Category Archives: stoicism

Plain ordinary mind

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In her beautiful essay The Gift of Contemplation, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard writes:

In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

…

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

Yesterday, I wrote of the dimensionless metaphysical ground that is Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit. I know this kind of thing can sound wilfully abstruse, and yet it is truly the simplest thing; well, except that it is no thing! To sit still, aware of nothing except what is – whether the sound of tyres on the road beyond the garden, or the continual appearance of unsought dreamy thoughts, or the solid floor beneath – is as plain and ordinary a thing as one could find to do. To remain merely aware of whatever enters the field of consciousness is not even slightly complicated, and yet it is the work of a lifetime.

To learn to love what plainly is, as Goddard says, is the foundation of equanimity, the amor fati of the Stoics. And yet, this ordinary “resting in and into what is” is the very ground of isness itself. There is no other; and yet this unvarnished awareness is itself the most utterly fundamental reality, the open ground itself, before all differentiation. It is only.

Cause and effect

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Things have consequences; they are themselves consequences. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this – sometimes things seem merely to be chance, or else they are the result of someone’s action, out of their – or God’s – “sovereign will”. But those ideas are never true. The “chance” occurrence had causes. The cliff fall came about because of heavy rain falling onto fissured and unstable ground – someone was injured because they hadn’t heard the Coastguard warnings, and were walking too close to the base of the cliffs…

Fate? Karma? The will of God? What do these things mean, except attempts to explain to ourselves how things beyond our control could happen to us, or to those we care about? Karma actually seems to me to come closest: the idea that cause and effect are ineluctable – what is sown will be reaped. Karma, though, is usually more naturally understood in its human, ethical dimension:

The Buddha defined karma as intention; whether the intention manifested itself in physical, vocal or mental form, it was the intention alone which had a moral character: good, bad or neutral […] The focus of interest shifted from physical action, involving people and objects in the real world, to psychological process.

Richard Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice.

The Chinese concept of the Tao – “[t]he Tao can be roughly thought of as the ‘flow of the universe’, or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered” (Wikipedia) – seems to me closer to the metaphysical implications. To harmonise one’s will with the Tao, to accept the way things come to be, is to cease to swim against the current, to follow “the watercourse way” (Watts).

The Stoics frequently talked about ‘living in agreement with nature’. This, in part, means that it is within our nature to be social, cooperative beings who want the best for others, and for people around us to thrive. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said, ‘All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.’

Bridgid Delaney, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in chaotic times.

To live in harmony with nature in this sense requires a willing abdication of knowledge and willfulness. Alan Watts again:

[P]eople try to force issues only when not realizing that it can’t be done—that there is no way of deviating from the watercourse of nature. You may imagine that you are outside, or separate from, the Tao and thus able to follow it or not follow; but this very imagination is itself within the stream, for there is no way other than the Way. Willy-nilly, we are it and go with it. From a strictly logical point of view, this means nothing and gives us no information. Tao is just a name for whatever happens, or, as Lao-tzu put it, “The Tao principle is what happens of itself [tzu-jan].”

This is of course, as I suggested in a recent post here, very close to what has been called, in Christian contexts, “quietism” – which has widely been criticised as heretical, due to its rejection of doctrines around free will and supernatural determinism.

But (and I quoted her in the linked post) Jennifer Kavanagh explains:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

The contemplative embracing of this principle is perhaps most clearly seen in the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, watching for the way to open:

Zazen or enlightenment is not about finding a particular state of mind, for all states of mind are fleeting and cannot be relied upon. When you know who is sitting, you know sitting Buddha. This expression is a bit strange; why not say sitting like a Buddha? I prefer to say sitting Buddha because there is nobody sitting like a Buddha; there is just sitting Buddha. That Buddha never stops sitting, but we must awaken to her presence–not that sitting Buddha is either male or female…

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.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha.

Atheism and stoicism

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

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV

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

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

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

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

Einzelgänger and Fleur Vaz, Stoicism for Inner Peace

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