“The zero on which all other numbers depend”

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

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

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

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

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

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homily 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

On prayer

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The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mountains and rivers remain

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Should spiritual people avoid politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT of the world,” or “We are uniters, not dividers.” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would shut up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

Should spiritual people embrace politics? Some of my friends say things like, “We are supposed to be in the world, but NOT be worldly,” or “What use is spirituality if it is not engaged?” Agreed.  They might state, “I wish that spiritual people would speak up when it comes to politics.” Perhaps.

And I wrote about shutting up or speaking up here. And Henry Shukman, a Zen teacher, quotes the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu from the eighth century:

“The nation is shattered. Mountains and rivers remain.”

Things are volatile in the relative realm of apparent separation, but they are unchanged in the Absolute realm. In The Way, I wrote, “I find that I live a better life when I live as if there is a Oneness, as if we are supposed to bring our understanding of the Absolute world, which is Oneness, to our relative world, which can seem disconnected and divided.”

Larry Jordan

Larry  Jordan – who describes himself as “a follower of Jesus with a Zen practice” – is making a point very similar to Joan Tollifson’s, which I quoted the other day, where she wrote,

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

Mountains and rivers do remain. As Steven Pinker points out, no human, and no point in human history, stands alone. We are all part of an evolutionary current; as Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It is easy to forget. We are so readily, especially at times like the present, drawn into polarised positions, swayed by shouts of “Pick a side!”, that we lose sight of not only our indissoluble common humanity, but the metaphysical oneness of things, Being (Eckhart Tolle), the Tao, Rigpa.

Only be still, be quiet. The flickering passage of thought and emotion is no different to the impressions of the senses, the sound of the jackdaws settling into their roost in the old water tower, the rustle of tyres on the road at the end of the garden.

Out of stillness arises, quite by itself, what is needful. I nearly said, “what needs to be done”, but maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. Now is all that is real; if it contains doing, so be it. That will be doing, but in stillness. Like Chuang Tzu’s Cook Ding, following things as they are, we do what is needful without resistance. But only in stillness, only in quiet, can the way open, just as it is.

Inseparable

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

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

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

Awakening is collective because we’re not separate.

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

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

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

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

The Ocean is waving us.

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

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

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

—

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Hopeless? originally published on September 13, 2021]

In the way

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In her recent Substack essay, ‘Is Spirituality an Escape?‘, Joan Tollifson writes:

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

So, all of this was swirling around. Round and round goes the mind. The body contracts and tightens. Feelings of anger and judgment arise, and I seem to lose touch with love and joy.

But then, miracle of miracles, I stop and sit quietly and simply feel the open, spacious aliveness and presence of this one bottomless moment here and now. And the whole conundrum disappears. And I know in my heart without a doubt that this openness, this stillness, is the deepest truth. It is where I want to come from, and what I want to communicate, this possibility of peace and unconditional love that is always right here, at once boundless and most intimate.

These are, to say the least, difficult and puzzling times. The merest glance at the headlines will suffice to demonstrate that, and to demonstrate the further fact that the media, almost without exception, have a perfectly understandable commercial interest in keeping our hearts in our mouths. In the face of massively publicised and widespread cruelty and injustice, violence and deceit, it is increasingly hard to avoid the current zeitgeist of taking sides, adopting entrenched positions, and demonising the “opposition”.

This jarring sense of disconnection between the contemplative life and the activist’s “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” is something that has troubled me for many years, as it has been troubling Tollifson and so many of her fellow Americans. But it is nothing new, I fear.

Simon Barrington-Ward wrote of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him.

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practiced this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness…

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am no longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

(The Jesus Prayer, of which Bishop Simon is writing here, is of course the central practice of hesychasm, the great mystical tradition within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, centred on cultivating inner stillness (Greek: hesychia) and uninterrupted communion with God. It was the central practice, too, of my own Christian contemplative years.)

Again in the Christian tradition, Karen Karper Fredette and Paul Fredette write, in Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life (p.213):

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and the Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening. We cannot, either by the force of our own will, or by the eloquence of our pleading, bring about the healing for which we long. And yet, like the Fredettes, and like the hesychasts of Mount Athos during the Second World War, we know beyond words or reasoning that our calling matters – far more, perhaps. than anything else we could do.

In the Tao Te Ching (51) we read:

The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

Antinomian?

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Antinomianism (Ancient Greek: ἀντί [anti] ‘against’ and νόμος [nomos] ‘law’) is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms (Latin: mores), or is at least considered to do so. The term has both religious and secular meanings…

The distinction between antinomian and other Christian takes on moral law is that antinomians believe that obedience to the law is motivated by an internal principle flowing from belief rather than from any external compulsion, devotion, or need.

