Tag Archives: awakening

Embrace everything

2 Replies

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

3 Replies

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

1 Reply

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

3 Replies

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

4 Replies

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.

Attention

6 Replies

[E]very moment in life is absolute in itself. That’s all there is. There is nothing other than this present moment; there is no past, there is no future; there is nothing but this. So when we don’t pay attention to each little this, we miss the whole thing. And the contents of this can be anything. This can be straightening our sitting mats, chopping an onion, visiting someone we don’t want to visit. It doesn’t matter what the contents of the moment are; each moment is absolute. That’s all there is, and all there ever will be. If we could totally pay attention, we would never be upset. If we’re upset, it’s axiomatic that we’re not paying attention. If we miss not just one moment, but one moment after another, we’re in trouble.

Suppose I’m condemned to have my head chopped off in a guillotine. Now I’m being marched up the steps onto the platform. Can I maintain attention to the moment? Can I be aware of each step, step by step? Can I place my head in the guillotine carefully so that I serve the executioner well? If I am able to live and die in this way, no problem arises.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Tricycle Magazine, Fall 1993

If you get used to paying attention in your sitting, moment by moment, breath by breath, thought by random thought as they arise, then you may find that, without even having to turn your mind to it, your attention will hold whatever it it you are doing – shaving, walking, waiting for the lift, fastening your shoes – and you will discover that it is unimaginably delicious, just as it is. A jackdaw looking in the grass by the verge of the road for things to eat among the grass stems, the sound of a bus pulling away into traffic – priceless things, lovely and complete in themselves, simply because they are.

There is something even stranger, too. The sting of the little cut on my thumb where I was in too much of a hurry chopping the shallots for lunch, the twinge in my knee that reminds me that I am going to die – sooner, now, rather than later, since I am an old man these days. These too are precious, particular things, lovely just as they are, just since they are.

Occasionally I do find myself reminding myself to pay attention – and so (as a bonus) reminding myself that there is no stable self to remind – but generally, you know, it’s just something that happens. When I practice, when I am faithful to regular sitting, it happens, more and more as time goes by. Just to be here is the loveliest thing, wherever it is I am at this moment; and all I have to do is notice that. Whatever is is precious because it is, not for what it means, nor for what it might lead to, but only because it is. In every moment of isness everything is, like the reflected world within a raindrop, only wholly present as itself. There is nothing to lose. The instant of death is as lovely, and as necessary, as the moment of birth. Nothing means anything; everything is meaning.

To arrive where I started…

3 Replies

Whatever the origin of religion, it is so often present in our lives as a way to try to understand the ineffable; a way to give presence and weight to an experience that defies words; that takes place outside of thought and perception. What are we to do with such an experience – a thing commonly known as mystical, or numinous? It cannot be thought, or described, since it is entirely beyond the realm of cognition and language.

This was my own experience; as a young man – even as a child – I had been prone to experiences like this, for which I had no words, nor even a broad category or discipline to which to assign them. (The nearest I got to the feeling was reading about astronomy or zoology or meteorology – a sense that here was something in terms of which everything else made sense, rather than my trying to make sense of it.)

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital in my teens that I had the freedom to begin to explore; to realise that the natural direction of this condition of mind was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was something I learned to call “spirituality”. When I began to discover that I was not alone in this, of course my fellow pilgrims were in general religious people, and so it seemed to me that these must be religious experiences. Despite my having early on read Jiddu Krishnamurti and Lao Tzu, it was all too easy to understand these experiences in terms of either Buddhism, or later, irresistibly, the Christian mystical tradition – which of course brought the whole complex machinery of faith clattering along with it.

Extraordinarily, despite my by then growing and scarcely repressed doubts, it took the enforced isolation of the recent pandemic, and the discovery of writers like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore, finally to shake me loose; to let me realise that, as Harris points out so poignantly in the first chapter of Waking Up, “Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ for millennia… there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.” Somehow, I had to recapitulate this for myself; it often amazes me to realise that it took me the best part of my adult life “to arrive where [I] started, and know the place for the first time.”

