Just this simple

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Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Really, it is just this simple. There is next to nothing to it, this practice of ours. And yet it is the work of a lifetime, and the more we go on, the lovelier we discover it to be. There is something so juicy, so moreish, about this whole enterprise. Part of it seems to be that we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch meshing like the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.

More than this, the webbed patterns of causality seem to come clear, bright wires against the dark softness of the breath itself; they are as they are, and yet all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right. What is is the most precious gift, Merton’s diamond, the open ground of isness in this ordinary room, this plain body resting in just now.

In another way, of course, what I’m describing isn’t complicated or difficult at all. What you are really learning—and this begins with following the breath—is the art of doing less and less until finally you are doing nothing, just being as you are and letting your experience come to you. There are no distractions; you are mindful of your present experience just as it is. Nothing in particular is supposed to happen. You attend to what is there just because it is there. It is your life at that moment. We are used to doing things all the time, trying to change our environment, improve our situation, so it may seem difficult to do nothing. Actually, there is nothing easier. You just sit and let the world come to you.

Larry Rosenberg, appendix to Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive

Stone lanterns

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I have always been strangely moved by the tōrō stone lanterns found in gardens and along paths around Buddhist monasteries and large houses in parts of Japan, and hence in similar places around the world in tribute. The one here is in the Japanese garden at Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Even as a boy I loved to look at garden ornaments like sundials and benches that stood out in the rain and sun, in the snow and the wind, bearing the marks of the weather and its changes.

To sit like a stone lantern may be a fanciful way of putting it, but there is something in shikantaza that is just like that, sitting still as the moments pass and the breaths, and the sounds outside drift unremarked across the comings and goings of thoughts. Sitting steadily, nothing moves; and yet there is nothing that remains unchanged, nothing that does not bear the marks of time and its weather. To do nothing, as the stone lantern does nothing, is to remain true to impermanence. Nothing is sought or planned; there is no goal or intention, only to sit still, out in the sun and wind of what comes to be, just that – and in that, all that is.

The truth can only heal

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This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have…

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Tricycle Magazine, June 2015

Impermanence, the realisation in actual experience that nothing lasts, nothing is eternal, seems to many people a gloomy doctrine. Actually it is anything but. The burden of hope is lifted; the agony of yearning is eased in the coming of light. The truth can only heal; only the truth can truly heal.

As Traleg Kyabgon says, though, this has to be experienced, not merely learned. The intellect may find such a thought easy enough to grasp – or it may not! – but it is only in lived experience that the heart can know. This is grace; the grace of practice, the gift of sitting still; or else it may be the grace of pain itself, accepted either willingly or helplessly. Either way, I have not found it something I could set out to learn: it had to happen to me. (Various monastic traditions, Christian and Buddhist, have disciplines intended to make it easier – meditations in charnel-grounds, for instance – but again I suspect that they are more ways to open the heart to grace than to compel it to learn some technique or accomplishment.)

I have been uncommonly fortunate. Not only do I have my practice, grown and changed to fit over many years, but I have had more than one close encounter with the finitude of my own life. These last have been great gifts; but they are not something one could seek out intentionally – what the news reports call a “life-changing industrial accident” would be an odd sort of spiritual discipline!

I think what lies at the heart of what may be learned from all these practices and encounters is acceptance – even glad acceptance – of the fact that life and death belong together as do the two sides of one coin, as do day and night, summer and winter. Not only is one impossible without the other, but they are a succession, parts of a cycle. Our little lives are not just rounded with a sleep, but with a waking too; just as next summer will be another year, so there will be another life. Not I – I am as fleeting as the leaves – but another will wake to a new day, in another time that might have been different had I not passed this way before.

When there is nothing left

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One of the strangest realisations of contemplative practice is that the closest place to the truth is when everything is broken. Really. When the thing you thought you could never survive is upon you, when the last thing you could rely on has given way under your feet, then you can see what is actually there. Until the bridge breaks beneath you, you have no idea what is really going on at all. You have your plans, you have your resources, you have your own strength and your courage; until you don’t. Until the worst happens. And then you are free. Oliver Burkeman:

This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as “playing in the ruins.”

In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen—when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations—he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, “a precious state of being can dawn. . . . You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, OK, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?”

When there is nothing left, the way opens. Only when you can sit still in the ruins of all you had lived for, and see what is actually there, can you begin to wake up at last.

The promise of the end of suffering is the hook that we grab on to, and for a long time after we’ve begun to practice we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn’t end up looking like what we expect—or what we want.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

All this sounds like very bad news, but in truth it is the best news possible. When what is not is gone, when our hopes and our fears turn out to be the same thing in the end, then we can see that what is is, in Thomas Merton’s words, the “little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty” that is iness itself, the open ground. And that, perhaps, is why we practice.

A new site page

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I have just added a new permanent site page, Advice etc.

I hope the links here will give easy access to what little practical advice I have dared to give on this blog, not being in any sense a teacher!

Do click over and have a look – and let me know in the comments if there is any way in which you think it should be improved.

