Tag Archives: awakening

Wide-eyed seeing

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Contemplation allows us to see the truth of things in their wholeness. It is a mental discipline and gift that detaches us, even neurologically, from our addiction to our habitual way of thinking and from our minds which like to think they are in control. We stop believing our little binary mind (which strips things down to two choices and then usually identifies with one of them) and begin to recognize the inadequacy of that limited way of knowing reality. In fact, a binary mind is a recipe for superficiality, if not silliness. Only the contemplative, or the deeply intuitive, can start venturing out into much broader and more open-ended horizons. This is probably why Einstein said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination  encircles the world.”

But how do we learn this contemplative mind, this deep, mysterious, and life-giving way of seeing, of being with, reality? Why does it not come naturally to us? Actually, it does come momentarily, in states of great love and great suffering, but such wide-eyed seeing normally does not last. We return quickly to dualistic analysis and use our judgments to retake control. A prayer practice—contemplation—is simply a way of maintaining the fruits of great love and great suffering over the long haul and in different situations. And that takes a lot of practice—in fact, our whole life becomes one continual practice. 

Richard Rohr,  Why Contemplation?

That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? Wide-eyed seeing – the necessity of awakening from the daze of subject/object, inward/outward. As I mentioned the other week, trauma – and the shock of love – can free us, instantly, from the fog of the default internal narrative, the user illusion of the “selfplex” (Blackmore) that occupies our days. But the moment fades; we can even begin to doubt it ever happened – or if it did, that it meant what it seemed to mean in the blazing moment that we were there, present for once, in the utter light of what actually is.

As Rohr says, our contemplative practice is only the way – the only way – that we can sustain ourselves in the presence: in the vastness of the open ground. It will not feel like that most of the time – in fact, it may hardly ever feel like that – but each day’s hour of sitting sustains us in the unknowing from which this wide-eyed seeing can proceed. This unknowing is the hollow place in us where, as in the moments of shock and trauma, what is can touch what we are. It is the crack where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen saw.

Against fear

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Everything that is comes to be because of a combination of causes. When the causes and conditions are sufficient, the body is present. When the causes and conditions are not sufficient, the body is absent. The same is true of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, mind; form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and so on. This may seem abstract, but it is possible for all of us to have a deep understanding of it. You have to know the true nature of dying to understand the true nature of living. If you don’t understand death, you don’t understand life.

The teaching of the Buddha relieves us of suffering. The basis of suffering is ignorance about the true nature of self and of the world around you. When you don’t understand, you are afraid, and your fear brings you much suffering. That is why the offering of nonfear is the best kind of gift you can give, to yourself and to anyone else.

Thich Nhat Hanh, from Tricycle Magazine, February 2025

We, and all we perceive – from ants to oceans to galaxy clusters – are contingent. Nothing exists of itself, from itself: everything that is depends upon something else, upon prior conditions, preceding events… We soft walking things, and the farthest stars, are no more than brief appearances born of brief appearances; on the face of – what? The physicist might say, “spacetime” – but then concede that spacetime itself depends upon prior conditions.

All we can say is that things exist; that they’re frail, temporary appearances, but they are. Isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, is the only ground of their appearing. “[It] is before all things, and in [it] all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17) The ground of being is just that: it is no thing, and it is the ground of all that comes to be. There is nowhere else to go, no end to the beginning. I sometimes have to call it love.

Under the hood

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The Socratic Question, ‘What sort of person should I be?’ – and its variants, ‘What kind of life should I lead?’ ‘What values shall I live by?’ ‘What shall I aim for?’ – asks any reflective person, at any point in life, to pause and consider what really matters, and as far as practically possible to live according to the answers. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus pointed out that a person might be struck by the force of this Socratic challenge even in the last hours of advanced old age, and at that moment ‘begin’, as he put it, ‘to be wise’. It is never too late.

It might strain optimism to think that a philosophy of life could be arrived at early, in the sense that a youth might consider Socrates’ question, come to a decision, and thereafter live in conformity with that decision. Yet although it is never too late to consider one’s philosophy of life, neither is it ever too soon.