Wikipedia

All human beings have a constitution which suffers when it sees the suffering of others . . . If people catch sight suddenly of a child about to fall into a well, they will all experience a feeling of alarm and distress . . . Because we all have these feelings in ourselves, let us develop them, and the result will be like the blaze that is kindled from a small flame, or the spring in full spate that starts with a trickle. Let these feelings have a free rein, and they will be enough to give shelter and love to us all.

Mengzhi (c. 371 – c. 289 BC)

A commenter on a recent post of mine suggested that membership of some kind of religious organisation (albeit a non-dogmatic one like The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)) might be a necessary defence against “isolation, individualism, even a form of antinomianism.”

This set me thinking. As I have said often enough on this blog, I am more than happy with what some might feel to be isolation; I am, I suppose, some sort of individualist, and always have been; but antinomian? Well, yes, perhaps – guilty as charged, I guess. One of the problems I have had all my life with religious systems and their organisations has been their insistence on adherence to some kind of law, some sort of list of dos and don’ts, of things to believe and beliefs to assent to, rather than reliance upon inner transformation, or simply upon straightforward ethical thinking.

Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson, in The Little Book of Humanism, p. 94:

Considering others is fundamental to our biology. But there’s always room for improvement. We can get better at being good people by thinking about what being good really means, reflecting on the needs of others and ourselves.

Humanists don’t believe in any supernatural source of commands or rules for being good. Instead, humanists hold that we need to think for ourselves about what sort of person we want to be and about the consequences of our actions.

Even people who say they’re taking their morals from religious authority, sacred doctrines or holy books mostly have a very selective approach to this – carefully choosing parts that chime with what they already believe to be moral and ignoring other parts. So, they’re not really learning moral lessons from scripture – rather, imposing their own morals on those archaic texts.

And this seems to me the key point: however much we may ascribe our being good to evolutionary biology’s drive to intraspecific cooperation, to what I called “inner transformation” (really, just the inevitable effect of mindfulness on one’s own unthinking selfishness), or to Scripture, it is actually no more than common sense: thinking through the consequences of our own actions in the light of the needs of others and of ourselves, and doing it thoroughly enough that it becomes second nature.

If this is antinomianism, and it rather looks as though by any accepted definition it is, then sign me up! The contemplative path cannot but be pathless; in itself it is a deeply moral thing to realise our intrinsic emptiness of a separated self; to add to it a layer of doctrines and strictures, from whatever source, seems to me like the gilding of lilies. Leave me the open ground, and the loveliness of the wild flowers, and I will take the risk – if risk it be – of wandering where there is no circumscription, no metalled road.

A pathless land

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Jiddu Krishnamurti, in his famous speech dissolving the Order of the Star in the East – the organisation formed by the Theosophical Society to prepare the world for the arrival of a reputed messianic entity, the World Teacher or Maitreya – spoke as follows (this is a short extract from a much  longer speech):

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others…

When you look for an authority to lead you to spirituality, you are bound automatically to build an organization around that authority. By the very creation of that organization, which, you think, will help this authority to lead you to spirituality, you are held in a cage.

I first read these words of Krishnamurti’s more than fifty years ago. It seems to have taken me most of those fifty years to take them to heart.

For whatever reasons of upbringing or character, I have been reluctant to trust myself, even to trust that I had truly encountered the moments of insight that have brought me beyond the self; that seem to have occurred periodically throughout my life. They have occurred more reliably the more reliably I have practiced stillness and quiet; but they have occurred regardless, even in the times I have felt most lost.

As a result, I have for most of my life sought an organisation, if not to lead me to spirituality, then at least to validate the spirituality I have come to know for myself. As Krishnamurti saw so clearly, when he was still a young man, it doesn’t work. What’s more, much as I now dislike organised religion of any sort, it isn’t fair to the local expressions of religious organisations for someone like me to mix himself up in them. Inevitably one finds oneself in various positions of responsibility, and then, in extricating oneself, letting people down.

The pathless land of which Krishnamurti spoke is found most clearly in choiceless awareness; as he said himself:

This journey I am proposing that we take together is not to the moon or even to the stars. The distance to the stars is much less than the distance within ourselves. The discovery of ourselves is endless, and it requires constant inquiry, a perception which is total, an awareness in which there is no choice. This journey is really an opening of the door to the individual in his relationship with the world.

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Madras, 7th Public Talk, December 13, 1959 Collected Works, Vol. XI

It’s difficult, sometimes, to try and explain what one is about when one talks of choiceless awareness. I have been writing this blog for five years now; Krishnamurti spent nearly his whole life travelling and speaking, albeit with far more to say than I have. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most concise, practical summary is Toni Bernhard’s. Perhaps I should leave it at that:

[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself… Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

What’s love got to do with it?