About time

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Real meditation isn’t something you do; it’s something you cease to do… it is the freedom to notice what is already here… What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important – or even sacred? … Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always – but always, and only, now.

Sam Harris, from a recorded talk on Waking Up

“Self” is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is a word for the thousand guises themselves. To understand the “self” is to understand the usage of the word within the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled in philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns. Wittgenstein repeatedly said that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language. In taking this approach to what had traditionally been seen as intractable metaphysical conundrums, Wittgenstein, I believe, comes the closest of any Western philosopher to Zen.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

The thing about the self is that it is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, another substantive noun – like time – that can lead us to mistake the word for the substance. Time does not contain, or somehow lead to, the succession of experience: it is that successive experiencing. The self does not experience a succession of events: it is the experience. To sit still is to see this unfold, in real time.

The unfolding is the sacred moment itself. As Harris points out in his talk, it would be easy to be misled by what appears to be religious language here; but the sacredness of the moment resides not in some imported framework of belief that conditions, or interprets, or redeems the time. It is sacred because it is real. It is all that can be real – all else is a memory of time past, or an anticipation of time future; and these are only dreams. The world of speculation is empty, as empty as the idea of a self. The one end is only present; it is all that is real.

Happy New Year!

No one to blame

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I’m always a bit skeptical when people talk about the increasing interest in Buddhism and the numbers of people appreciating the dharma and turning to meditation. It’s like the first week of a romance. When you first fall in love with someone—even if that person has purple hair and all kinds of what we call “extraordinary embellishments”—there’s just the feeling of love. You don’t see the blemishes; you see only the good things.

Yes, meditation and being calm and peaceful and loving, and generating compassion and doing good for others, and being more aware—these are all very good! But in the initial romantic stage, you may be looking through rose-tinted glasses. After that, you will see the hard work involved, hard work that will be done by nobody but you. This is why interest in Buddhism increases at first and then dips—and this dip is steep, because hard work will never make Buddhism very popular.

Moreover, Buddhism is the only philosophy that doesn’t have anyone to ascribe blame to but oneself for what’s wrong. Nor is there anyone but oneself responsible for producing what is good. To be put on the spot like this is not always seen as favorable by the human mind. Our cultures, social upbringing, and the design of our world condition us to hold some person or people or circumstance responsible for our situation. We have politicians to blame; we have God and the prophets, religious masters, and original sin to blame. We have many things to blame, including karma. It is very difficult to come to the point at which you see that blame is not actually logical—that everything depends on you, yourself.

Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, writing in Tricycle Magazine

Every so often I find myself longing to be able to hand over the responsibility for walking this path to someone else – divine or human – who could absolve me of the weight of all this moral, intentional, intellectual hard work. A religion would be such a comfort. And yet…

The longer I seem to be able to try to follow this way, the less it does seem to be someone’s responsibility, either mine or God’s. Yes, as Khandro Rinpoche says here, there is no one else; but responsibility, in the sense of being the one to make it work? It’s inevitable that the ego, the left-brained, thinking self, will want to take responsibility, absent someone else to lean on – but the “executive self” can’t do it, can’t even see that there is a path. Only by keeping still, by watching to see what happens – of itself – can the busy little mind be persuaded to give up. Giving the whole process names, and hence regulations, is the root of the religious impulse itself, it seems to me.

I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t going through some kind of unseen spiritual revolution at the moment. Yes, the great religions appear to be flourishing – except when they’re not –  and the purveyors of slick solutions appear to thrive, but under the radar a good deal of quiet, hidden, patient practice seems to be going on. It’s invidious to draw direct parallels, but I am often reminded of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; not in their asceticism, but in their rejection of compromise and expedience in favour of interior silence and continual practice. Who knows where this is going? But that doesn’t matter – where it is going is just the flow of the stream in its bed; this is not the time for dreams and plans, but for emptiness and quiet.

Outside the window as I write this it is dark, but pinpoints of light from the road, and across the yard by the old reservoir, prick the blackness. At this distance they can’t be seen to illuminate anything, but the little lights are there in their own brightness. It seems very still. There is nothing to do but watch.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness, with thanks to What’s Here Now

To sit still in winter

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Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter Solstice, a day variously to reflect on the past year, to celebrate the season’s turning from darkness towards the light of the coming summer, and to draw together in the warmth we humans have learned to make against the long cold. It is tempting to locate its origins in the Last Glacial Maximum, when our ancestors must have been so acutely aware of their fragility in the face of the huge weight of time and climate that bore down on them, and sought with such longing for an assurance of this turning season.

Today is also the day the United Nations has set aside as World Meditation Day, celebrated for the first time this year. (Jochen Weber, writing for the Secular Buddhist Network, has an excellent and well-linked reflection on their website.)

Meditation, as far as we can tell from historical research, has been practised in something like its present form for at least 5000 years; the Winter Solstice has been celebrated, in ways we can recognise, at Neolithic sites like Newgrange and Slieve Gullion for roughly the same length of time.