AC Grayling, Philosophy and Life: Exploring the Great Questions of How to Live

As I’ve mentioned here before, I came to my interest in philosophy very young – probably between the ages of 14 and 15 – during an extended spell in hospital. I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me then to frame my growing interest in terms of the Socratic Question as explained by Grayling in the quote above; but I was acutely conscious of a need to find out for myself what went on under life’s engine cover. There must, I was certain, be something that made it all go, some intrinsic power or energy behind everything; something that made sense of my earlier – for want of a better term – mystical experiences as a child recovering from a long illness. Academic philosophy, I soon discovered, was not the way to find out.

This longing to look “under the hood” – AKA metaphysical inquiry – has stayed with me all my life. It was the reason for my early interest in Buddhism and Taoism; for my tentative experiments with psychedelics. It was the reason I turned for some years to writing poetry. It was most certainly what drew me – apart from the felt need for a context, and a justification, for practice – to religion; and, paradoxically perhaps, it is what – out of a need to remain close to my own inner experience – has led me out of formal religion altogether.

My life has perhaps been a sequence of beginning again. Some might see this – as I have myself, often enough – as indecisiveness, or even faithlessness. But actually it has been, I now see, anything but either of those things; it has been a process of trying to be true to what I have actually encountered in practice – in stillness, in looking under the outward appearance of things, under the surface of my own apprehensions.

Now that I am getting close to the age of Epictetus’ imaginary example, I am just beginning to realise that just beginning is the necessary condition of insight. I first read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind many years ago; it seems to have taken me more than fifty years to start to get a handle on what the title means. Now, perhaps, I have learnt to sit still.

Sometimes the darkness…

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I know that many people are feeling worried, anxious and unsettled these days. The world can be a scary place, and human beings are fragile organisms, vulnerable to all kinds of pain and painful circumstances. We naturally seek security, comfort and control, and in search of this, we often turn to addictive pleasures, comforting beliefs and obsessive thinking, none of which really deliver the well-being and the certainty for which we long…

Sometimes it eludes us and the darkness overtakes us, but if we stop and allow everything to be just as it is, if we tune in to the stillness at the very heart of our being, our apparently separate self may dissolve into the boundless aware presence that we truly are. We may discover that the “me” who seems to be suffering, or alternately “getting it” and “losing it,” is nothing more than a mirage, and that the darkness has no actual substance…

We can get very lost in trying to figure this all out mentally, trying to understand it, grasp it, get control of it, and so on. But the essence of this so-called awakening is very, very, very simple. It’s not complicated, mysterious or exotic. It doesn’t require years of training and study. It’s not in the future or the past.

It’s right here in the sounds of rain, the taste of tea, the dazzling light sparkling on the still bare branches, the aware presence beholding it all, the openness of being. It’s nothing other than this one bottomless, centerless moment that is what we are, this wholeness that has no outside or inside, this presence that is most intimate, closer than close, and at the same time, boundless and all-inclusive…

Perhaps this is what the world needs more than anything else—human beings waking up from the powerful hypnotic trance of ideology, division and apparent separation, waking up to the wholeness and the unconditional love that is at the heart of our being. It may seem that we are small and insignificant, and that this kind of devotion to presence can’t possibly affect the world at large. But we’re actually not small. Each and every drop contains and affects the whole.

Joan Tollifson, from her Substack

Sometimes the darkness does overtake us, even at the best of times; and this is not the best of times, as the news media delight to remind us. (You can’t blame them: it’s in their perfectly understandable commercial interest to keep our hearts in our mouths.)

Of course the trouble is that one feels so helpless; there is little or nothing one can do, practically, and absent a convincing doctrine of supernatural intervention, it doesn’t seem to make sense to pray – though this may actually be the heart’s instinct, interestingly enough. But practice, once one stops telling oneself that it is useless, is in fact anything but useless, as Tollifson explains. The world’s idea of “useful” ain’t necessarily so. We are told that a president or his sidekick “matter”; a naval rating, a junior librarian, a pensioner in a retirement community, don’t matter at all. It isn’t true.

