Category Archives: Religion and spiritual traditions

Powerlessness (at the top of the flume)

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The way of pure faith is to persevere in contemplative practice without worrying about where we are on the journey, and without comparing ourselves with others or judging others’ gifts as better than ours. We can be spared all this nonsense if we surrender ourselves to the divine action, whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be. In pure faith, the results are often hidden even from those who are growing the most.

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love, p.139

It would be all too easy to misunderstand Keating here as writing of belief: faith in the sense of a church’s “statement of faith” to which members are required to assent. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing he is referring to at all. Alan Watts writes:

I do not, at this point, wish to seem mysterious or to be making claims to “secret knowledge.” The reality which corresponds to “God” and “eternal life” is honest, above-board, plain, and open for all to see. But the seeing requires a correction of mind, just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes.

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here 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…

The Wisdom of Insecurity, p.22

“Faith lets go” – it is in the letting go that pure faith, in Keating’s sense, consists. That willingness to “plunge into the unknown” whatever the intellectual, or even existential, risk is what lies at the heart of the contemplative adventure. In one sense, it is a willing embrace of the condition to which, willing or not, we shall all be heir in death. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” (Colossians 3:2-4 NRSV)

Many years ago I used to swim in a large city pool that had a huge and seemingly flimsy device called a flume: you sat at the top of a long, curving tube just large enough for a human body, with a stream of water running down it, holding onto two handles. Once you let go, that was it – you hurtled many meters down the twisty tube at ever increasing speed – your friction negated by the cushion of water under your bottom – until you popped out and fell the last meter or so into a deep pool, with a great splash. There was no stopping, no going back, no practical possibility of even slowing down; and the real thrill was in that moment at the top, just before you let go…

To live, consciously, at the top of the flume is one of the insights of the contemplative life. We are not safe – no life is – and the glory is in embracing that to the extent that the distinction – it’s only an illusion anyway – between our little selves and that limitless ground of being itself, in which we – and all that is – rest breaks down. Faith is merely to trust that, implicitly. Thomas Keating again:

Powerlessness is our greatest treasure. Don’t try to get rid of it. Everything in us wants to get rid of it. “Grace is sufficient for you,” but not something you can understand. To be in too big a hurry to get over our difficulties is a mistake because we don’t know how valuable they are from God’s perspective. Without them we might never be transformed as deeply and as thoroughly. If everything else fails, the dying process is the place where we will have no choice but to go through the transformation process because everything is in fact taken away. The spiritual journey is the commitment to allow everything we possess to be taken away before the dying process begins. This makes us of enormous value to ourselves and to others because we have anticipated death, and death is not the end but the beginning of the fullness of transformation. If we were born, we’ve already been through a facsimile of death and our body is well prepared for the final translation, or transition as some prefer to call it. We can’t see God without going through death…

Reflections on the Unknowable, p.156

Set and setting

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Thinking over my last post here, and talking it through with Susan, I realised that much of the problem so often encountered by lone contemplative practitioners – spiritual crises, phenomenological dislocations of one kind of another – may all too often simply be due a lack of understanding of the contemplative equivalent of what the the psychonauts of the psychedelic community refer to as “set and setting”.

In their original context, set and setting were used to refer to a psychedelic drug user’s mindset and their physical and social setting at the time of their embarking on a trip. In the sense in which I am borrowing them, I mean the practitioner’s own personal beliefs, past experiences, unconscious biases and expectations (“set”) and their broader cultural, social and spiritual environment (“setting”). We in the West cannot escape our own culture – two thousand years of Christian spiritual tradition, and two hundred years of post-Enlightenment liberal thought – any more than we can escape what C.G, Jung called our “collective unconscious“: the psychological weight of symbols, myths and practices we have all inherited by virtue of our birth and upbringing.