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In All About Love, bell hooks writes (p.239):

Love heals. When we are wounded in the place where we would know love, it is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything. No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way. We go forward with the fresh insight that the past can no longer hurt us. Or if our past was one in which we were loved, we know that no matter the occasional presence of suffering in our lives we will return always to remembered calm and bliss. Mindful remembering lets us put the broken bits and pieces of our hearts together again. This is the way healing begins.

But to open our hearts to love… It seems so impossible when, as bell hooks writes, we are wounded in the very place where we would know love, the place where we had opened in trust, only to receive hurt. To remember would seem to be the worst counsel, when all we were wanted merely to run, to hide from the shame of having trusted.

And yet what seemed a refuge turned out to be nothing more than a place apart from ourselves, a place without. The protection we had sought was the door locked against becoming healed.

To remember mindfulness itself is to remember love: to remember the blue distance and the scent of the sea; the movement of wind in the cedars, amber beads against the grey bark.

Remembering what is, just as it is; instead of forgetting in the search for something else, always something else. Only now is it possible, only in this now. This one, now.

It may not make sense, but in now the past is healed. Remembering is different now. In the open stillness, what was was only what is seemed to be at the time; and what is is now.

Ordinary lives in quiet places

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Eve Baker, in Paths in Solitude:

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery…

But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

We need sometimes, I think, to remind ourselves of our uselessness. The end of the contemplative life – in the sense of purpose – is not a thing we achieve, not even a destination we arrive at.

Sandy Boucher (Tricycle Magazine, December 2017):

We share the physical elements and so much else with other beings; our lives are dependent on the conditions prevailing in our environment. This is being nobody special. How do we recognize and surrender to this without thought of image, achievement, comparison? Maurine Stuart advised, “All the simple, ordinary, everyday things we do—walking, cleaning, sitting—are ways to deeply penetrate this.”

So we become the true person without rank, the primordial person, who simply walks, eats, shits, works, sleeps, loves. We see that even the fully awakened condition that we call enlightenment or liberation, even this is not special but as inconsequential as a grain of sand. To be fully awake is the normal human condition. It expresses the deepest truth of our nature, our oneness with the energy of the universe. We meditate and study and practice to penetrate into, or relax into, this awareness.

As contemplatives, we are not here to lead anything. Most of us are not even here to teach anything to anyone. We are here to live our ordinary lives in quiet places. Our solitude is so often a merely interior solitude, so that we cannot even claim the romantic status of some kind of hermit.

Here we are, unremarkable, at the edge of the mystery. The endless ground lies open before us, and we walk down to the nearest shop with our little bag, and our comfortable old shoes. This is all we are; our little sisters and brothers the sparrows chirp to us from the hedge, and the rain is coming on, again.

Sky gazing

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Occasionally, throughout my life, I have found myself gazing into the open sky, vast, unbounded; and I lying beneath, like an ant at the bottom of a measureless funnel of bright air.

The first time I can remember was at the age of five, lying on an old rug in the orchard at the back of our house, recovering from a long illness. (I have written more of this in the introduction to this blog.) The blue vault of the sky stretched over me, seemingly limitless, threaded by the distant sparkling motes, high overhead, of aircraft heading out over the English Channel towards Europe.

There were other, less striking occasions during my teens and twenties; it did not come again, recognisably, until some time in my thirties, lying – once again in an orchard! – with friends late at night at an isolated farmhouse near Poitiers in central France, far from any human lights, gazing up at the Milky Way stretching far into the interstellar distances, sparkling with uncountable stars. The sense of self and place, the voices of my companions, the night sounds of insects and owls, all fell away. I was alone in a timeless immeasurable distance; only I was not. All there was was light; light beyond light, without place or end or source.

It was many years again before I stumbled across the fact that in Dzogchen there is a long-established practice actually known as “Sky-gazing” (Tögal), which delineates, in typically precise Tibetan fashion, exactly what had been happening to me on these occasions. (See also Matthieu Ricard, p.93ff)

It isn’t necessary to lie out under the open sky – though it is beautiful and profoundly healing when it can be done – but merely to gaze up into the interior of one’s vision (usually, I find, with closed eyes), or even into a patch of sky glimpsed through a window, Thoughts, sensations, dream states (hypnogogia) will inevitably occur, but they can safely be allowed to pass. All that is necessary is to lie still.

A barking dog. Green leaves dancing in the sunlight. The listening silence. Open. Vast. Limitless. Just this!

This is not like anything else. It is as it is. How is it? It’s not any particular way for it is always changing…

The real message is what remains after the ink has vanished. But if you are looking to see what that is, you will never find it, for you are looking for an object. Presence is not an object. It is the openness that beholds it all.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp, p.34