Open awareness

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I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats, The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763

Slowly it is being borne in upon me that open awareness is not so much a state of mind among other states of mind, but mind itself. Forgive me if I quote here again a summary of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, but it may help to refresh our minds:

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, response to user query, November 9 2025)

What I referred to the other day as “our normal everyday consciousness” is Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge: limited, conditional and conditioned, irredeemably self-centred. The second kind of knowledge is the one we employ in thinking things through, whether how to hang wallpaper straight or the ontological argument – Keats’ “irritable reaching after fact and reason”. But the third kind is a leap into something entirely different.

The third kind of knowledge is direct seeing; and in my experience, just sitting, simply aware of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight and presence, you begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.

This is not a matter of academic philosophy  – in any case I have no formal training in that field at all – but of plain observation. Open awareness is an overarching presence, awareness itself, objectless and unconditioned. Within awareness itself things appear – the “ten thousand things” of the Taoists, the Śūnyatā of the Mahayana Buddhists, Spinoza’s modes – but open awareness, that holds and gives rise to them all, is no thing. It merely is.

Awake awareness

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Awake awareness has been described as the “groundless ground,” or the foundation out of which all phenomena rise and dissolve back into again and again. It’s a big idea, but it can be explored in manageable pieces. Developed in Tibet more than one thousand years ago and used by advanced meditators, the practice of resting in awake awareness has recently become more widely accessible through the teachings of [psychologist and Dzogchen meditation teacher Daniel] Brown and others. It differs from the well-known practice of mindfulness by involving a key shift in the state of awareness. The practitioner learns to release from thought and the sense of being an individual who is meditating, and learns to become part of a more subtle level of awareness that is not separate from self and that is everywhere. 

Imagine the ocean. Instead of identifying with the waves on the surface, which are like our thoughts that come and go, you can cultivate a calmer mind by sinking below the waves. You can open the experience of the mind to become the ocean itself. This subtle level of awareness, known as awake awareness, is limitless and boundless. It is lucid, calm, still, and has the quality of love.

When people learn to drop into the field of awake awareness consistently, or even just periodically, their relationship to this field allows them to develop basic trust in themselves and in life, even when they did not have a childhood that helped to establish trust…

Radhule Weininger, Deep Trust: Finding Our Footing in a Turbulent World, Tricycle Magazine, August 2022

Simple awareness is not in any way the same as our normal everyday consciousness, nor even a subset of it. Awareness, as Weininger points out, is an overarching presence, “limitless and boundless, and has the quality of love.” Being not separated – nondual, as it’s often described – it is “not separate from self, and… is everywhere.”

To “drop into the field of awake awareness” allows us to glimpse the underlying oneness of all things and events – modes as Spinoza calls them – and to cease trying to choose between them, to choose otherwise. In other words, to avoid the patterns of attachment and rejection before they begin.

In Buddhist and other contemplative traditions, one sometimes encounters the sense of three levels of mind: ordinary conditioned consciousness, mindfulness (attention to the present) and rigpa, awake (or open) awareness as Radhule Weininger describes above. It is not the same as, but somehow resonant with, Baruch Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge:

Spinoza’s 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, response to user query, November 9 2025)

To sit in open, choiceless awareness, in the plain light of what is, is in itself an act of radical trust. To let go of our cherished discrimination, our sense of ourselves as separate isolated selves sending messages to each other across a gap of disconnection instead of loving, is to realise all of a piece that there is nowhere else to be than the “groundess ground” from which all things arise. And that is uttermost trust in the “interconnected unfolding” (Weininger, ibid.) that is life, and death, itself.

What is awareness?

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Sitting quietly, it becomes apparent that awareness is not the same thing at all as thought. It’s not the same as physical sensations, either. Thoughts and sensations are objects within awareness; things seen, perhaps, against stillness. Awareness is no thing; it can’t be the object of any subject whatever, it seems.