I’ve been wondering what all this might mean for a contemplative living and practicing outside of a religious – monastic or otherwise – community. Perhaps tradition tends to act like a homing beacon, helping the practitioner locate their inner experience within a context shaped by centuries, millennia, of practice and its inherited understanding; and without which, the contemplative life can come to be experienced as unguided, adrift, destabilised. However much we try to find this sense of location within the philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology or whatever, the resonant frequency of that beacon is missing. What we are is not theoretical: we are living beings, beautiful creatures with stars’ iron in our veins; the causes and effects that brought us to birth are shared with those among whom we live.

Finding correlates within the existing Christian non-dual tradition seems to be the beacon I have, with my eyes on the charts rather than on the sea, been missing. Reading Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, David Frenette or Martin Laird, I can see that I am not alone out on the waves.

The all that is nothing is the effulgent ground of being from which all things are birthed. Union with Christ means oneness with the unseen and hidden ground of everything, a union that unites every separate thing. But because humans are so focused on single, visible separate things we tend to miss out on the unseen and secret source of everything. Jesus invites us to remember the source of everything when he says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The all of God is nothing because it is no one thing. The all of God is everything, or, better said, every separate thing comes from God.

David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer, p.102

Eastering*

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Jesus was not the lone exemplar. Jesus was not the standalone symbol for the pattern of the universe. Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah on this Easter morning, we’re also saying hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for. 

Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naive to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away. 

Of course, it’s an act of faith on our side. In our experience, our most cherished people, pets, and even places, fade away—but Jesus is the archetype of the shape of the universe. To believe in Jesus is to believe that all of this is going somewhere and that God is going to make it so. All we have to do is stay on the train, stay on the wave, trusting that by our crucifixions, we would be allowed to fail, fumble and die, and be transformed by grace and by God.

Richard Rohr

[Jesus] left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being “a new creation”: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart…

As Paul so profoundly realized, “up” and “down” do not ultimately matter, for in kenosis consciousness reclaims dominion over energy. The pathway to freedom, to the realized unity of our being, lies in and in fact is coextensive with the sacramental act of giving it all away, making “self-giving” the core gesture through which all the meaning, purpose, and nobility of our human life is ultimately conveyed.

Cynthia Bourgeault

The intuition that death is not the end, that the way to light is through the darkness of entire surrender, is fundamental to the contemplative life in all traditions. Easter is only one expression of it, though it is certainly the most powerful expression available to us in the West. Where we so often go wrong is in assuming that “life” somehow implies the survival of something like an ego. Ego is precisely what must be surrendered, in contemplative practice just as, ultimately, in death. Personhood, whether imagined as human or as divine, is not what we think it is. As Buddhism so clearly sees, there is actually no such individual self – it only looks that way; and that illusion ends with surrender, with death. Life cannot fall out of the ground of being; the ground is life; life is being.

I am gradually coming to realise that language and culture are inescapable; I can no more escape my native English, and Englishness, than I can change my own genes. No wonder the language of the Christian contemplative life has so strong a resonance for me; it is simply the way that I perceive things, left to myself. That, after all, is how the Gospels came to be peppered with imagery that looks as though it has been borrowed from its contemporary pagan surroundings almost as much as from its native Jewish culture; that is simply how language turned out for the New Testament writers when they tried to find words for a reality beyond words.

My innate Einzelgänger-ishness remains, of course. But maybe I can embrace, rather than struggle with, my native contemplative heritage. The sense of homecoming I felt at Willen Priory was perhaps not illusory after all, but a real intuition; not a homecoming to a place so much as to a language, to a way of understanding that which is beyond language.

*Eastering, as a verb, seems to have originated with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘.

Trying to put it simply

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Simply put I am an atheist. That is, I don’t believe in any kind of god. I think that the major religions of the world are dangerous selfish memeplexes that use a variety of tricks to propagate themselves and do great harm to both individuals and society – from preventing truthful education to justifying war and murder. However, most religions include at least two aspects which I would be sorry to lose.

