Tag Archives: awakening

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.

Mysterium Tremendum

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It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

In a sense, meditation does just this, in small, repeatable doses, if we have the resolve to sit through what seem at the time to be dark places.  We are out of our depth, conclusively – and it can be all too easy to draw back, reflexively, like drawing back one’s hand from an electric shock. If we can sit it out, literally, then we may receive one of the greatest  gifts of our practice.

Just last week, I quoted Eckhart Tolle. I make no apologies for repeating the passage here, since what he says fits so precisely:

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

As Rohr suggests in Immortal Diamond, this may be why initiation rites have traditionally mimicked dying, and why so much of the language of traditional monastic spirituality used the terminology of dying to self, and rising to God. But we are once again at the thin edges of language here, and what actually happens is not in the least metaphorical.

As Rohr suggests, actually to encounter the metaphysical ground is not an experience (if that is even the right word for it) that it is possible to take lightly. It is overwhelming, in every sense of the  word, not least in the way that volition, self-determination, self-anything, are swept away in what simply is. And yet, and yet – where else could one ever hope for?

The nature of silence

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In Larry Rosenberg’s new book, he writes:

There are many ways to quiet ourselves, all of which are valuable. There’s a silence that comes from reading a book filled with magnificent ideas. There’s a silence in seeing beauty in any form—in nature, taking a swim in the ocean or a walk in the woods, or just being in solitude. But I’m talking about a measureless kind of silence that grows out of the practice. You could say it’s the heart of the practice because the deepest essence of our innermost being is silence.

This silence is shy. You can’t find it through the intellect. You can’t reach it with your emotions. In fact, you can’t search for it—the search itself would cause stirrings, movements, vexation. You can’t order it, expecting to receive silence by command. That would be like commanding love—we all know you can’t force love into existence. Silence likes humility, gentleness, innocence. It likes to be valued for itself. Thought goes into abeyance gently, gracefully, peacefully, without a struggle, without any bloodshed…

This silence is not a rarified experience. Stillness or silence or emptiness is not reserved for mystics who live high up in the Himalayas, wear loincloths, eat one grain of rice a day, sit cross-legged for weeks while freezing cold, or stand on one leg for ten years. It’s part of the human constitution.

The emptiness I’m talking about is not dead; it’s not a vacuity. When the mind gets silent, you’re tapping into the energy of the universe. Though we’re part of the universe, we typically just receive it in little drips—drip, drip, drip, like a faucet that’s not fully turned on. When we let go of who we think we are—all the notions, concepts, images, and delusions—we channel the energy that animates the whole universe. Silence is an energy that’s packed with life. It’s highly charged.

Larry Rosenberg, in an extract from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness, published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2025

I’ve often written of silence on this blog, but Larry Rosenberg’s words here seemed to say something I’ve been trying to say for a long time, and probably failing to capture. Silence, the silence of spiritual practice that is so intimately connected with stillness, is not the absence of noise.  It thrives on the presence of background sounds, whether gentle and quiet like the wind in the tall trees behind the garden, or rather less so, like the occasional sirens from the main road – which are actually not all that occasional, since we live near a major hospital. It will grow quite happily, as I wrote the other day, in an airport departure lounge.

No, shy though the silence of the heart seems to be, it is actually a thing of greater power than we’d imagine. In this long extract published in Tricycle Magazine, Rosenberg goes on:

Silence is what spiritual life is about, at least this version of it. Behind all the commotion of our lives there is an unfathomable silence accompanied by unlimited space—an endless dimension. We’re psychonauts, whether we know it or not. Ours is an inner orbit. The Tibetans put it plainly: the cognizing power of emptiness. In silence, there’s an awakening of a kind of intelligence. Great healing, the most important healing, occurs in silence. In silence you find you’re more compassionate, wiser. All the metta, or loving-kindness, you could ever want is in silence.

The longer I go on with the contemplative life, the more obvious it seems to me that what actually happens in the silence is that our apparent separation from the ground, from the source of being itself, falls away. Separation is an illusion anyway, less substantial than moon-shadows on a cloudy night. We are not ever separated from the ground – else how could we exist? – but our enserfment to the useful illusion of our everyday life in consensus reality makes it seem as though we are. Just to sit still in open awareness allows the mind’s illusions to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond, until the clear presence can be seen for itself, the ground of all that is.