Each of us is a human being; each of us is a precious and only life; each of us “contains and affects the whole” just as much as any other. There is no such thing as an insignificant person. Waking up from the nightmare sleep of either/or, left/right, right/wrong; waking up to the bright ground of what is, to the inextinguishable love at the very heart of being itself… Maybe, after all, “[m]ore things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of…”* or by something very like contemplative prayer, at any rate.

*Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

Trauma and vastness

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Trauma, damaging as it is, may also provide the ground for opening the mind. When the body is in pain and shock, the thinking mind can quiet and open to a vivid experience of vastness. A moment of suffering can free the mind to realize the truths of human existence: our interconnectedness and our impermanence.

Grace Schireson, Naked in the Zendo: Stories of Uptight Zen, Wild-Ass Zen, and Enlightenment Wherever You Are

This is perhaps the extremity of what I was trying to write about yesterday: the open acceptance of whatever is simply as it is, without wishing it otherwise, trying to change it or make it stop.

In the course of a long and somewhat varied life I have encountered both physical and emotional trauma – though not, I’m relieved to say, both at the same time – and what Roshi Grace writes here does seem to be true.

I remember clearly the accident that ended my farming career; at the very time that I was severely injured, a vast and spacious freshness opened around me: a sense of limitless possibility opened out in the exact instant that all choice was taken from me and I became no longer a grown man in my prime, but what they call “a victim”. In that moment I was free. In some respects at least, that freedom has never left me.

So what is it that happens at times like these? I think the essence of it is probably that the thinking mind, the little mind that comments, describes, evaluates from dawn to dusk on a normal day, is suddenly, decisively, stilled. Something has happened that is too big for it to even pretend to comprehend or to control, and it simply drops out. In that precise instant, the light and the vastness of the open ground suddenly flood in, overwhelming all else, and in the midst of disaster there is perfect peace.

Of course such extremes of practice cannot, must not, be repeated. (Perhaps, though, one may glimpse something of the addictiveness for some people of taking certain kinds of risk?) But such a moment is unforgettable; taken in the context of an established practice, maybe it can provide, what? A yardstick? A seamark, perhaps. Something to steer by; no more than that, and yet, vitally, that. Now, at least, one knows that it is there, that it is possible to be there oneself. That then is the gift, the treasure the dragon was hiding; and it is beyond price.

Embrace everything

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Significantly, the gaining of knowledge about spirituality is not the same as a commitment to a spiritual life. Jack Kornfield testifies: “In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain our path is connected with our heart. In beginning a genuine spiritual journey, we have to stay much closer to home, to focus directly on what is right here in front of us, to make sure that our path is connected with our deepest love.” When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit. We recognize divine spirit everywhere. This is especially true when we face difficulties. So many people turn to spiritual thinking only when they experience difficulties, hoping that the sorrow or pain will just miraculously disappear. Usually, they find that the place of suffering, the place where we are broken in spirit, when accepted and embraced, is also a place of peace and possibility. Our sufferings do not magically end; instead, we are able to wisely alchemically recycle them. They become the abundant waste that we use to make new growth possible. That is why biblical scripture admonishes us to “count it all joy when we meet various trials.” Learning to embrace our suffering is one of the gifts offered by spiritual life and practice. 

Spiritual practice does not need to be connected to organized religion in order to be meaningful. Some individuals find their sacred connection to life communing with the natural world and engaging in practices that honor life-sustaining ecosystems. We can meditate, pray, go to temple, church, or mosque, or create a quiet sanctuary where we live to commune with holy spirits. To some folks, daily service to others is affirmative spiritual practice, one that expresses their love for others. When we make a commitment to staying in touch with divine forces that inform our inner and outer world, we are choosing to lead a life in the spirit. 

bell hooks, Tricycle Magazine February 2025

It’s very strange. Our instinct is so clearly to avoid suffering, to snatch our hand away from the heat, to stretch the aching limb; and while these may be good instincts, reflexes – even the stretching! – they don’t seem to apply to the spiritual life. To accept, observe, even to welcome the suffering that is an inevitable part of being alive is at the very heart of our practice.

To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet to remain still enough to see that thought and feeling themselves are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed; from which all change proceeds.