First is the truths that many contain in their mystical or spiritual traditions; including insights into the nature of self, time and impermanence. Happily, these can be found through meditation, drugs, ritual and other methods and are not the sole prerogative of religions. I have had many spontaneous mystical experiences, and have practiced Zen meditation for more than 20 years.

The other is the rituals that we humans seem to need, marking such events as birth, death, and celebrations. Humanism provides a non-religious alternative and I have found the few such ceremonies I have attended to be a refreshing change from the Christian ones of my upbringing. I am also glad that these ceremonies allow for an eclectic mixture of songs, music and words. In spite of my lack of belief I still enjoy the ancient hymns of my childhood and I know others do too. We can and should build on our traditions rather than throwing out everything along with our childish beliefs.

Susan Blackmore

Unlike Susan Blackmore I was not brought up as a Christian; my long association with the Christian contemplative tradition began at the end of my twenties, when I first encountered  real live Christian contemplatives at the SSM Priory at Willen, and became aware that there was still a living contemplative tradition within Christianity; and that texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, were more than curiosities for scholars of the medieval church. Before I knew it, I found myself launched on a lifetime of contemplation in the context, mostly, of the Anglican church, and based on the practice of the Jesus Prayer.

As I wrote here recently, to write, or even to think, about the contemplative life (or indeed spirituality more generally) is much easier if one is prepared to use the time-worn language of religion. The difficulty arises when one discovers, as I have all too often, that the language has taken over, and is actually determining what one can say or think. So far from experiencing the attributes – “accidents”, to borrow from Aristotle via Thomas Aquinus – of religion as comforting or nostalgic, they have come to represent, for me at any rate, a real danger: that of finding myself actually experiencing my own experiences through a stained-glass filter of religious imagery.

None of this happens, of course, in practice itself; it is only when I attempt to think and write about it that I fall prey to such phenomenological distortions.

The reassurance of familiarity, the resonance of well-loved and much used phrases, can come to blanket the clarity of direct experience like a valley fog. The more difficult task, that of somehow finding a language with which to write of secular mysticism on its own terms, is perhaps the reason why I persevere, despite my frequent mistakes, with this blog.

A leanness of speech

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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.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

It is hard sometimes, writing about the contemplative life; not because it is difficult to find words so much as it is to find what words to leave out. Belden Lane:

When you put a priority on silence and scarcity as taught by the land itself, the language you use will be very sparse. People out in the desert don’t tend to talk much. Having left behind the noise and clutter of city life, the [desert] monks placed a premium on brevity of speech. They knew that words too easily got in the way of what matters most…

The monks’ leanness of speech even affected the way they spoke of God. The vast expanse of the desert had done a job on the mindset of these early Christians. It broke up their dependence on glib answers and theological explanations. They found themselves running out of language very easily. They knew that in God’s own being was a vast expanse beyond their ability to comprehend, not unlike the desert itself. God is ultimately beyond anything that can be put into words…

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 polemical, 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

The danger, it seems to me, is not that the contemplative might do too little, earning themselves the too often perjorative label “quietist”, but that they might be insufficiently radical in their quietness, and so lose the very thing that had drawn them to silence in the first place.

Having walked through the fire

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The period of early Christianity is one of the key building blocks in my lineage of faith. It’s an overlooked area for much of the Roman Church and its child, Protestantism. With the self-sufficiency and arrogance that has often characterized the West, we have proceeded as if the first centuries of Christianity were unimportant, or not part of the essential Christ mystery. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—are some of the most neglected parts of the Western Church. 

After the legitimation and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the 4th century, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the desert fathers and mothers (or abbas and ammas). The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church councils. Since the desert monks often lacked formal education, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. 