Dimensionless

4 Replies

In stillness it can become apparent that the dimensionless ground, that is “before all things” (Colossians 1:17) underlies both phenomenal reality and the perception of that reality, since the mind’s original awareness – its intrinsic consciousness – is awareness of the ground itself. In this sense,

Consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.

Rebecca Goldstein, in a personal communication to Annaka Harris

As long seen in the Dzogchen concept of rigpa, the ground is both dimensionless and atemporal. It is empty, from our phenomenological point of view, even of “emptiness” itself. It is no thing, in the most utter sense of that phrase. And yet each of us can be said to have it, in the identical sense that all beings are said to have “Buddha-nature”; only our own confusion, our incessant and self-identified thoughts, get in the way as the clear light of the moon is obscured by clouds. (There is even a Dzogchen term for this too – ma-rigpa!)

Perhaps this sounds complicated. The attempt to say it gets that way; and yet it is the simplest thing. All that is needed is to remain still enough, open enough to plain awareness; the ground is open, cloudless, without end or beginning. It isn’t even there. It, simply, is.

The open door

4 Replies

Thought is the result of the past acting in the present; the past is constantly sweeping over the present. The present, the new, is ever being absorbed by the past, by the known. To live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory; in this death there is timeless renewal.

The present extends into the past and into the future; without the understanding of the present the door to the past is closed. The perception of the new is so fleeting; no sooner is it felt than the swift current of the past sweeps over it and the new ceases to be. To die to the many yesterdays, to renew each day is only possible if we are capable of being passively aware. In this passive awareness there is no gathering to oneself; in it there is intense stillness in which the new is ever unfolding, in which silence is ever extending with measure.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Transcript of Talk 10, Ojai, 29 July 1945

To remain still, to turn from knowing to simple awareness – without choosing, without direction, in open unknowing – really, that is all that is needed. It is so simple, so unproblematic, that we find it the most difficult thing, simply because it seems too good to be true. And yet it is the truest encounter this life affords; it is the open door to “the original primordially empty Body of Reality, the ultimate truth of the expanse” (Longchenpa). In the end, there is nothing else.

Only practice

1 Reply

At times recently I’ve been tempted to see my previous years of practice, stretches of time I spent as a Christian contemplative in the world – rather than as a monastic of any kind – as perhaps wasted years; years I could have spent in some more fruitful way, such as the kind of practice to which I’m now committed. But gradually, it has come clear to me that it has all worked together, astonishingly seamlessly. There is no right or wrong way: there is only practice. The “story of my life,” disjointed though it has often appeared to me, is actually all of a piece. There is nothing to regret. There is no need to start over with anything.

I have mentioned before here my profound gratitude for occasions in my life when I have been injured or unwell, and the insights they have afforded me. These too, though, aren’t isolated occurrences in a life of somehow lesser significance; they are merely currants in a bun whose sugar and spice, and very ordinary flour, have been just as essential to the overall flavour.

I don’t mean to attribute any of this to some species of external cause, in the sense of acting under the control of some supernatural puppet-master; everything I have mentioned has merely been composed of natural events in a largely unremarkable life. Any sense of their fitting together, of their working towards some overarching purpose, is retrospective: the pattern only emerges as it nears completion. Perhaps it could even be suggested that without its later elements the earlier would be meaningless, or at least have an entirely different meaning; but perhaps “meaning” is too loaded a term altogether. A pattern, after all, only describes what has happened, what events have become; even if like one of Daniel Dennett’s real  patterns it does have significance beyond simple human interpretation!

There is a kind of peace here that I hadn’t perhaps foreseen. In one sense, nothing has changed – practice goes on from day to day just as before; and yet something is different in a way I find difficult to explain even to myself without falling into linguistic pits. Maybe nothing more needs to be said: what is being described here is a still-evolving process, not a destination. If there is indeed a pattern, it is probably much more like a vortex street than a snowflake, to misappropriate a metaphor. The practice remains. Nothing else is needed; there is nothing else we need to remember.