To sit still in winter, to wait for the season’s turning, to watch for the coming of the light, must be one of the deepest instincts of humanity, going far back into the beginnings of our species, perhaps even of our old, old relatives from before we modern humans appeared. Sitting in my warm, lamplit room this evening I felt for a moment part of all this, no different from the long succession of humankind whose DNA still sings in my own blood; and something in me was thankful, in a way I hadn’t imagined, for warmth and life, and for the sweet succession of generations of women and men who have watched, just as I do, for the light.

Threads

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This question is proving interesting, and difficult. I resolve to pursue it night and day. I have a go – asking myself from time to time, in the midst of ordinary life, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’

As I get used to the exercise, the response settles down to a pattern. I usually find several things; several candidates for things I might have been conscious of a moment ago. Sounds are the easiest bet. They hang on. They take time. When I light upon them, they always seem to have been going on for some time, and it feels as though I have been conscious of them. There is the sound of the cars outside in the distance. There’s the ticking of the clock. There’s the beating of my own heart. And then – oh goodness me – how could I have ignored that. There’s my breath. Surely I have been watching my breath, haven’t I?

Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness

I’m sure that, in a sense, this is a familiar enough experience for most of us: to suddenly become aware, in the midst of practice, especially, of an ongoing sound – a clock chiming, a cat purring (both examples from Blackmore’s book) – coupled with the realisation that it has been going on for some time already. But when? When did we become aware? At the first stroke of the clock? Or when we noticed it, say at four strokes? If it was the former, why hadn’t it been the focus of the conscious mind? If the latter, what was going on before we noticed?

There is no answer, says [Daniel] Dennett. There is simply no way in which one could ever tell. Looking inside the brain won’t tell you, for the signals were being processed in the relevant bits of brain whichever way you describe it, and asking the person won’t tell you because she doesn’t know either. So it’s a difference that makes no difference. And what should we do with a difference that makes no difference? Forget it; accept that there is no answer to the question ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’ Can that really be right? …

[W]hen I look, I can find at least one, and often many, threads of things that I might have been conscious of a moment ago but which seem to have had no connection with each other. Who then was conscious of them? Surely someone was because they have that quality of having been listened to, having been stared at, having been felt or smelt or tasted – by someone. Was it me? Unless there were several mes at once, then no. Or is it that I am split up in reverse; that going backwards I can find lots of routes to the past? This is how it seems. Threads is the right word. From any point – from any now – I can look back and find these myriad threads. They feel perfectly real. They feel as though I was listening to that blackbird’s song, that drone of traffic, that distant hammering somewhere up the hill, the purring cat beside me. But each one has this peculiar quality…

I can go round and round, starting with the middle of the view out there, working in carefully towards myself in the centre, and there I find only the same old view, to start all over again. How did that happen? I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. It’s a familiar enough trick, but easily forgotten. Look for the viewing self and find only the view. I am, it seems, the world I see.

Blackmore, ibid.

That, of course, is the crux of all this, the unimaginable but undeniable Istigkeit that we always try not to see: there is no self remembering, no inner seamstress patterning the threads. There is the living loveliness of just what is, nothing more. What is arises of itself, comes to be because that is what it is. Light strikes the water, sparkling instants. Mind perceives. Thoughts think themselves. Everything is as it is, acts according to itself. What else could it be? There is only what is, clear and pure as a raindrop on the window of – what? – mind? Only what is. That is all there is.

Invisible

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For a long time, since in fact before I formed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards being somehow invisible among my peers. And of course, over the years, my contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising. All this tends inevitably towards the eremitic.

As I have said here before, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; perhaps even for the commitment of active membership in some political or social movement. This may seem austere to a detached observer, but it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, as it were. It may even be a necessary discipline.

Oddly enough, I can’t seem to detach this eremitical instinct from an acute sense of the moral necessity of equality. It has never made sense to me that – often in religious just as much as in political contexts – some people were disadvantaged, often for reasons over which they had no control themselves, compared to their fellows. That the fact that someone was a woman, or Black, or poor, or gay, would have anything to do with the opportunities life presented has increasingly seemed to me morally obscene. In an interview with Andrew Copson, published in the recent What I Believe collection from Humanists UK, Kate Pickett says,

I’m always quite impressed by the way Quakers talk about it, they have a testimony towards equality. I think that’s the way I think about it as well. People get a bit bent out of shape when they talk about equality, saying things like: ‘We can never have equality, and can never truly be equal, it’s utopian.’ And to a certain extent, that’s true, but we can have more equality. And we can work towards reducing inequality gaps in various aspects. So we can think about working towards reducing gender pay gaps, for example, and that’s improving equality. And even if we don’t get to exactly the same level, then we’re still making progress.

Organisations – even sometimes the Quakers! – have inequality gaps. It’s inevitable: the mere organising of people into structural groupings has this effect. Maybe the radical inward equality imposed by the contemplative life cries out against even this; perhaps that is why the longing for stillness and solitude seems somehow to include a longing for equality?

Certainly this instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.