Richard Rohr, A Radical Foundation

During the period of pandemic lockdowns, I wrote, in one of the early posts on this blog, of

…my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world…

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century [CE], the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

It isn’t merely the sociology of religion at stake here, though. There is a fundamental shift in spiritual perspective, I suggest, when we step outside the conventions and hierarchies of organised religion – to say nothing of the inner bindings of doctrine and dogma – into an uncharted space of presence and necessary, rather than mandated, practice. There is no longer any traction for the human instinct for security and status; those things no longer afford an escape or a distraction from the inner work.

Out there in the wild, there was no one to impress, no need to cultivate a reputation. A lot of things didn’t matter anymore out there. The desert fathers and mothers wanted to keep the edges hot and to imitate the life of Jesus…. In short, theirs was a countercultural spirituality carrying a prophetic edge. Some of them had been draft dodgers and tax resistors. In fact, some of the women had fled from being sold into a marriage that would’ve been little better than slavery. 

A spiritual resistance movement takes shape among these desert monks, questioning the commodification and militarization of life in the wider culture. They had no use for the ego advancement and social climbing to which even Christians had begun to aspire. You see this in their practice of what they called apatheia, a fierce indifference to unimportant things….  

What do you learn to ignore and what do you learn to love? What needs to die in your life and what do you need to affirm unreservedly? These two questions are the heart of desert spirituality. The desert becomes a tomb, said the monks, a place for the demise of the ego. But there’s also an immense joy and release in that, in learning to die before you die. You’re finally set free to live with abandon. No one is freer than those who have looked death in the eye, have walked through the fire, and are able now fearlessly to love.

Belden Lane, quoted in Rohr, ibid.

So once again we have that sense I wrote of recently, that the nearness of death is in itself a gateway to the vast openness from which all things become, the ground of all that is. There is no getting around it: only as we face the ending of all we thought we were are we free at last to see that what we actually are is none other than what actually is.

Sangha and solitude (slight return)

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Sangha and solitude

It occurs to me that this post, though it was written when the pandemic was still near its height, says some things I’d wish to say now. In any case, more recent readers may have missed it first time around!

Eternal life?

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In Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life, Larry Rosenberg ends his chapter on choiceless awareness with a Q&A session. One of the questioners asks:

Q: Ideas and beliefs about rebirth are often mentioned in dharma books. I wonder if you could tell us whether you believe in rebirth.

A: If you are a person brought up in a culture that has believed in rebirth for thousands of years, such as in Tibet or Thailand, the answer is obvious. I’ve known wonderful Tibetan teachers who look at me with sympathy when I say I’m uncertain about rebirth. On the other hand, many professors in the sciences might look at you like you’re crazy if you even mention the subject. All I know is that I am open to the idea but honestly don’t know!

One of the reasons I no longer profess to be a Christian, and could never be a Buddhist in any formal sense, is just this question.

In Christian doctrine God is held to be eternal – though opinions vary as to whether this implies that he exists outside time altogether, or whether he exists simultaneously in all dimensions of time, past, present and future. To die as a Christian is to possess eternal life (John 10:27-28) through knowing God (John 17:3). The only way I could ever make sense of this was to think that the instant of death must somehow be atemporal, and that in that moment outside time one might meet God. I have never been able to make any sense of the idea of a portable plug-in soul that could somehow be translated to a land beyond the sky. Maybe I never was a “proper” Christian.

Similarly, any idea of rebirth runs into the same problem, only worse. Not only is there the question of what might constitute the soul to be reborn, and where it might be located, but Buddhism explicitly, and cogently, states that there is, in a living person, no permanent unchanging self or essence (anātman). So what is to be reborn?

The metaphysical mechanics of life after death don’t make any sense to me, however they are expressed. That there is life after death – that the human race will go on, and so will all the other forms of life – is undeniable; but my life after my death? I’m not sure that idea even makes sense.

Cause and effect is another matter, maybe. Things have consequences; they are themselves always consequences. There is no discernible beginning or end to this chain of causation (karma), short of cosmological speculations about the “beginnings” of time. I was born as a result of certain events in history – my mother and father met; they met because of their work during WWII; there was a war because of certain political, economic and military factors, and so on and so on, back into time – and there will be certain limited consequences of events in my own life that will outlive me. But this is not the same as me in some way continuing, or recurring into the future.

