Tag Archives: awakening

Otherness

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In my last post, I mentioned my sense that in situations of what I called transcendent powerlessness we can touch – or be touched by – something electric and quite beyond ourselves. In that post I wrote,

…something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else…

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

What is happening here? Throughout the years philosophers, from the ancient Taoists to Spinoza, have found themselves unable to avoid treating the necessity of what could otherwise seem raw causality with something close to personification.

There is something undifferentiated and yet complete.
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless.
It depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25 (tr. Chan)

God is the Determiner (but not a Planner): God/Nature is the immanent (indwelling) and necessary cause of all things. God doesn’t stand outside the world creating and planning by free will, like the personal, transcendent God of traditional religion. Instead, the order and regularity of the universe—the natural laws—are God’s nature.

Google Gemini, in conversation with the author on “Spinoza’s Determinism and God”

In contemplative practice one may occasionally find the sense that, in the sheer powerlessness of sitting still, something breaks through that Dzogchen practitioners would call Rigpa, “the ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself.” (Stephen Batchelor). Somehow this is always unsought – you cannot bring it about, and trying is entirely counterproductive.

Of course the parallel immediately appears here with the traditional Catholic concept of infused contemplation – “…a state that can be prepared for, but cannot in any way be produced by the will or desire of a person through methods or ascetical practices” (Burke & Bartunek).

As I wrote yesterday, there is nothing here but grace. One can go so far in faithful practice, in preparedness and in waiting, but no farther. Even Spinoza wrote of the “intellectual love of God”, his term for the highest spiritual attainment, as intuitive rather than rational. I think we experience the ground of being, especially when encountered unawares, as so profoundly “other” because its immanence and necessity are so far from our own state as one of the “ten thousand things” (Laozi); and yet we are not other. We did not plan our birth: our very existence rests in the ground itself – we are from being itself, and that by sheer grace.

Powerless

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Learning to navigate life’s changing nature from center is one of the gifts of endarkenment (to commit to turning toward rather than away from physical and symbolic darkness and to learn to perceive with the heart—beyond unconscious bias and hierarchical perception). Change invites us to affirm our participation with life beyond the isolating, but seemingly sheltered, visible security. With reverence toward the divine darkness, we can learn to meet our human experience of change with openness rather than fear. We can learn to surrender to rather than resist the groundlessness of change. We can learn to lean into the changing nature of existence, realizing the freedom that arises from not knowing and realizing we do not have to fear the unknown.

Deborah Eden Tull, in an extract from her book Luminous Darkness, published in Tricycle Magazine, August 2025

One of the most striking encounters with powerlessness that many of us have had to navigate was the recent pandemic, Nick Cave: “Suddenly, there was an extraordinary sense of relief, a sort of wave washing through me, a kind of euphoria, but also something more than that – a crazy energy. A sense of potential, maybe? Yes, but true potential. Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something.”

There are many ways to understand this odd experience. There have been other times in my life, too, when I have lost for a time – for all I knew, forever – the ability to choose my own course. (I think particularly when I suffered what the press describe as a “life-changing accident”, and had to face the prospect of losing my career, my home – a farmhouse that came with the job – and all sense of security in an instant.) And I experienced Nick Cave’s strange sense of immense, electric potential; there was a genuine exhilaration, a quality of being right at the nexus of change. Anything could happen, anything could be lost; and somehow there was nothing to fear, however frightened I was.

Perhaps this sort of thing lies at the root of the old quip about there being no atheists in foxholes. Of course those in imminent danger of death don’t suddenly acquire a full-featured evangelical faith, but something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else.

We are back with the odd intersection of semantics with experience. A committed Christian at the time, I experienced an immediate sense of the nearness of God; a Buddhist like Deborah Eden Tull might find something different again. The spiritual landscape within which we live, the words that come with the tradition we occupy: these things condition our very experience, and yet the truth of what each of us encounters is the same. It has to be, if it is real.

Perhaps it’s in these extreme situations – pandemics, near-fatal accidents, instants of loss and devastation, that we can suddenly see clearly, if we are open enough, in a way that has at least something in common with the fruit of years of contemplative practice. It was during an intense spiritual and psychological crisis, coming at the climax of years of anxiety and suicidal depression, that Eckhart Tolle had the encounter with terror and surrender that changed in an instant the course of his life, and led him to spend the next few years externally lost and homeless, yet radiant within, trying to work out what had happened to him. (See the Introduction to The Power of Now)

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

Contemplative practice is a far safer path; and yet, strangely, the apparently uneventful years of faithful practice can crystallise in a moment, providing a cradle of unsought meaning to hold the instant of transcendent powerlessness. In that moment of acceptance, just as in a crisis met with surrender, there is nothing left but grace.

Changes

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Suffering is, by its nature, the primary mechanism of change… It somehow presents us with the opportunity to transform into something else, something different, hopefully something better… This change is not something we necessarily seek out; rather, change is often brought to bear upon us, through a shattering or annihilation of our former selves.

Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, p.165

‘Changes’ was a song performed by a long lost band of mine, The Society of the Walking Wounded, and written by our frontman, my best friend Malcolm Long. Malcolm died well over thirty years ago; I still miss him, meet him again in dreams, think of him almost daily.

“Change and decay in all around I see…” in the words of the old hymn. And yet change and ending and decay are necessary for transformation, indispensable for new life. We are frail and temporary creatures, all of us who love, and live. Grief is as inevitable as death itself, and inextricable from love.

The contemplative way is as much a way of understanding this as it is a way of liberation. It is often thought of as liberation from suffering; I would differ. Whatever may be said about the perils of attachment,  truly to love is to know that grieving is as much a part of it as joy; on the contemplative path one learns that not only is it so, but that it is right that it should be so. As Nick Cave points out, suffering is the primary engine of change; life itself is change; suffering is essential to life.

This is not unkind or harsh; the path teaches us that it is not to be fought, or raged against: death is as normal and ultimately beneficial as the fall of leaves in autumn – they are falling fast here now – and in its way as beautiful. The grace of change is being itself, and lies in the hollow of the open ground like a hazel dormouse in her nest of leaves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?