Keeping it simple

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Remember that thoughts are only the product of the momentary confluence of a great number of factors. In themselves they do not exist. Thus, the moment they arise, recognize that their nature is emptiness. They will immediately lose their power to produce other thoughts, and the chain of illusion will be broken. Recognize the emptiness of thoughts and let them relax into the natural clarity of the transparent and unaltered mind.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, quoted by Mathieu Ricard in The Art of Meditation

In my last post I wrote of the conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know to becoming vulnerable and available to illumination, to open objectless awareness.

The obstacle, of course, is the incessant passage of thoughts through the mind – a stream which of course we cannot halt, since they are in this context no more than noise thrown off by the machinery of the conscious mind. But mere recognition will loosen their grip on our attention; and as Dilgo Khyentse points out, they will fall away of themselves from the awakening mind.

Simplicity, poverty of intent, remains at the heart of practice for me. The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm (contemplative practice based on the Jesus Prayer) 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. But really, faithfully and regularly sitting still – whether formally, as in shikantaza, or just resting for a moment on the way – is all that is needed in the end.

Silence and language

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Even in silence, the linguistic apparatus of our brain continues in the background wash of thought. Even when we avoid the incessant temptation to follow, to identify with thoughts as they arise, we know they are there, spinning their webs of language in the corners of our awareness like spiders in the corners of the window frame.

We can attend to our breathing, to our proprioception, to the sensations of our body resting where it rests; but the thoughts with their language continue as before. What if we were to use the linguistic yearnings of our mind in our contemplative practice itself?

Stephanie Paulsell: “Contemplation… [i]t’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God… There are these things… reading, meditation, prayer… you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift…”

And then there are the prayers of repetition, acting almost as a semantic container for presence, a way of using the mind’s own hunger for language as a route to silence.

True contemplative silence is no more than resting in the objectless awareness that lies at the end of words. And Stephanie Paulsell is right – it is a gift – one that no intention, no act of will can secure. But we can remain still; it seems that, for me at least, stillness is the central thing “you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available”.

All of practice comes down to stillness in the end; and it is only in stillness that words can finally settle out like sediment in the troubled pond of thought, to leave the steady light of what is in the unobscured clarity of awareness.

Freedom!

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Abbot Christopher Jamison writes:

The first Christian monks and nuns were inspired by the example of St Antony. They lived in the deserts of the Middle East in the fourth and fifthccenturies and became known as the desert fathers and mothers, living in loose associations and gradually founding more structured monasteries. The wisest of them acquired the title abba for men and amma for women, meaning father and mother respectively, which later become abbot and abbess… They did not use the language of freedom, a language that has come to dominate modern discourse. Their central concern was purity of heart, which we might describe as freedom of spirit…

The desert fathers compared purity of heart to the target that a javelin thrower aimed at in the ancient games; a small target may be difficult to hit but it can be done and the effort required draws out the best from the thrower. So purity of heart describes the condition of human beings at their best, when the human capacity for love finds complete expression devoid of any selfish thought. To arrive at this state of being is demanding because human beings are continually tempted to behave selfishly, but the example of many saints shows that it can be done.

Finding Happiness: A monk’s guide to life, Christopher Jamison

So freedom of spirit is found in freedom from identifying with the thoughts of the self – in laying down the self as the centre of experience. Heidegger’s sense of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) from our manipulative human wilfulness then leads to contemplative openness to the mystery of Being (Sein).

But so much of the time we do identify with our self-centred patterns of thought – with the “self” on which our thought is centred – and become entangled once again. We miss the target…

Now, in the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” that last word gives pause to many who see it, in the context of too many clumsy sermons, in a narrowly moralistic light. But the Greek – the Jesus Prayer developed among those early desert monastics of whom Abbot Christopher writes, and was first written down and disseminated in Greek – word is αμαρτωλόν (harmartolón), and αμαρτωλόν carries the sense of “to forfeit by missing the mark”. For the Desert Mothers and Fathers, sin was just that, missing the target of purity of heart, of freedom of spirit; it is not in any direct sense somehow “transgressing a list of naughty-things-to-be-avoided”.

We slip so easily into self-identifying thoughts; freedom of spirit consists in freedom from this self-identification. Note, though, that it is not freedom from thoughts themselves. We can do little about those – they seem to be often no more than artifacts that the brain throws off in its everyday functioning – but we can learn not to identify with them, And that is what practice is for.