The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing” [Dzogchen]

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Nothing to practice

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Do not make being quiet into a task to be performed. Relax. There is nothing to practice.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

It is fatally easy to make a career out of the contemplative life. Monastics have been doing it since at least the Buddha’s day – probably far longer ago than that. It isn’t a career. The Taoist and Chan Buddhist traditions are full of stories of those who wandered “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao), away from the politics, and the academic and religious structures of their day, simply to remain still and quiet, among the comings and goings of natural things, the flow of what simply is.

Part of the trouble, it seems to me, is no more than the nature of mind itself. The self is not a settled thing, not a captain on the bridge of the mind; thoughts, feelings, longings, identities even, come and go according to circumstances, or else merely according to the restless patterns of internal weather. Nothing is fixed; intention is only a word, a flickering across unsteady waters.

To sit still enough to see this, to see that at the centre of all that calls itself the self is no thing at all, is far easier and more possible outside of the structures and expectations imposed by institutions, whether spiritual or academic. Of course, there were many contemplatives who subsisted in the cracks and crevices of the religious life, just as there are many today who find places to shelter within contemporary scholarship; the AC Graylings and Susan Blackmores, perhaps. But it seems to me that they survive – and even thrive – often in spite of, rather than because of, where they find themselves.

To live as a small shopkeeper, like Nisargadatta Maharaj, or to follow various disparate semi-careers as I have done in the past – or simply to live quietly in a retirement community as I do now, or as Joan Tollifson does these days – seems to me in most cases an easier, even sometimes a more honest, way to carry on. There is no task anyway: no goal to achieve, no position to maintain. There is only the falling away of purposeful action; the light through the trees behind the garden, the robin trying out his spring song in the chill evening air of early March. Only remain still, and quiet. All that is is given.

What we can’t say

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We can’t say what or why this is, only that it is. No conceptual formulation can capture this living reality. We habitually search for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom…

Thought conceptually divides, labels, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes the flow of experience, creating the illusory sense of apparently separate, independent, persisting things, including bodies, minds, the world, and a self that is supposedly authoring our thoughts and making our choices.

But if we give open attention to direct experiencing, we may discover that all apparently formed things, including people, are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing and inseparable movements of the whole. There is no substantial boundary between inside and outside, nor any findable center to experience.

Our urges, desires, impulses, interests, preferences, abilities, thoughts, emotions and actions are all a movement of the whole. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Realizing this is the freedom to be as we are and for everything to be as it is, including our apparent abilities or inabilities to change, heal or correct things.

Joan Tollifson, from the introduction to her website.

Simply to sit still, making no effort – not even to concentrate, not even to not think – just quietly, inwardly watching, listening: that’s all there is. Open awareness is the freedom we always looked for, fought for, dreamed of; only it was here all the time. We just hadn’t noticed, being too caught up in the chase.

There’s nothing to be, apart from this immediate occurrence. Nothing else exists. There’s nothing to create. We are created in each moment. We are this movement, moving spontaneously, automatically. There is no “self” directing this. Any urge that arises is not our creation.

Why look for truth in fantasies of name and form, when it is so easily felt in the flowing of this moment? …

You don’t have to observe this moment or cultivate any special awareness. It already feels like this happening is happening, so merely sit down, or lie down, and rest, making no effort at all, and let this happening present whatever it presents.

Darryl Bailey, A Summary of Existence: the sense of here and now

The freshness that comes in this stillness is the freshness of first light, almost literal dawning – “the mind revealing itself to itself”* – the sense of relief is beyond describing, like the last day of school! It’s all over. There’s nothing to look for any more. Everything is given, just as it is – there is nothing to strive for any more. Only be still.

We search for gurus, for ideal states, for enlightenment, a better life, a more perfect self. We analyze, we think, we strain to finally, totally “get it,” to know the answer, to do the right thing. And in the end—in sleep, or death, or waking up—it all dissolves into silence.

Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

*Major Briggs to his son Bobby, Twin Peaks, Season 2

A mystery

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The fact that you are you, the fact that you exist in this moment is a miracle of sorts. There’s something fundamentally inexplicable about it. There’s no amount of knowledge that seems adequate to dispel the mystery of our appearance here. And whatever you know, whatever you believe, whatever you have done or hope to do, you have this moment of conscious life to contemplate. You have this minute, this hour, this day. And it will never come again.

