’re no longer trying to be in charge, but letting life itself be in charge. Let yourself recognize that this is the highest freedom you can have. Try to live that freedom every day as much as you can. There will be moments in your life when you will feel that you don’t need that freedom, but as humans we are going through ups and downs, and in some moments freedom will be the only refuge you have. We human beings are extremely resilient and strong—we have the capacity to be openhearted and to surrender in any situation. It is our innate potential. Let’s use it.

Thubten, in writing of prayer as a means of inner liberation and surrender, comes very close to the spirit behind the Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer.

Prayers of repetition (as opposed to classical mantras) are not intended to carry any magical charge, nor to bring about an altered state of consciousness. They are merely a form of practice based on repeated surrender to, ultimately, the metaphysical ground in which all things – including ourselves – come to be. In a sense, they are a rehearsal for the final surrender of death; and yet they are prayers of radical simplicity, poverty even. Anyone can use them, at any time.

The Jesus Prayer in particular is prayed in the understanding that the words are self-dissolving, tending always to silence. It is important to remember that the words employed in these prayers of repetition are not limited to, or even mainly about, their literal meaning: they are nearer to a kind of spiritual poetry, perhaps. Their power is not in what they say, but in that they are said. In that lies their gift of liberation, the heart’s stillness. Nothing is accomplished; only grace is revealed as itself.

Inseparable

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In her ‘Daily Nonduality‘ newsletter this morning, ‘We never walk alone‘, Kat van Oudheusden touches on very much the point I was groping after yesterday, in her typically direct and no-nonsense way:

Waking up to our nondual nature is never a solo affair, even if it convincingly seems that way.

There is no lone hero (or anti-hero) on a journey to their awakening. Once there is recognition of no-self, the whole concept of individual awakening stops making sense.

Awakening is collective because we’re not separate.

There is only everything all at once. And whatever is going on, is going on as all of it: an intertwining, interacting, and interbeing of apparent things that are not even separate.

We are completely embedded in THIS. There is no boundary between what I have learned to call me and reality. It’s only that our learned thoughts — now fixed beliefs — convincingly uphold this illusion of separation.

It’s not the human body that awakens. Nor is there a separate mind, soul, or self to whom awakening can happen.

The movement of awakening (if we can even call it that) is the movement of one Being, expressed as endless shapes and forms.

The Ocean is waving us.

It is waving us while we believe ourselves to be separate waves, waving us as we wake up to the illusion of it, waving us as we try to communicate it …

Meanwhile, we are all already that, whether we realize it or not.

Kat van Oudheusden’s words here are an almost uncanny echo  – certainly a synchronicity – of a post entitled ‘Hopeless?‘ that I wrote back in 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still a daily threat. I fully intended merely to quote from it here, but I see that it pretty much says everything I would want to say again – perhaps with more immediacy and conviction than I could summon now – so I shall take the liberty of reproducing it in full below:

—

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness…

It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope…

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

This brings us close to what has become for me a key issue in practice and in experience. Chödrön goes on to point out that this sense of hopelessness, of “nowhere to turn” and no one to turn to, lies at the heart of non-theism. There is no cosmic babysitter, she explains: “In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”

Now, there is a decided attraction in such a point of view. For all the relinquishment of the sense of “a solid, separate self” it is fatally easy, down this road, to see oneself as some kind of Raymond Chandler anti-hero, hat pulled low, collar turned to the rainy night, face starkly outlined by the light of a match held in cupped hands. “There’s no hope now, baby. And y’know, that’s okay…” The End.

The Buddhist opposite, I guess, is shinjin. Here the practitioner is giving up not hope, but self-reliance. She abandons her self to the tariki, the “other-power” of Amida Buddha inherent in the nembutsu, the core practice of Pureland Buddhism. As Jeff Wilson points out,

The nembutsu that we say, that others can hear, is only the tip of the shinjin iceberg; the nembutsu we recite is only the most visible sign of the working of Other Power within the shadowy ego-self. That inner working of shinjin may show through as nembutsu, but it can also show through in a hug, a gift, a kind word, laughter.

Nembutsu is a vital avenue for expressing our faith, but it need not be taken for the whole iceberg. There’s really no limit to the possibilities of expression of the trusting heart….

Humility and trust go hand in hand, forming the second part of the true trusting mind. Shinjin is another name for this development of humility-entrusting.

Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness [p.85]

The issue of humility is one, of course, with which I had continually to struggle during my long years as a Christian contemplative. My practice was always the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” – a prayer repeated in very much the same manner as the nembutsu, formally for regular periods each day, and spontaneously from time to time for the rest of the day – and night, too, given the way it tends to pop up whenever one turns over in the night, or half-wakes to look at the clock.

The Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer are both ways of abandonment: not of the abandonment of hope so much as the abandonment of self-will, of giving up not hope but self-reliance, of giving up oneself into the continuum of something not other but utterly interpenetrating. Jean Pierre de Caussade puts it solidly (in Christian terms of course) in his title Abandonment to Divine Providence or The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The fall out of self is the fall into now, into the ground of being, that isness that is always now and in which all beings rest.

The more I go on, the more fundamental this abandonment seems to be for me. However threadbare devotional practice can be, however compromised and compromising the religions we humans build around our moments of clarity and truth, there is no way past the frailty and limitation of the self, its littleness and its bombu imperfection. All its struggles for self-validation will sooner or later have to be given up in death anyway. To let it dissolve in light is no loss, but limitless grace.

[Hopeless? originally published on September 13, 2021]

In the way

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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

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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.

Emptiness?

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Emptiness is not a denial of existence but a subtler perspective that all phenomena are impermanent and interrelated.

Miranda Shaw, “Mothers of Liberation”
Tricycle Magazine, Summer 2007

Emptiness should not be confused with nihilism, which asserts that nothing has any intrinsic value or meaning. Buddhism does not deny the conventional reality of the world nor the importance of ethical conduct; Its doctrine of emptiness simply asserts that the true nature of things is characterized by interdependence and lack of solid, independent existence. It doesn’t deny that things exist; it describes how they exist.

Buddhism A-Z: Śūnyatā, Lion‘s Roar

By these reckonings, Śūnyatā is remarkably similar to distributed causality in modern physics…

To sit quietly, though, is to observe this for oneself. Reading the words alone skitters on the surface skin of an idea. Only watchful stillness can reveal the undeniable, empty nature of conditioned things: the fleeting impermanence of the breath, and of the earth itself – even of the bright stars, so distant that by the time we see them they may no longer even be there. And yet not a thing exists without its antecedents, not even without the things that share its time. But things, truly, are not; there is only pattern, becoming, the bright ground that is no thing. What more could there be?