Vast, empty

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So it’s more about the recognition that the “me” who seems to be “doing” all of this [living and practice] is a mirage. It’s ALL a movement of this undivided whole. The vastness has space for everything, and it clings to nothing. It is open, playful and free. Free to wear robes and free not to wear them. Even free to feel contracted, encapsulated and separate. Whatever comes will eventually go. And if the mind starts looking for what doesn’t come and go, anything it finds will be another object, another imagination. That is what Toni [Packer, leading a retreat] was pointing out. And the objects can get very subtle in nature.

One of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, said, “Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.”

Joan Tollifson

Choiceless awareness is like this. It is not a specialised technique for meditation, nor a philosophical position, though it can be taken for either of those. I’m not sure – and this is the difficulty so many people have (myself included) when they first encounter the term in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s writings. What, exactly, are we being asked to do?

It has taken a long time, but gradually I have come to realise that just sitting, only that, aware not only of breathing, and the body resting in space, feeling what it feels, hearing what it hears, but also being aware of thoughts as they arise, and of the emotions and bodily states that can accompany them (fear, desire, wonder, grief…) as they well up and fade away, is nothing other than the vastness of which Joan Tollifson writes so movingly. Allowing it all, the empty awareness is itself the open ground, being-itself, Istigkeit.

But it isn’t something we do. That’s what is so difficult to explain. In stillness, it happens. As Tollifson writes (op. cit.), “And, of course, ‘we’ aren’t doing any of this. It is all happening by itself. Ever-fresh. Ungraspable.” It does happen all by itself. It always has. Just watch.

One small room

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You need one small room for yourself. This is very true: when you can really find yourself in a small room, then there is you yourself, and the whole universe is there, and the whole universe makes sense to you. Without your one small room, the whole universe doesn’t make any sense. So what you need now is a small room, and what you will need after your death is a small stone. That is the actual reality, which is always true for everyone.

Shunryu Suzuki, Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life p.32

I have grown increasingly to love my own small room. It has become soaked, somehow, at least in my own feelings, with the hours I have  spent there, and the changes I have seen in myself and in the seasons – in the years now, in fact – the trees growing and changing, generations of blackbirds coming and going across the lawn.

Strangely, though, I’ve also come to notice that the room travels with me. If I am aware enough of where I am, of the light moving across the floor, my own breathing in its little tides and intervals, then my own little room can be in a hotel, even a train seat or in an airport among all the other displaced travellers who wait with me, Stillness isn’t a thing you need to find so much as that you just need to step into, opening the  door and closing it behind you gently.

Perhaps the strangest thing I have found is that this small room of stillness is there, almost clearer and almost more precious somehow, in those times when the usual patterns of volition, of self-determination, seem to be lost, and whatever baneful thing is in the air has, finally, hit the fan.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

Suzuki’s paradoxical remark about the universe begins to make sense. It is within now, as Tolle himself says, that what is is all there is. For once, we have dropped into the stillness that has lain beneath all that has come to be, and is beneath all that is becoming now. All the myriad contrivances of thought have dropped away; what is left is no thing – it is the ground itself, bright and unending.

Umwelten again, but cleansed

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The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species’ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it. For example, around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the water and adapting to life on land. In open air, these pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer distances than they could in water. The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and strategic thinking  Instead of simply reacting to whatever was directly in front of them, they could be proactive. By seeing farther, they could think ahead. As their Umwelten expanded, so did their minds.

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Senses always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli [heat, touch and scent]. “However, the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, pp.7-8

When Aldous Huxley wrote his astonishing 1954 study of the effects of psychedelics on the human mind, The Doors of Perception, he pointed out that the human brain and nervous system, in their normal configuration, function so as “to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the ‘Mind at Large’.” Under the influence of mescaline, however, the “miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” becomes apparent, unfiltered, just as it is.