But things exist. They are. There is a ground of being – Istigkeit, Tao – from which, in which, all things arise.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Tao Te Ching

Things go on. Where they come from, where they go – I’m not sure those are questions that mean anything in the context of being itself; hence the “nameless” in the Tao Te Ching.

All we can do, all we need to do, is sit still. Daishin Morgan:

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Onyng

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If the ground of being is no thing, literally not an object – as it must be, being the source and beginning of all that comes to be – then in our closeness to it we find we cannot speak of it, really. JP Williams writes: “Aside from the fact that the Creator of all cannot be any kind of ‘object’, the divine activity of ‘onyng’ [Julian of Norwich] finally removes the ground from under any duality. The soul’s ‘solitude’ is not necessarily a denial of divine presence; when it is united with God, there are not two beings to count. Peace and holiness are ‘held at no remove’, as John [of the Cross] says. In so far as the soul speaks at all there, it stammers, tripping itself up, disrupting its own saying.”

In the ground itself there is no separation, no “God” and “soul”; there is only being. There is no “life” and “death”, as if these were separated, states or places to transition between; there is only isness, beyond time or ending. What we think of as self (which is only a convenient fiction, anyway) is entirely subsumed in light. It is nothing: it has found no thing.

Lost in hope

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Hope, in the conventional sense, is, as we have seen in the last couple of posts here, generally tied to a sense of outcome. We hope something will turn out all right; we hope something else will not happen. Cynthia Bourgeault points out that what she terms mystical hope is not tied in this way. It has a life of its own, “without reference to external circumstances and conditions.”

I have noticed myself that, at least after some years of steady contemplative practice, the experience of what we think of as “loss” – serious accident, illness, bereavement, loss of livelihood, money, or status, for instance – is not accompanied by a loss of hope at the deepest level. Of course, hope in a good outcome is lost – the worst has happened, something is irretrievably broken – but underneath it all there is what feels for all the world like some kind of certainty. Beneath the quicksand is a solid ground, the bedrock of what is. As the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk saw (Habakkuk 3.17-19) though all else fails, at the end there is something more like presence than anything else.

In a long article in Tricycle Magazine, Kurt Spellmeyer reminds us that the Buddha’s illumination came only after the most profound experience of helplessness, when he was so starved and dehydrated that had a passing village girl not brought him rice and milk, he might very well not have lived the night. This, like Habakkuk’s prophecy, may or may not be historical, but it contains as profound a truth: only at the very end of conventional hope, even in our own survival, can we find that which is beyond any result or outcome, beyond any thing whatever.

This brings us, of course, to the thought of our own death. Here is the ultimate helplessness: at the end we shall be bereft of everything, even of the ability to draw the next breath. There will be no more chances, nothing to decide. Richmond Lewis, in a coma from which he was not expected to recover, had a vision of his own death very similar to experiences I have had of being close to physical death, which he memorably described as “dissolv[ing] into light”.

What could this mean? Is it a comforting(?) illusion? An artifact of failing neural circuitry? It isn’t possible, of course, to answer such a question in a way that would satisfy a scientific researcher. We are describing an experience, a “something that it is like to be”, in Thomas Nagel’s words. It does not admit of experimental verification, or if it did, the experimental subject would be in no position to report on the outcome of the experiment! But as an experience, it is as definite and actual as any: far more so than almost any other. But an experience of what?

The nearest expression of it that I can find is that it is an experience of absolute unknowing, of pure isness.

Tara Brach writes, of “the open, wakeful emptiness of awareness”:

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.”

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance, Ebury Digital 2012 (pp. 315, 317)

It seems to me that that “vast and shining presence” is not only the light into which we dissolve, but the ground of our being itself – and our death merely the letting go into what is seen.