Sam Harris

When I think of this mystery that Harris describes, my immediate reaction, quite unsought, is grief. The first time this occurred to me was in my early twenties, at a time in my life when I was feeling exceptionally fortunate. I was finding that I was at last able to do many of the things I had longed to do, I was in a happy relationship, I had no obvious material lack. One morning I was sitting on the sofa in the sun, reading, when – literally – out of a clear blue sky this mystery fell on me like a crystal shroud. In a instant I could see the long arc of geological time that had led up to this moment, and the numbing abyss of time ahead, in which not only would I no longer live, but all I loved and lived for would utterly perish, vanished forever in an interminable future I would never see. I thought my heart might burst, there on the warm sofa on that sunny morning, with the early summer breeze coming in through the open window.

Looking back, I can see that I had for a brief flicker of time glimpsed what Harris points out here – that this moment is utterly unique, utterly precious; and it will not come again. A little later in the same piece, Sam Harris says, “We confront the mystery of being in every moment, but we don’t notice it because this mystery is tiled over with concepts.” Perhaps for me the tiling had for a few minutes come adrift; certainly when I then attempted to write down what I had seen, I found I swiftly tiled it over again with concepts that were, on that morning, immeasurably reassuring.

In one sense the grief remains. It is at the centre of old and kind Buddhist practices like metta and tonglen; it sweetly – bittersweetly – informs the sense of the infinite preciousness of each moment, each perception. But not only are we impermanent dwellers in impermanence; we are not what we seem. The little self that is so lost in this tragic mystery is not: it is an illusion. There never was an atom of self adrift in eternity. There only ever is the moment itself. We are ourselves what is, nothing more. To actually realise this in immediate experience is the safest place; in every moment everything is, like the reflected world within a raindrop, only wholly present as itself. There is nothing to lose. Nothing means anything; everything is meaning.

[See also my own recent post Attention]

Lathe biōsas

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Epicurus promoted an innovative theory of justice as a social contract. Justice, Epicurus said, is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed, and we need to have such a contract in order to enjoy fully the benefits of living together in a well-ordered society. Laws and punishments are needed to keep misguided fools in line who would otherwise break the contract. But the wise person sees the usefulness of justice, and because of his limited desires, he has no need to engage in the conduct prohibited by the laws in any case. Laws that are useful for promoting happiness are just, but those that are not useful are not just…

Epicurus discouraged participation in politics, as doing so leads to perturbation and status seeking. He instead advocated not drawing attention to oneself. This principle is epitomised by the phrase lathe biōsas (λάθε βιώσας), meaning “live in obscurity”, “get through life without drawing attention to yourself”, i.e., live without pursuing glory or wealth or power, but anonymously, enjoying little things like food, the company of friends, etc.

Wikipedia

I have written here before about the benefits of living a quiet life. I am not necessarily prescribing this as a universal panacea, of course, but I am saying that it is necessary to me. I have come to realise increasingly clearly that Epicurus’ “live in obscurity” is exactly the dictum for me. The tiny daily accidents of life, the passing sounds and impressions observed during practice and after, are infinitely precious and worth attention. Birdsong, the particular exhaust note of a motorcycle on the road at the end of the garden, the half-unconscious inflection in one’s partner’s voice – all of them perfect just as they are in their crystalline presence. Things like this are simply not accessible to one who is on a mission, busy making a name for themselves.

Silence and stillness are quite different from “perturbation and status seeking”; which goes a long way to explain my own reluctance to engage with social media, with activism and campaigning, with banging and shouting in all their increasingly prevalent forms. However good the cause, anger seems only to beget anger, and violence, violence. Unkindness of whatever sort is never the way to an increase in kindness.

For myself, there is no other way than to keep still, to remain alert to the smallest things: to the leaves and the snails, to the minute changes in the weather, the slight ticking you hear as the thermostat balances the warmth of the room. Practice is no more than a way to awareness itself, to the limitless ground. Be quiet. Be still. Nothing else will do.