Now of course this is not an escape from the sensory component of the human Umwelt – we are still constrained by the information our senses can respond to (mescaline cannot enable us to see in ultraviolet, or accurately to sense the earth’s magnetic field) – but it is at least a partial escape from the functional processing of that information stream that presents us with the familiar, usable world of the everyday. As Huxley himself pointed out, it is possible to perceive directly Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the untrammelled isness of things, the being-itself that our minds dissect in order to construct our daily lives; in itself, it is, as William Blake remarked, infinite: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Absent hare-brained theories of medieval magic mushroom culture, Eckhart was not under the influence of psychedelics. The contemplative technology of unenclosing humankind has millennia of research and development behind it, and as texts like The Cloud of Unknowing reveal, it was highly developed in at least some strands of medieval European monasticism.  To see things as they are to our unedited senses – through our own cleansed Umwelt – is as basic a human ability as breathing; only most of us have forgotten how. As Eckhart Tolle points out in our own time,

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

The Power of Now, p.63

Waves and the ocean

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…[T]hink of the vast ocean. There are waves that are catastrophic, there are little ripples, there is water crashing on the shore, but it’s all unquestionably ocean. The ocean is whole. I think this is one of the reasons humans love to look at the ocean: somehow the usual sense of “me” and “that” dissolves naturally. There’s still some kind of subject-object sensibility there, but it softens. And there’s something about that that we as a species fall in love with. We love that vastness, and there’s actually a very deep yearning for it. [We’re] nourished by the experience of wholeness.

Anne C Klein, Tricycle Magazine, August 2023

It is hard even to write of these things without sounding slightly silly, but somehow the image of waves and the ocean has, for as long as I can remember, had for me this sense not only of wholeness, but of ultimate security. The wave cannot fall out of the ocean; however much “subject-object sensibility” it manages to retain, it remains water. The awareness with which we are aware – of sense impressions, thoughts, emotions, whatever, even when we are asleep and dreaming – is the awareness within which all appearances arise.

To be still, listening, beside the open ocean, is all it takes; then our fretful wavelets still for a moment, if only between one breath and another, and we can sense the non-differentiation of Istigkeit, the unending of no thing. We are not other than what is.

Losses

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We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.

And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.

Maria Popova

I have long felt that losses, not only the losses inherent in mortality, but the little everyday losses that go with being human and alive – the loss of times past, of old haunts one may never revisit because they are not the same any more, the loss of old lovers, of once treasured possessions, of whole phases of life that cannot now be relived – are no more and no less than the fabric of meaning itself. They are the juicy realities that life is actually about, just as much as the joys of being alive and the wonders of illumination.

Richard Norman, in his excellent new book What is Humanism For?, quotes Martin Hägglund:

Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal. … The question of what I ought to do with my life – a question that is at issue in everything I do – presupposes that I understand my life to be finite. … If I believed that my life would last forever, I could never take my life to be at stake and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.

One loss we can never avoid is that of our own life, sooner or later; for many people this is in itself an appalling prospect, and yet it may be in the end the only thing that makes life – our one and finite life – worth living. Death, as I’ve written elsewhere, is no enemy, but the truest friend we have:

Death is an old friend. To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing: what is there to fear? Death follows us, yes, but he is our own death; dear, familiar, kind, and faithful.

Perhaps it is good to make friends with death for ourselves: to greet him first thing in the morning, say goodnight; check in with him when we wake during the night. He won’t be asleep.

Not knowing

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In order to explore different dimensions of not knowing, we have to establish and cultivate a willingness to put aside what we may think we already know—about ourselves, the world, Buddhism, or dharma practice—to really engage with what we don’t know.

Consider the range of views you may have about dharma practice, or about Buddhism, for example. There could be a religious view: one that attempts to describe reality, and maybe gives us codes of behavior for how to be in that reality. You may or may not subscribe to a religious view of Buddhism.

There’s a philosophical view that attempts to understand reality rather than simply describe it. A philosophical way of knowing about Buddhism, for example, is replete with ideas: those many lists of the eightfold path, the five precepts, or the four noble truths. In all the ways we can find those views helpful, or illuminating, they can also just reinforce a knowing about, a knowledge-based view, or a philosophical view.

The self-help view of Buddhism, which may be the way many of us have first engaged with dharma practice, is designed to offer a better way to cope with reality, rather than trying to merely describe or even understand reality. In this view, one hopes to put aside some of their confusions, neuroses, and difficulties. You hope to cultivate certain mental and emotional skills, so as to better meet the life around you, the people around you, the world around you, and the world within you.