About being awake

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Oddly enough, I do mean just being awake, now; not planning to wake up, not undertaking to awaken after sufficient steps (hours, certifications) have been acquired.

Joan Tollifson, writing in Exploring What Is:

The kind of spirituality that interests me is not about a belief system or a philosophy. It’s about being awake Here / Now—seeing through the imaginary problem that we think is binding us and realizing the boundless freedom that is our ever-present True Nature. This realization is not something that happens once-and-for-all. It’s not an event in the past or the future. Awakening is always NOW.

When I talk about meditation, I’m not talking about some methodical practice where you repeat a mantra, visualize a deity, label your thoughts, or try very hard to keep your attention focused on the breath. I’m not opposed to those practices if they are of interest to you, but what I’m talking about is something much more open, a way of being that is without control or manipulation. I’m talking about being awake, being present in this moment (this ever-present Now) in an open way that is at once relaxed and alert—allowing everything to be as it is, not grasping or resisting anything, not trying to change anything—simply being.

Meditation is a kind of open inquiry into the living reality Here / Now—not opposing anything, not trying to achieve anything. There is no method in this approach, no set of instructions to follow. It is a pathless path, an open discovery, ever-fresh, ever-new. In Zen, the only instruction you may get in the beginning is to just sit down and see what happens.

Can you hear the bird singing, cheep-cheep-cheep? And the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the traffic? The sound of the airplane passing overhead? Can you feel the breathing and all the different sensations throughout the body? Can you see the thoughts that pop up, the headlines they deliver, the stories they tell, the conclusions they assert? Can you sense the spaciousness of the listening presence, the awareness, that you are? Is it possible right now to be awake to this whole undivided happening just as it is?

True meditation can happen on the city bus while riding to work or in a waiting room before an appointment. It can happen while stuck in a traffic jam or while sitting quietly at home in an armchair. It can happen on an airplane or on a park bench. It can happen while walking through nature or while walking through the city. It can happen in your kitchen or in a prison cell, in a hospital bed or at the office. It can happen with eyes open or closed, in the lotus position or stretched out in a recliner, in solitude or in the midst of a crowd. It can happen in formal meditation or it can happen spontaneously and unexpectedly while drinking a cup of coffee or sitting at a stop light. It can be a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours—it is outside of time. It is always Now.

Formal (i.e. deliberate, intentional) meditation, if you strip away all the whistles and bells that often get added on, is nothing more or less than a kind of simplified space where we stop all our usual activity (all the talking and doing) and simply be here. We put down the books and magazines, the smart phones and tablets, we turn off the TV and the computer and the music, and we sit quietly doing nothing. Simply being this awake presence, this present happening. By slowing things down and stripping away all that typically demands our attention, energy can gather Here / Now in bare presence and awareness. We begin to notice the ever-changing non-conceptual happening of this moment in ever more subtle ways—the sounds of traffic, the sensations in the body, the smell of rain, the breathing, the chirping of a bird. We may begin to actually feel the spaciousness and the fluidity of what’s here before we think about it. And we may notice that every sound, every color and shape, every sensation, every thought, every breath appears Here / Now in this vast unbound space of awareness.

This is just what I mean when I so often say that all that is needed is to keep still. It is Heidegger’s “openness to Being”, Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit; the essence of both the mystical and the philosphical understanding of Gelassenheit. In other words, just sitting still. The “vast unbound state of awareness” is not a thing to achieve, an accomplishment of some kind. It is no thing: it is always there, now. If it made any sense (it doesn’t) to ascribe to it intentionality, you could say it is “always waiting to reveal itself”. I would want to say that it is, now; and that we merely miss it, always thinking, as we do, of then.

What is it? If I may be permitted to use nouns (they’re not really the right things, but we’ll have to do our best with what we have) then it is the ground of being itself, open, dimensionless, before space or time, before extent or becoming: Istigkeit (Huxley) – that which solely is.

The trouble with all these words, of course, is that helpful though they set out to be, they actually obscure as much as they illuminate. The only illumination is Now; present, but without duration. Oh, do just sit still – it will explain itself.

All it comes down to

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All that practice comes down to, in the end, is acceptance: that open stillness that listens to the unsaid, watches quietly for the opening of the undifferentiated ground beneath all that is, the Istigkeit that is no thing, but Being itself.

What Spinoza called “intuitive knowledge” (see Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, p.30) is only this: the releasement of grasping – the surrender of the idea of the separate self – that is reached directly in choiceless awareness.