Try it. Try merely being aware of awareness. (It’s much the same as Sam Harris’ introduction to the practice of Dzogchen – “looking for the one who is looking”.) You will find that there is no self to look, nor a self to be looked for, There is only awareness – and that is, after all, no thing.

To sit like this, merely aware – of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight sitting – you might begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.

This seems to be a big metaphysical bite; but it is not to be chewed, not to be thought through. Leave the thoughts where they fall. Sit in plain awareness, and all the mind’s anxious grasping will eventually fall away like leaves in autumn. The bright field of awareness is all that is; in fact, it really is all that is. Time and place, things and thoughts, are all simply ripples on that bright surface, nothing else.

Sit still. Be quiet. There is nothing you need. Let the bright field be your only home; it is, anyway.

Ground and network (republished)

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Merlin Sheldrake, in his book Entangled Life, discusses the way all life, on this planet at least, seems to be underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks (which is facilitated by the wider international academic and commercial scientific community), “It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you.” (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)

Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a “thing” over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don’t continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, competition between organisms (Sheldrake, op cit., pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.

For a long time now, Paul Tillich’s understanding of God as “Ground of Being”, beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (Theology of Culture, p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in Systematic Theology refers to God as Ground of Being as “Being-itself” – a concept which has always seemed to me very close to Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, “isness”.

This sense of the ground’s relation to “things” in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of.

Simon Cross writes, in one of his Weekday Meditations,

It’s extraordinary how quickly time moves, and with it, understanding of our world. Only in recent years have we come to recognise that apparently ‘non sentient’ forms of life are not only sentient, but apparently social too. Trees have been shown to communicate with one another, to share resources with one another, and to be interdependent in ways that were hitherto unimaginable. Or perhaps – imaginable, but impossible to demonstrate.

With this growing recognition that the world around us is alive in ways that we hadn’t realised, has come a renewed interest in the panpsychism, an idea that has its roots in centuries old philosophy which suggested that consciousness exists beyond ‘just’ the animal kingdom. Panpsychists think that consciousness of some sort may exist at a molecular level, which, when you come to think of it is pretty mind blowing. Although given the subject matter, that seems like exactly the wrong term, or perhaps exactly the right one.

Now, I don’t know anything much about panpsychism as a philosophy of mind, but it has been suggested that the concept of Buddha-nature may in some Buddhist traditions be interpreted as implying a form of panpsychism. Dōgen Zenji, the importer into Japan of the Sōtō Zen school, wrote:

Therefore, the very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest is the Buddha nature. The very impermanency of men and things, body and mind, is the Buddha nature. Nature and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are the Buddha nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha nature.

This impermanence, the dependence of things for their origin, one upon another, is surely the very place where we fall to the ground of all that is, or seems to be.

“Everything passes; everything changes; just do what you think you should do.” (Bob Dylan, ‘To Ramona’) Perhaps somehow we can be still enough to know.

[I came across this post, first published back in 2021, and thought it might be worth republishing it here.]

Godless?

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At this point in my life, I think there isn’t a god or Higher Being out there 100% of the time. My renouncement of God is too fresh, and a major reason I felt relief at my unbelief was the end of the cognitive dissonance I experienced for so long. I don’t think of the universe as a god-substitute, somehow working with will and intention to bring people and opportunities our way. I truly believe that no one is in charge anywhere out there in the background of our lives.

Yet I considered the label “Christian atheist”… not because I do and don’t believe in God, but because I feel like I am an atheistic cultural Christian, akin to a secular Jewish person. Because I continue to be culturally involved in Christianity while I attend church with my family and socialize with predominantly religious friends. I still enjoy discussing (picking apart) the Bible, and I enjoy debating spiritual theories. I like this approach because as I laid out earlier, Christianity created me. The foundation of my life was centered around Christ. It greatly contributed (for better or for worse) to so much of my essence—my values, my morality, my language, my behavior, my tastes, my sexuality, my life choices.