There’s also what we could call a liberation view that—in addition to describing reality, understanding reality, and better coping with reality—points us to that capacity to fully merge with reality and to know a freeness as we navigate through reality. On the one hand, liberation view is about this one, brief, lifetime, and on the other hand, it’s also about the immensity of consciousness, of awareness, and the knowing of all time and space as being available right here.

This “right-here-ness” is the open doorway, a portal to fully meeting reality. We can access a living engagement with right here through our capacity to not know. To put aside the familiar, the well-worn, the conceptual, and the habitual, and instead engage with the immediate, the mysterious, the constantly surprising, and the conceptually ungraspable.

Martin Aylward, ‘Why We Should Turn Towards Mystery’, Tricycle Magazine, February 2023

To live quietly, away from the maelstrom of news and rumour, paranoia and opinion that seems to constitute social and public media, appears to me to be the best ground for cultivating the mystery. Practice, silence and stillness flourish in these long, quiet days of my retirement; but they can too in moments of quiet in a busy life – on the bus, perhaps, or sitting alone in a city square during lunch hour.

Lewis Richmond writes of the early days of the recent pandemic,

As terrible as that period was, I did notice that it resembled certain qualities of the monastic life with which I was familiar. There were few distractions. Life was simple; we got up, made our meals, dusted and cleaned, and sat after dinner in silence together without much distraction. We didn’t watch TV. We discovered that that enforced quiet was paradoxically the most genuine way to be connected with the world, which was living through the same angst that we were.

For me too, this was a strangely fruitful time. (You can read something of my own experience here.) Connection to the world does not require connection to the firehose of the media; it merely requires the deep awareness of the mystery of being, the unknowability of life itself – the curious realisation that however close one may grow to another person, their own inner world is forever theirs, and you can only know of it what they choose to share, or what you can yourself deduce, nothing more. And yet this existential aloneness is the community we share; it is what it is to be human.

These are things that can only be found in stillness and waiting. Our long hours of practice are nothing more than this; they are no more like the bright awareness beneath all phenomena than soil is like the flowers of the hebe bush, but they are just as necessary.

Einklammerung

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At its core, the epoché (from the Greek word meaning “suspension”) refers to the act of suspending or “bracketing” all judgments and assumptions about the world. This suspension is not about doubting the existence of things, but rather about setting aside all preconceptions, biases, and taken-for-granted beliefs. In other words, it is the process of withholding judgment about the nature of the external world to focus on pure experience itself.

For Husserl, the purpose of epoché is to return to a more original, direct experience of phenomena, where the subjective and the objective are not yet split. By “bracketing” or suspending the natural attitude—the everyday way we engage with the world based on assumptions—we can get to the essence of our experiences, as they appear to consciousness, unmediated by theoretical frameworks or prejudices.

Epoché in Phenomenology: Husserl’s Method of Suspension

Einklammerung, bracketing, epoché – is Western phenomenology’s version of the Heart Sutra‘s “Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form”, perhaps. For Edmund Husserl the act of bracketing was not an intellectual curiosity, it was a means to what he called “transcendental consciousness” or “pure consciousness” – something very close to the Dzogchen concept of Rigpa, “the pristine awareness of the fundamental ground itself.” (Wikipedia)

Once we have performed the epoché, we are no longer tied to the particularities of the world. Instead, we can see the world as it is constituted by our consciousness. For Husserl, this is a profound insight, as it reveals that the world is not something external and independent but is, in some sense, dependent on consciousness for its very existence. The epoché uncovers the transcendental nature of experience, which has profound implications for how we understand reality and our place within it.

Epoché in Phenomenology (above)

Western philosophy is prone to run aground on the shoals of terminology and syntax. The simplicity of just sitting, in plain awareness of the moment’s breath, of the sounds beyond the window, the movement of the air, without naming them, without distinguishing them as objects or processes or implications – the Einklammerung happens all by itself, without struggle or willpower; just in the mere being there, in showing up, no more and no less, morning and evening, and sitting there, in stillness. Nothing else.