There is nothing else, really. The house of peace (Heidegger’s Wohnen) is no less than this: to let go of all striving: to accept, finally, one’s oneness with the simple, undifferentiated ground. Sitting still, the door just opens of itself, that’s all.

Being still

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To remain still is one of the fundamental conditions of contemplative practice, and yet it is also one of its fruits. Many of us will remember how hard it was to stay still as children, even –  maybe especially – when we were explicitly told to. And yet I found that when I as a child had no choice but to remain still, the effect of that simple action – or lack of action – had effects that remain with me to this day.

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought but fertile with becoming.

Mathieu Ricard writes (The Art of Meditation, p.93):

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no independent and permanent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as empty of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself. Once this essential idea has been understood and assimilated, our erroneous perception of our ego and our world gives way to an accurate view of the nature of things and beings – wisdom. Wisdom is not a simple intellectual construction or a compilation of information. It arises from a precise methodology that allows us progressively to eliminate mental blindness and the afflictive emotions that derive from it and, in that way, free us from the principal cause of suffering.

So long as we act in the world from our own will and desire, our own imagined, illusory sense of what is real, the emptiness of forms (“independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena”) will be invisible to us. It is only when we keep still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be will become clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest.

It seems to me that, short of illness or some other unsought but somehow accepted immobility, stillness can only be found in some kind of practice; as far as I am concerned, the simpler the better. Choiceless awareness – just sitting, shikantaza – or the steady releasement of Gelassenheit, are the ways that open themselves to me; gateways into silence and stillness so plain and simple that anyone can use them, regardless of skill or training. All that is needed is regularity and time – faithfulness, if you will – given to the simplest practice, for the “vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being” (Tara Brach) to open around us.

Breath

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The breath we have always with us, as long as we live.

It takes no skill, no technique, no memory to return to the breath. It is gentle. It does not judge. It stays close no matter what we do.

Turn back to the breath. That is all that’s needed; and you will find that within is stillness, silence, the endless healing of what is.

A vast and shining presence

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Silence and stillness sometimes seem as though they are, or should be, the same thing – but, as Leigh Anderson of the Spiritual Naturalist Society points out, this is not quite so in the contemplative life:

Silence in meditation transcends the mere absence of external sound. It represents an internal quietude, an expansive space where the mind’s constant chatter diminishes to mere whispers. This pursuit of silence is, in essence, a battle against our intrinsic human nature — a nature that fills every moment of potential stillness with relentless thought. The path to internal silence is fraught with challenges, as our minds are wired to think, analyze, and incessantly chatter. Yet, the rewards of cultivating this form of silence are profound, offering mental clarity, emotional equilibrium, and a profound connection to the present moment that feels deeply rooted and unshakable.

On the flip side of the meditative coin lies stillness — not merely the absence of physical motion but a deep mental repose where inner agitation dissolves. Within the realm of stillness, we discover the ability to observe our thoughts and emotions without judgment, to exist in the present moment without the compulsion to act. This stillness isn’t merely an end goal but a gateway; it opens us up to deeper introspection, fostering an environment where heightened awareness and profound insights can flourish.

In Quaker usage, silence – the context of meeting for worship – is always acknowledged to be more, and often other, than an absence of words. Birdsong, the traffic outside, Friends shifting slightly in their seats, breathing, voices in the street – these are all drawn into the silence of meeting, and become part of its fabric; and so it is in one’s own solitary practice. Extraneous sounds are not interruptions; they are an integral element in the silence itself.

Stillness, though, is an inevitably inward place. Ultimately, it is not other than objectless awareness, the second part of Martin Heidegger’s definition of Gelassenheit: “an openness to mystery”.

I was standing at a busy crossroads waiting for lights to change. Traffic was racing by, people buzzing back and forth; noise and fumes, action, restlessness, rush, impatience, thoughts, demands. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt my whole existence pause. I looked to see whether the green man was showing yet, followed by the pressurizing countdown of seconds allowed to cross the junction, people crossing over each other. But I felt strangely calm and quiet. I felt “otherness” deep within, a stillness, and my whole life shifted into the present.

Joanna Godfrey Wood, In Search of Stillness, p.13

Within stillness, all that obscures awareness seems to settle out, like the sediment in a disturbed pond when it is left in peace again. Just as the small sounds within and without a Quaker meeting house do not interrupt the silence but become woven into it, so passing thoughts and images, and physical sensations, merely become part of the nature of stillness itself. Tara Brach:

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.

Radical Acceptance, p.317

“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.