Sarah Henn Hayward, Giving Up God, p.155

Although for most of the middle years of my life I would have called myself a contemplative Christian of one kind or another, I never really shared Sarah Henn Hayward’s sense of being a cultural Christian. I grew up as the child of a single parent, outside of any formal religion. My mother, a painter and sculptor, was an early example of someone who might today refer to themselves as spiritual, but not religious; and while most of my twenties were spent trying to find some kind of spiritual compass, the last place I thought of looking was within the Christian faith. Most of the time my adult friends were not Christian – some were militantly atheist – and I was rarely entirely at home in a church milieu.

Nevertheless, since my own “giving up God” experience over the last five years, I have experienced something of the tension Hayward describes. Like her, I found Christian language had become “infused into the air I breathed” (ibid. p.156), and it has been difficult at times to live without it. Appropriating another religious language from a culture far removed from my own would not have helped – long ago I discovered that, intricate and finely honed as it was, Buddhist language and iconography didn’t really  do it for me. Inevitably I do find I borrow technical terminology here and there, but that live electricity of a sacred poetry deeply embedded in my own culture is lacking.

The language of scientific materialism, while I tend to agree with many, if not most, of its conclusions, doesn’t do very well when it comes to the  phenomenology of spirituality. It is probably best left to those who use it in their daily work; in any case, stretched too far, it begins to sound like pseudoscience, after the manner of Deepak Chopra or JZ Knight.

To muddle on, as I have done over the last few years, occasionally using the word “God” in Paul Tillich’s sense of the ground of being, or Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, occasionally repurposing bits of Scripture, occasionally filching Buddhist or Taoist phrases to use out of context, seems to be the best I can do; although even academic philosophers often seem to find themselves reinventing language to suit their own formal requirements – Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work comes to mind, not to mention Spinoza’s Euclidian complexities in his Ethics. In any case, I have no formal philosophical training whatsoever; and moreover, I usually find myself distrusting academic philosophy when applied to spiritual intuitions.

Perhaps I am doing the best I can. Certainly over the last year or so I have become more comfortable with what I can’t do in terms of language. I know that my writing can verge on the incoherent, but at least I feel as though I’m beginning to be able to say what I mean, to put words to what David Jones so memorably called “the actually loved and known”.

The freedom of the elbow

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Again and again, I find liberation in the very places I thought it was not—in brokenness and imperfection, disappointment and disillusionment, limitation and death, failure and darkness, unresolvability and uncertainty, groundlessness and everything falling apart. This is “the freedom of the elbow not bending backwards,” as they say in Zen. Of course, the elbow can’t bend backwards without breaking. So this is not the freedom to do what I want, but the freedom to be as I am, and the freedom for everything to be as it is, which is no way and every way, and never the same way twice. This is the freedom of nothing to grasp…

For me, the never-ending, always Now, pathless path of awakening boils down to simply being awake, being present, being truly alive—seeing the beauty in everything, living in gratitude and devotion, enjoying the dance of life, being just this moment, not knowing what anything is, clinging to nothing, recognizing—not in the head, but in the heart—that everything belongs, that nothing persists, that every moment is fresh and new.

Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, pp.262,263

While human actions are completely determined, Spinoza introduces a notion of human freedom that is compatible with determinism:

  • True Freedom is Understanding: Freedom isn’t the ability to choose against causes (free will), but the ability to understand the necessary causes that determine us.
  • Activity vs. Passivity: A person is passive when they are determined by external causes and inadequate ideas (passions).
  • A person becomes active and more free when they act from adequate ideas (reason) and understand that they are part of the necessary order of God/Nature. This intellectual understanding leads to the highest state: the intellectual love of God (Amor Dei Intellectualis).

(Google Gemini, response to user query, October 2025)

The flow of becoming, the stream, the Tao, is what it is. What comes to be in our frail and transient lives is only the result of causes far beyond our understanding, and leads on to effects we cannot know. What we can do is pay attention to the grace of the tiny, beautiful things among which we live: the endless sparkling of the wavelets of the stream.

Freedom is to know, all-of-a-piece, that what we are is nothing other than the stream itself, and that the stream runs in the course of what merely is: the ground itself. But how?

As Joan Tollisfson says, the path of awakening comes down to being awake: just that. The only way I know to be awake is practice; simply watching what happens, watching what becomes as it is becoming, is the only way. It is so simple, so perfectly simple; and yet it is the hardest work I’ve known. To be aware, without choosing an object, is the purest kind of attention; and yet it is like holding a bare wire.

Only sit still, in quiet. Don’t seek anything – watch. Live quietly, in obscurity, as Epicurus advised, and just watch. There is nothing else to do.

Succession and substance

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The stream is nothing less than the sparkling surface of becoming. For us, I suppose, it is time, since we are transient waves on the motion of what is coming to be; and we can only see what has been – which we call life, or the past.

To come to an end of knowing, to a place where reason and observation fail us, is the beginning of what Spinoza called the Third Kind of Knowledge: direct perception of what is, as a necessary, unique expression of the immediate activity of the stream (God, the Tao). In that we are the locus of seeing, the inevitable awareness in which things come to be what they are.

For me it is in simply sitting still that we come to see the glittering light from the wavelets on the swift skin of the stream itself. We are each no more than that, but beautiful; and able to love, each in our lift and fall on the running stream. Nothing is lost. The stream goes on, and each wavelet cannot be other than the stream itself.

Is it possible?

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Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?

Noelle Oxenhandler, What Is the Shape of My Life?, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2025

To sit with this question, simply as it is, may be not unfamiliar when applied to the breath, to the sitting body, to the sounds outside, or to the sunlight on a blank wall or closed eyelids. But it is less familiar when turned, as Oxenhandler does here, to oneself. It is a strange and disorienting practice, with a dzogchen quality, like a wordless pointing-out instruction, about it somewhere. Something appears like a bright skein on the velvety dark of the stream, a shape of purling water, nothing else.

Recently I have found myself drawn into just such a practice. It is not something I choose. It rises up through the usual pattern of unbidden thoughts, and asks for space at least to be, like a map drawn on glass. There is nothing dramatic about it, no sense of “my life flashed before my eyes” – and yet it is there, a kind of Tube map of a lifetime, glittering behind closed eyelids. The least attention, and a pattern enlarges, a stream of cause and effect reveals itself, and is – what? – forgiven? Something like that. An act, yet again, of grace, anyway. There is no judgement here, no impulse to improve anything. It just is as Noelle Oxenhandler suggests (ibid.):

[T]hrough the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own… life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

On the map beneath the glass there is nothing even to heal. The lines and stops stand out against the dark, and my breath comes and goes. There is no story here, just a pattern in the quiet. Nothing to conclude. The bright pattern stands against silence, as it is.

[First published 20/11/2025]

Vastness

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…[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…

We look back into the emptiness that is the creative source of all stories and emotions, into the formless fertile space that gives rise to all of existence. There, we “see the universe as it is.”…

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, pp.315-317

Vastness is an experience, if that is the right word, that most of us only encounter looking up at the night sky on a clear night, or perhaps gazing out across the ocean when the sea is glassy calm, and seems to extend beyond the rim of the world. But there is an interior vastness that opens directly on the ground of being itself, no-thing, the endless expanse before differentiation, before “thingness” ever was.

Silence itself leads us in the end to what merely is. Only in inward silence can we see out across the shore of our own unquiet sea. If we will only sit still and be quiet, the peaks and troughs of our fears and our longings will settle out; and then, perhaps, the way will open across the water. But we must wait, we must be still and want nothing. Only when we are at an end of ourselves can we receive the grace that comes in silence, in the stillness that lies behind our breath, behind the little sounds from beyond the window, behind our having been born. For it is grace. All we can achieve is the letting go, nothing more. The best we can  do is to get out of our own way, for the fundamental ground is always there, patient, immeasurable, without beginning. We have only to trust, to let go without assurance, drop ourselves, into the empty stillness that is always waiting for us, always there.

[First published 18/11/2025]

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]